Chapter 9
Saylor
I’m not sure what I’ve been waiting for. But I’ve waited patiently for nine days.
Nine whole days since the funeral. Nine days since the Riptide booth. Nine days since I fell asleep on a couch next to Celeste who is now taking up a greedy amount of space in my brain. But it’s obvious Celeste isn’t thinking about me.
I’ve heard absolutely nothing. I didn’t even grab her number which seems ludicrous now. She dropped me off at home the morning after we fell asleep on the couch like she was eager to get rid of me, which didn’t feel great, but she had a lot on her mind.
Which is fine. It’s fine. She doesn’t owe me updates.
She’s not my girlfriend. She’s not my friend.
She’s a client I spent a weekend with, and the weekend is over, and whatever happened between us—the trauma bond, the effortless way she let me hold her when she was about to collapse—that’s finished.
Filed under “memorable experiences” right alongside the time I watched a man cry over Hamilton from the third row and the night I talked a stranger through her divorce at a bar in the West Village.
Except it’s not filed. It’s not anywhere close to filed. It’s loose in my brain like a marble in an empty room, rolling into every corner every time I tilt my head.
I know the basics through Rina when I not-so-casually asked how Celeste was doing with the baby.
Rina gave me a tight-lipped, attorney-like reply.
What I gathered between the legal jargon is that Rina put Celeste in touch with the best family attorney in the Tri-state area.
Eleanor is indeed contesting the will, that absolutely did name Celeste as guardian to the baby.
Raven’s pregnancy is going well, and she has an upcoming ultrasound to find out the sex of the baby.
But that’s it. That’s all I’m allowed to know because even though I feel like I started this quest, I’ve been kicked off the great trek to Mordor.
The details—the legal strategy, the caseworker, whether Celeste is sleeping or spiraling or pacing back and forth in her living room at four in the morning, whether she’s missing me—those, I don’t know.
Because I don’t have a right to know. Because the funeral is over, and the appropriate thing to do is return to my regularly scheduled life and stop checking my phone like a teenager who’s been left on read.
My regularly scheduled life, for the record, is not cooperating with this plan.
Monday through Wednesday I pick up shifts at the bar.
Thursday I spend the morning with Mum, reorganizing her medications, fixing the loose grab bar in the bathroom that’s started wobbling.
By Friday, I’ve run out of tasks and chores to keep myself busy, so I sit in my room alone and stare at my phone.
I scroll, but not even dancing chicken videos or food-eating competitions are entertaining enough to hold my attention.
Usually on Friday nights, I see if Rina has work.
I make so much more as an escort than a bartender or bouncer, but after last weekend, it seems impossible.
It’s hard to explain, but I already feel the distance between me and Celeste.
Literally. Physically. I don’t want to take any more steps in the wrong direction.
I need a change. I can’t keep going like I have been.
It’s sprinting in place, my bones ache, my muscles are stripped, and I’m getting nowhere.
I close the app. Pick up the Rolex case from my nightstand. Turn it over in my hands.
The watch is worth thirty, maybe forty thousand dollars. It’s sitting in my apartment like a ticking time bomb with a price tag. I can’t keep it. I can’t pawn it. And I can’t pretend that the only reason I want to return it in person is because I’m ethically opposed to FedEx.
I want to see her. That’s the truth, stripped of every justification I’ve been constructing for nine days.
I want to see Celeste. I want to know she’s okay.
I want to sit in whatever room she’s in and feel that thing again—the recognition, the frequency, the sense that someone else speaks the language I’ve been speaking alone.
Before I can stop my thumbs, I’m googling Celeste’s headquarters. An impressive building in the ritzy part of Manhattan populates on the image search. It’s only fifteen minutes away.
Oi, this is fucking crazy.
But I’ve already swung my legs around the edge of my bed.
Already rummaging through my small closet for a shirt with a collar.
I’ve already decided I’m getting answers today.
After nine days, two hours, and roughly four hundred phone checks since I last saw her—I put on the nicest things I own, tuck the Rolex case under my arm, and take the subway to Midtown.
The building has a security desk. Two guards, one turnstile, the kind of badge-access system that says you either belong here or you don’t.
