Page 79 of Suite 7

She looks at me for a long moment. Not reading me, not calculating. Just looking.

“You’re an asshole.”

“You’re impossible,” I say.

“We’re going to hurt her.”

“Probably.”

“And you’re still not going to stop.”

“No.” I meet her eyes. “Are you?”

She looks away. The window. The counter. Somewhere that isn’t me.

Then back.

“No.”

We stare at each other across the kitchen. Both completely unable to walk away.

The air between us changes.

Her lips twitch.

“We were fighting,” she says.

I blink. “What?”

“We had a full Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown. About our agreement. About Sloane.”

The understanding hits me a beat after her.

We did. We fell right back into it — the same push, the same fire, both of us too stubborn to back down.

Except this time it was real. Not armor. Not performance. Two people who genuinely drive each other insane even when they’re sleeping together.

“We’ve still got it,” I say.

She starts laughing. Actually laughing. “Oh my god. We do. I had a complete meltdown and you got frustrated with me and we argued about whether we could still argue and—” She covers her face with both hands. “This is insane.”

“Completely insane.”

She drops her hands. Looks at me with something between relief and resignation. “So we can have this—” she gestures between us, “—and still want to strangle each other over stupid shit.”

“Apparently.”

“That’s—“ She searches for the word. “That’s actually kind of perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“Yeah. Because it means nothing has to change. We can still be us, the arguing, annoying, incompatible us that Sloane knows, and also be the other us. The private us.”

Her hands settle on my chest. “The fighting is real. The frustration is real. You’re still a controlling perfectionist and I’m still a woman who thinks she knows better, and that hasn’t changed because you’ve seen me naked.”

I look at her. Standing in my kitchen in my shirt, hair a mess, yesterday’s mascara smudged, arguing her way to peace the way she does everything.

“You’re something else,” I say.