Noah’s hand had done this before. In locker rooms after races he’d lost by hundredths of a second. In his father’s hospital room, gripping the bed rail until his knuckles ached. A fine tremor that started somewhere deeper than muscle, somewhere he couldn’t reach to still.
He hadn’t expected it to happen here, in the back room of a quiet bookstore, with the smell of old paper and wood polish thick in the warm air.
His hand hung at his side now, fingers twitching against his thigh. He curled them into a fist, held it, released. The tremor returned before his palm reached his leg again.
Isabelle’s green eyes dropped.
She saw it. Of course she saw it. She saw everything—the way her gaze caught the small betrayals other people missed. The twitch. The tremor. The failure. His jaw tightened. He forced his hand flat against his thigh, pressed until he could feel the muscle beneath his palm, until the vibration had nowhere to go but deeper.
Her eyes rose to meet his.
He expected pity. He’d seen it a hundred times since the scandal broke—the slightly tilted head, the softened mouth, the careful voice asking if he was okay. Isabelle’s face held none of that. Her eyes were steady. Green. Unreadable. The way she looked at a book before she decided whether to recommend it.
She didn’t speak. Her hand lifted from the hollow of her throat, where it had been resting, two fingers pressed to her collarbone. The movement was slow. Unconscious, maybe, or deliberate enough to make him wonder.
Her fingers stopped an inch from his wrist. The air between her skin and his felt warm. Charged. Like the moment before a starting gun, when every muscle in his body had already decided to move and only the sound was missing.
Noah’s breath went shallow. He could count the seconds. He was good at that. One. The dust motes drifted in the single bulb’s glow above them. Two. Her fingers didn’t touch him. Three. Her expression shifted—the smallest crack at the corner of her mouth, the same softness he’d seen earlier, when she’d talked about the Rembrandt. Four.
He didn’t pull away. He didn’t lean closer. He just stood there, his trembling hand exposed between them, and let her look at it.
Isabelle’s hand hovered in the charged space, her choice still unmade. The dust motes continued their slow drift.
Her fingers brushed his wrist.
Not a grip. Not a hold. The lightest possible contact—cool fingertips against the thin skin where his pulse beat closest to the surface. Isabelle's touch was steady. Deliberate in a way that made him think she'd decided five seconds ago and waited for her hand to catch up.
Noah's tremor didn't stop. It met her fingers and continued, a fine vibration that traveled up through her knuckles, her wrist, disappearing into the sleeve of her cardigan. She didn't pull back.
He wanted to apologize. The words were there, pre-formed—sorry, it does this sometimes, I can't—but his throat had closed around them. Apologizing would mean naming it. And naming it, here, with her fingers still resting against his pulse, would make it too real.
Isabelle's thumb moved. A single stroke across the inside of his wrist, tracing the tendon that tensed beneath his skin. Her eyes stayed on his face.
"Does it hurt?"
The question landed somewhere beneath his ribs. No one had asked him that. Not his coach, who'd told him to ice it. Not the reporters, who'd wanted to know what he'd been thinking when he'd walked away from the blocks. Not his mother, who'd looked at his hands and seen her own grief reflected back.
"No." His voice scraped out of him. "It's just—" He stopped. Just what? Just there. Just him. Just the body that had carried him through thousands of laps betraying him in a quiet bookstore back room.
Isabelle nodded like she'd heard the part he hadn't said. Her fingers stayed where they were, a cool anchor against his unsteady skin. The single bulb above them buzzed faintly. Somewhere in the front of the shop, a book shifted on a shelf, settling into a gap that hadn't been there before.
"I used to do this," she said quietly. "When I couldn't sleep. Come down here and run my fingers along the spines. Count them. Alphabetize sections that didn't need alphabetizing." Her thumb traced another line across his wrist. "It helped. The touching."
Noah's breath shuddered out of him. His fist, still pressed against his thigh, uncurled. Not consciously. His fingers just opened, palm facing her, an offering he hadn't planned to make.
She looked at his open hand. He watched her make a choice—watched the small shift in her jaw, the way her collarbone rose with a breath she didn't release. Her fingers slid from his wrist into his palm.
The contact was different now. Warmer. Her hand fit against his like a book sliding into the right space on a shelf, and Noah felt something in his chest crack open, a hairline fracture he'd been holding closed for months.