Chapter 153: Confronting Xavier
At the mention of that word, Xavier flinched. Stranger. Coming from her lips, after everything they had coordinated, built, and secured together, the word felt like a physical strike.
"Mr. Reed, have I upset you?" April pressed, her mind attempting to identify where it went wrong in their relationship. "Is this about the gift? Does the fact that I keep postponing the timing make it seem like I regard your intentions as less valuable than the rest of my schedule?"
A sudden, sharp bark of a laugh left Xavier’s lips. It was entirely humorless, a raw sound that cut through the sterile atmosphere of the study.
"I can’t believe such questions are actually coming from you," he murmured, leaning back into his chair, the green light of the banker’s lamp casting deep shadows across his sharp jawline.
He stared at her, his expression twisting into something deeply weary. "Do you know, Miss April, that for some time now, I have not seen a proper tug of your lips?"
April blinked, her thoughts momentarily stalling. "What?"
"Be it an amused grin, an excited one, a wicked one... I have not seen a single curve of your lips when speaking to you lately."
"Are you saying I don’t smile?"
"Oh, no, you do," Xavier replied, his voice dropping into a quiet, bruising cadence. "You smile a lot, for different reasons, for different things, and to different people. But as of late, it’s always been about someone else. And I feel... forgotten. Left in the background."
April felt entirely lost, the scope of the conversation shifting into a territory she had not yet been exposed to. "I don’t understand."
"Miss April, I understand I am a boring man," Xavier said, looking down at his tightly intertwined fingers. "A man who only knows how to bury himself in his work, speak corporate jargon, and keep a straight, unreadable face. But I..."
His words suddenly hung in his throat, choking off as if an invisible law forbade him from uttering them aloud.
He turned his face away from the lamp’s glow, letting out a heavy, ragged sigh as he dropped his hand over his face, shielding his expression from her piercing gaze.
"I’m sorry," he muttered from behind his palm. "I’m saying stupid things because I am equally confused."
"Well, if you’re confused and I’m confused, how do we understand this situation?" April asked.
For the first time since they had met, she sounded uncharacteristically eager—almost desperate—to decipher the situation right in front of her.
Xavier lowered his hand, a short, bitter, and somewhat painful smile touching his lips. "Yes. I also wonder the same thing. How do we understand this situation?"
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the study. April watched the man before her, tracking the profound disappointment and the deep, aching pain swirling in his dark eyes.
It vividly reminded her of the day he had admitted his powerlessness, realizing the financial empire he had spent his entire life constructing was going to go up in smoke. But looking closely now, she realized there was something much more bitter, much more personal lying behind his gaze tonight.
"Mr. Reed—"
"Call me Xavier," he interrupted softly, his eyes locking onto hers with an intense, unyielding gravity. "Just Xavier. Just as you call Nat Collins just... Nat."
At the mention of the name, something violently clicked inside April’s mind.
The pieces of the puzzle flew into alignment, forcing her to look at the board from an entirely different perspective. She had spent her entire past life suffering, bleeding, and surviving in the mud. Not once, in all that horrific time, had someone ever looked at her with eyes that held so much profound intention, so much quiet grief, and so much unspoken plea.
She had never been loved. She had never loved anyone. Her existence had always been utility, survival, and numbers. But she had seen the raw desperation that came with couples in the apocalypse—starving people who would willingly throw themselves into a horde of zombies just to buy the other a few extra seconds of life.
She had seen unspoken words fly through a simple touch or a lingering glance. She had observed those anomalies, but she had never truly understood them.
But right here, in the dim light of this quiet study, the anomaly was happening to her. She was beginning to understand the unspoken words.
"Xavier..." she called out, her voice dropping into an uncharacteristically soft, fragile register.
The gift. The sudden coldness. The tracking of her smiles. And now, the name.
When she finally forced herself to think outside her immediate surroundings—to actually look at the things happening around her rather than just the specific things she paid attention to—the truth became undeniable.
Xavier had been quietly competing. He had heard about what the others had done, what they had given her, and he had felt a profound, burning disappointment when she didn’t accord his efforts the same weight.
He was counting the fractions of a second her lips curved when she looked at someone else.
"...you need to think outside the box sometimes, sweetheart. Even I know how to read the signs sometimes."
Nat’s voice suddenly echoed from her memory of the morning after the auction.
She stared at Xavier, a sudden wave of clarity washing over her. Was this the sign he was talking about? The glaring, obvious human signs she had simply failed to see—or rather, the ones her cold, survivalist brain had actively refused to look at.
The sudden, sheer weight of the realization got a bit too overwhelming for her. Her logical defense mechanisms fractured, unable to process the raw, unquantifiable metrics of a man’s devotion.
April leaned her head back against the plush leather of the chair, taking a slow, deep breath as she stared up at the dark ceiling, the silence of the room wrapping tightly around them.
Just what was this?
For a long time, the only sound in the dimly lit study was the quiet, rhythmic ticking of the antique clock on the wall. April kept her eyes on the ceiling, waiting for the strange, fluttering chaos in her chest to subside. Her brain, usually so quick to calculate trajectories and resource loops, was entirely useless against the raw data of Xavier’s quiet devotion.