I do not. I also do not have a plan for this, which I probably should have considered during the subway ride instead of staring at my own reflection in the dark glass and rehearsing opening lines like an understudy.
A woman in a pencil skirt and headphones is walking toward the turnstile with her badge already extended.
I fall in two steps behind her, close enough to seem like we’re together, far enough to not seem like I’m following her.
She badges through. The turnstile clicks.
I slip through in the gap before it resets, angling my body so the Rolex case looks like a delivery and my collared shirt looks like a uniform and my entire vibe says I do this every day, I’m bored of this building, please don’t look at me.
Neither guard looks at me.
Full ops success. I’m in.
The lifts are a wall of polished steel. I press the top-floor button because if you’re Celeste Brinely—if you’ve built an empire from a sketchbook and a name you inherited from your grandmother—you don’t sit on the third floor.
You sit at the top. Where the view matches the altitude of your standards.
The doors open on forty-seven and the guess pays off.
It’s chaos. Beautiful chaos—the productive kind, where everyone is moving with purpose and nobody has time to question the man in the collared shirt who just stepped off the lift holding a box.
Garment racks line the hallway. Fabric bolts lean against the wall like colorful drunks.
Someone speed-walks past me carrying a mannequin torso under each arm, which is a sentence I never expected to witness in real life.
I keep walking. Down the main corridor, past open workrooms where sewing machines chatter and designers pin things to forms and a woman argues passionately into a phone about something called a “hand feel” which I’m choosing not to investigate.
Everyone is too busy to notice me, which is the beautiful thing about creative environments—if you walk with enough confidence, you become part of the scenery.
A sign on the wall catches my eye. Sleek, minimal, the same font as the logo on the building’s exterior. It reads ‘Celeste.’ It’s only in this moment I realize how freaking confusing it is to have your company name be your name. Because where am I headed right now? Celeste’s office? Or a boardroom?
I follow the arrow anyway. The hallway narrows, the noise dims, and the energy shifts from workshop to executive. Quieter. Cleaner. The air smells different up here—less fabric dust, more ambition.
There’s a desk outside a glass-walled corner office.
An executive assistant’s station, clearly—dual monitors, phone console, a small orchid that’s somehow both alive and resentful.
The chair is empty. No assistant. No gatekeeper.
Just an unguarded threshold between me and the woman I’ve been thinking about for nine days straight.
Through the glass, Celeste is at her desk.
Head down. Reading something with the kind of puzzled intensity that suggests the document is written in hieroglyphics.
Her hair is pulled back. Black blazer. Glasses I haven’t seen before—reading glasses, thin-framed, making her look like a very stylish professor who’s about to fail your entire thesis.
Oh, shit. Not good. This naughty-professor look is doing things beneath my belt, and I want my presence here to be a pleasant surprise, not predatory.
I knock on the glass.
Her head comes up. And for one unfiltered second—before the composure kicks in, before the armor slides back into position—her face does something I wasn’t prepared for.
Her lips part. Her eyes widen. Her hand freezes over the document mid-turn.
It’s not surprise, exactly. It’s something rawer than that.
Recognition. Relief. The look of someone who’s been waiting for a knock they didn’t believe was coming.
Then she blinks, and Celeste, CEO, returns to the building.
She stands. Walks around the desk. Opens the glass door herself, and stands there looking at me with her arms not yet crossed but clearly considering it.
“How did you get up here?”
“Charisma and a collared shirt.”
“Security didn’t stop you?”
“Security was…busy.”
“Busy?” she echoes in disbelief. “That’s concerning, Saylor. Security is here to make everyone feel safe at their place of work. No strangers.”
“And they’re doing a great job. I feel very secure. I haven’t seen even one stranger on the way up.”
Her mouth twitches. She steps aside just enough to let me through, and I walk into her office.
It’s everything I imagined and nothing like I’ve seen before—enormous windows, sculptures in the corner catching the light, sketches pinned to a corkboard behind her desk, the faint scent of something expensive that I can’t identify but that my brain has already filed under her.
There’s a mannequin in the corner wearing what looks like a half-finished dress, draped in muslin with pins catching the sun and glowing, like tiny lightsabers.
Celeste closes the door. The lock clicks behind me.