Georgia's POV
The café hides on a street where jacaranda trees bleed their violet confessions, nature's purple confetti mocking my feeble grasp at virtue.
I chose it over the gardens because crowds are both witness and alibi.
Public enough to prevent true intimacy, private enough that Josiah's satellites won't detect me in their orbit.
The perfect purgatory for this sacrilege I'm committing against myself.
The door resists then yields, heavy as guilt.
A symphony of coffee and cinnamon envelops me, and suddenly my coat transforms into ill-fitting armor.
My eyes sweep the room, skimming over furniture that refuses to match and half-abandoned cups.
Tiny monuments to other souls' failed pilgrimages toward meaningful solitude.
And there he is.
Carlisle. A creature born of shadow now bathed in merciless light.
His hair, a calculated dishevelment that speaks of intention, not chance.
His collar parts just enough to remind me he's flesh, not phantom.
The glimpse of skin beneath sends lightning through my veins.
He catches me looking. The air between us constricts like a throat.
"You came."
His voice is like gravel against silk, scraping against my ribcage where secrets nest.
"I wasn't sure I would."
The lie crystallizes on my tongue, brittle as winter frost.
We both recognize the inevitable collision course I set since the beginning.
Something in his eyes deepens, darkens.
"And yet, here you are."
I lower myself into the chair, cold seeping through fabric like premonition.
A waiter materializes, setting down obsidian coffee I hadn't requested.
Carlisle had presumed. Presumed correctly.
The certainty in his gesture both thrills and unsettles me.
"How did it feel?"
His gaze peels away my layers one by one.
"How did what feel?"
"Making a choice for yourself."
The question strikes like hail against glass.
Seven years I've spent as supporting character in Josiah's epic, my choices gift-wrapped for his approval.
To be questioned about my own sovereignty feels foreign.
"It's just coffee."
My words sound hollow as bird bones picked clean.
Carlisle reclines, his gaze dissecting.
"Is it?"
The conversation unwinds between us, deceptively buoyant.
We speak of art, literature, distant shores, impossible dreams.
He paints Venice at sunset with words so sharp I can almost taste salt crystallizing on my skin.
Scotland's highlands rendered so vividly I feel heather bristling against my palms, wind combing through my hair.
The café dissolves around us, cups and chatter receding like the tide abandoning shells.
I tell him secret things.
Writing dreams my mother suffocated with her practiced disappointment.
Books that became lifeboats when I was drowning in silence.
"You should write again."
His words slice through my carefully constructed facade.
My laugh emerges brittle as burnt paper.
"It's too late for that."
"It's never too late for something that sets your soul on fire."
I want to drink those words. Let them char me from inside out.
The idea of being set aflame by anything feels perilous now.
Hours bleed away. The café empties and fills like lungs breathing life in and out.
I had intended brevity. A polite refusal wrapped in pleasantries.
But time evaporates like phantom steam from our untouched cups.
Amber lights now bathe our corner in liquid honey, casting shadows that dance against rain-veined windows.
Carlisle leans forward, fingers tracing his cup's circumference.
His ring strikes ceramic, a dull percussion that somehow cleaves through ambient noise.
"You don't love him."
He says it as if pronouncing scientific fact rather than dangerous conjecture.
My breath snags on something sharp inside my chest.
I should rise in outrage, should remind him my marriage isn't his dominion to map.
But words solidify in my throat like glass being born in fire.
I turn away, watching raindrops suicide from the awning.
"Love isn't always the most important thing."
The words worn smooth as worry stones from endless repetition.
Carlisle expels a laugh devoid of mirth. The sound abrades like sandpaper against raw skin.
"That's something people say when they've convinced themselves they have no other choice."
I stiffen, nails carving crescent moons into my palms.
My wedding band constricts suddenly, a golden noose tightening incrementally.
"You don't know anything about my marriage."
My voice comes sharper than intended.
He tilts his head, studying me with quiet curiosity that makes my skin prickle.
His amber eyes penetrate my walls as if they're constructed of gossamer.
"Don't I?"
I despise how effortlessly he destabilizes me, strips away defenses with nothing but calculated glances.
"He treats you well enough, I imagine. He provides. Purchases expensive trinkets. Parades you at appropriate functions. On paper, perfect husband, perfect wife."
He pauses. His cologne, cedar and something indefinably warm, mingles with coffee.
"So why do you look like a woman who can't breathe?"
My lungs seize. Nails burrow deeper.
I welcome the crescents of pain, something tangible beyond the truth unspooling between us.
"I..."
My voice falters on the precipice of falsehood.
Because he's right.
He speaks aloud things I've never permitted myself to acknowledge.
Things I've spent seasons, lifetimes, rationalizing, exiling to shadowed corners of consciousness.
"You have the eyes of a woman who once dreamed of something more."
His voice comes low enough to feel rather than hear.
I dismiss it with practiced levity, bracelets singing discordantly loud.
"Everyone wants more. Human nature."
He shakes his head, smile small and omniscient.
"Not like you. You have the eyes of someone who remembers what she wanted, who hasn't quite relinquished the vision. There's a division between dreaming of more and knowing precisely what that 'more' resembles."
His words detonate my painstakingly constructed persona.
My fingers constrict around my cup, bone-white, clutching the final fragment of control.