Kimberly #2
"Mm." She rolled her eyes, like she'd heard my kind of story a hundred times and was bored of the ending.
"And how many beggars have stood right there and told you that exact thing this month?
" She turned back to me, and all that fake sweetness slid neatly into place.
"There’s a lovely coffee place on the corner, hon.
Go sit down before you embarrass yourself any worse than you already have. "
"I’m asking you to just let him know Kimberly Bishop is here," I said. My voice came out level, steadier than the rest of me, which was its own small mercy.
"Oh, sweetie." She raised her voice again, her eyes drifting to the folder in my hands. "No. No, no. We don’t hire people who turn up in shoes that look like they walked here from a shelter. Didn’t you hear me? I said to get out before I call security."
Two men in suits by the window glanced over and then very politely glanced away, which was somehow worse than if they’d laughed out loud.
That was what crawled up my neck and sat hot in my face. But I kept my feet, and I kept my chin where it belonged. My folder shook a little in my hands. "You don’t have to be rude, I was only…"
"Do I have to call security?" She cut in.
The heat spread from my neck into my face. My eyes stung. I blinked hard.
Not here, not in a marble box full of strangers. I took a step with what was left of my dignity.
I had one foot pointed at the door when the elevator opened again, and the lobby shifted, the way air moves when someone opens a door in winter.
Jackson Whitlock walked out, and I felt it before I placed him.
Some people enter a room and it rearranges itself around them without being asked.
I’d seen him a handful of times over the years, from across his mother’s garden, once from a distance inside the big house, and then at the funeral, where I’d stood in the back in a borrowed black dress and watched him sit at the far end of the front pew from his brother.
We had never traded more than a nod.
Greta used to talk about him constantly.
To hear her tell it, Jackson was a soft touch buried under all that starch, a boy who felt everything so deeply he’d built a wall around himself just so the world couldn’t get a clean shot at his heart.
My sensitive one, she called him, more than once.
He only needs the right person to be patient with him, Kimberly.
I looked at the man crossing the lobby, cut from clean cold lines, charcoal suit tailored so close it had to be made for him, sharp gray eyes, a face engineered to keep the entire human race on the far side of a locked door, and I thought, with a calm bordering on hysterical, that a mother’s love must be the most magnificent blindness God ever made.
Sensitive. Of course. He looked like he’d fire the sun for clocking in late.
He was also the best-looking man I had ever stood within twelve feet of, which struck me as a deeply unfair thing for a glacier to be.
His attention swept the lobby in one unhurried pass. His secretary. Then it settled on me and stayed, heavy enough that I lost track, briefly, of how breathing was meant to go.
"What happened." Low, deep, a voice that didn't need volume to fill a room.
It put a strange current along the back of my neck, like a hand laid flat between my shoulder blades, and I straightened under it, startled by how easily it moved me.
He came near enough for me to catch a clean trace of cedar off him, the only warm thing about him so far.
His secretary recovered fast and smoothed her face into a smile. She straightened and said, "I was just letting her know that we don’t have any open positions, sir."
He didn’t so much as glance at her. He kept his eyes on me, and I understood the question was still there, still waiting, and that it was my answer he wanted.
"There was a misunderstanding about whether you were hiring," I said, even and polite. "I was on my way out."
He studied me for a second, like I’d answered a different question than the one he’d asked, and held out his hand.
It took me a second to realize he wanted the folder.
I handed it over. He flipped it open and read it, top to bottom, in about three seconds, like he'd already decided, while the whole lobby waited on him. Then his eyes stopped near the top of the page, on my name. They lifted off the paper and found mine, and for one breath I would have sworn on my mother’s grave that he could see through my thoughts.
"We do now," he said.
"What?" My head came up. I just stared at him.
He looked at his secretary with the same cold stare. "You're done, Mara. Get your things."
It took me a full beat to believe him.
The woman’s lips fell open, her eyes round with disbelief. "Mr. Whitlock, I’ve been here for a year, I was only—"
"You humiliated a stranger in my lobby for sport, and you did it loudly enough that I heard it from inside the elevator.
" He said it with no heat at all, a flat reading of the facts, like he was handing her a receipt.
"I don’t keep people who do that on a floor with my name on the wall. Security will see you out."
The gloss slid off her all at once. She started in again, faster now, the apologies tumbling out. He turned back to me and held the folder out. When I took it, his attention came down on me again and pinned me where I stood.
I found my voice somewhere under all that stone. "Can I ask what the job actually is?"
The corner of his mouth twitched—the closest thing to an expression he seemed willing to spend. "You’re asking me that now. After you nearly walked out the door." He sighed, impatient, and glanced at his wristwatch.
"My office. Thirty minutes. You’ll find out what the job is when you get there." He turned back toward the elevators, and he tossed it back over his shoulder with finality, "Don’t be late. I don’t repeat myself."