11. Emily
— · —
Emily
The bus ride home is its own special kind of torture.
Richard’s knee is pressed against mine the whole way, warm and solid, and every time the road bends his thigh shifts into me and I have to stare very hard out the window at the trees going by so I don’t combust in front of a busload of my old classmates.
Last night keeps replaying behind my eyes whether I want it to or not.
His hands. His mouth. The sound he made when I pulled him closer.
I have to physically fight my face out of a blush, and across the aisle Tara catches me doing it and smirks like she’s already written the whole story in her head. She probably has. She’s not far off.
The whispering started the second we boarded and hasn’t let up.
Half these people watched some strange man in a suit get on his knees in the gravel and cry yesterday, and most of them have no idea who he even was.
The other half watched me walk away with Richard Reed, the boy half the girls in our class had a thing for back in the day, and now they can’t decide which scene was the better show.
I catch my name a few times, Carmen’s once, a lot of “did you see that guy.” A week ago that would have made me want to crawl under the seat.
Today I just look out the window and let them talk.
Let them. They can say whatever they want. None of it is my problem anymore.
It’s strange, actually, how little it touches me now.
For two years I organized my whole personality around not being talked about, around being small and pleasant and easy to overlook, because being noticed in Henry’s world meant being criticized.
Shrink, smile, don’t make a scene. And here I am on a bus full of people making a scene of me, and it slides right off.
Brittany twists around in her seat to get a better look and I meet her eyes and hold them until she’s the one who looks away. Small thing. Feels enormous.
Richard is on his phone for most of the ride, thumbs moving fast, jaw getting tighter with every reply. Whatever it is, it isn’t good.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Work stuff.” He doesn’t look up right away. “Somebody made a call they weren’t authorized to make. I’m fixing it.”
He doesn’t say more than that, and I don’t push, because we’re not in a place where I get to push.
I file it away though. There’s a whole side of his life I don’t know a single thing about, and in three days it has not once occurred to me to ask what he actually does for a living beyond “some business.” He’s been cagey about it the entire time, sliding the question sideways with a grin every time I get close, and I’ve let him, because every other thing about him has been so easy to fall into that the gap didn’t seem to matter.
When we pull into the parking lot back in the city, Tara grabs me before I can even get my bag down and hugs me so hard my ribs creak.
“Call me,” she says into my hair. “Every single day. I’m serious.”
“It’s a job, T, not witness protection.”
“Call me anyway.” She pulls back and holds me by the shoulders, looking at me dead serious. “And if he turns out to be a creep, you come straight to my place. I don’t care what time it is. I will drive across the city in my pajamas.”
“He’s not a creep.”
“I know.” She squeezes once more. “But just in case.”
I watch her load into her own car and pull away, and then it’s just me and Richard and a sleek black sedan that probably cost more than every car I’ve ever owned put together.
“Nice car,” I say, sliding in.
“It does the job.” He pulls out smooth and quiet, and we drive.
City gives way to suburbs, suburbs give way to whatever lives past suburbs, the houses spreading farther and farther apart, the lots getting wider, the trees getting taller and older. I keep waiting for him to slow down somewhere normal. He doesn’t.
“Where exactly do you live?” I ask.
“You’ll see.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting.” That maddening little smile.
Twenty minutes later he slows at a gate. An actual gate, iron and tall, set into a stone wall, and it swings open like it recognizes the car. I sit up straighter.
“Richard.”
“Hm?”
“Why does your driveway have a gate? Who has a gate?”
“Lots of people have gates.”
“Lots of normal people don’t have gates.” We roll through, and the drive curves, and then the trees open up and I forget how to make words. “Okay, what. What is this. Where are you taking me, who lives here?”
“I do.”
“You do not live in this. Richard, this has columns. Plural columns.” I’m pointing now, I can’t help it.
White stone, three stories of it, ivy climbing one whole side, windows everywhere, and in the middle of the circular drive a fountain, a working one, with water in it.
“There’s a fountain. There’s a fountain in your yard. Who are you?”
“It came with the house.”
“You keep saying that like it’s a normal thing to say. It is not a normal thing to say, Richard.”
He parks. Before I’ve even got my seatbelt off, the front door opens and a man in an honest-to-God suit steps out, calm as anything, and starts down the steps toward us.
“That’s Charles,” Richard says, like this is normal. “The butler.”
I whip around to stare at him. “You have a butler? An actual butler? Like in a movie?”
“He came with the house too.”
I’m going to pass out in this very expensive car.
Charles opens my door before I can do it myself, inclines his head like I’m somebody important, and says, “Welcome, Miss,” and reaches for my suitcase out of the trunk.
“Oh, no, I’ve got it,” I say, grabbing for the handle.
Charles already has it. He gives me a small, polite, completely immovable smile and simply does not let go, lifting it out and turning for the house like the matter is settled. I look at Richard. Richard is biting down on a grin.
“He does that,” he says. “Just let him.”
I follow them up the steps in a daze. Inside, it gets worse.
The foyer alone is bigger than the whole downstairs of the house I shared with Henry, the floor is actual marble, there’s a chandelier hanging over it that throws little bits of light all over the walls, and a staircase curves up and away like a set piece from a movie about people who have never once worried about a bill.
A woman comes out of a doorway wiping her hands on an apron, takes one look at me, and lights up.
“Oh, you must be Emily.” She’s got flour on one cheek and the warmest face I’ve seen all week.
“I’m Helen. I do the cooking. You look like you haven’t eaten a proper meal in days, and don’t argue, I can always tell.
I’ll have something ready within the hour. Do you like roast chicken?”
“I, um.” I look at Richard, who is no help, just grinning. “Yes. I love roast chicken.”
“Good girl.” Helen pats my arm like she’s known me for years and bustles back where she came from, and I’m left standing in a marble foyer feeling like I’ve wandered into someone else’s life and forgotten to ask permission.
“She’s going to feed you constantly,” Richard says. “Fair warning. She thinks everyone’s too thin.”
Charles reappears at the foot of the stairs without a sound, my suitcase apparently already deposited somewhere, and asks if I’d like anything brought up.
I tell him no, thank you, and he inclines his head and melts away again, and I lean toward Richard and whisper, “Does he just appear like that? Out of nowhere?”
“Constantly. You get used to it. Mostly.” He’s clearly fighting a grin. “He’s been here longer than I have. I’m fairly sure he runs the place and lets me think I do.”
“Living room’s through there,” he goes on, walking me deeper into the house like a tour guide who is enjoying himself far too much.
“Kitchen that way, you’ve met Helen. Library’s down the hall.
” Somewhere upstairs a vacuum hums, and a young woman in a gray uniform crosses the far end of the hall with a stack of folded towels, nods at us, and disappears.
I’m starting to lose track of how many people apparently work here.
I stop walking. “Hold on, did you say library? You have a library? In your house?”
He pushes open a door, and yeah. He has a library.
Two full stories of shelves, books everywhere, one of those rolling ladders on a rail, big windows, deep chairs you could disappear into for a week.
My heart does a complicated little flip, and a small embarrassing noise escapes me before I can stop it.
I love it instantly and I resent that I love it.
“Oh, that’s not fair,” I say. “You don’t get to have a library. That’s cheating.”
I turn around slow, taking in the whole impossible house, the marble and the chandelier and the butler and the library, and the math finally catches up with me.
“Richard.” My voice comes out careful. “Are you... are you a billionaire?”
He has the nerve to smile. “Kinda, yeah.”
“Kinda.” I press my fingers to my forehead.
“You’re kinda a billionaire. Okay. Okay.
Hold on.” I round on him, because the math is not adding up and it’s making my pulse climb.
“Back at the resort, I asked what you did and you said regular office employee. You looked me in the eye and said it. So what exactly is your position, Richard, because butlers and libraries are not a desk-job situation.”
“Well.” That grin again, the one I’m starting to want to slap off his stupid handsome face. “Technically, I’m the CEO.”
I nearly choke. “Tell me the name of your company.”
“SunCove.”
The name lands wrong for a second, too familiar, like a word you’ve heard a thousand times without ever once stopping to think about it. “Like... the insurance company? SunCove like the ads, SunCove on the side of the stadium downtown, SunCove like...”
“We are the insurance company.”
I stare at him. Richard Reed is the CEO of one of the biggest insurance companies in the country. And I just got hired there.
“You’re the CEO of SunCove.”
“Technically, yes.”
“Technically.” My voice goes up an entire octave. “You said you were a regular office employee. You said it to my face. I remember it exactly, because I called you a liar at the time.”
“Technically, I have an office. And I am employed there.” He’s openly laughing now, holding both hands up like he’s the reasonable one here.
I grab a throw pillow off the nearest chair and hit him with it. “You ass!”
“I didn’t lie!” He dodges, laughing harder, backing up around a reading table.
“You lied by omission! That’s the same thing!
That’s worse, actually, that’s the sneaky kind!
” I’m chasing him now, swinging the pillow, and somewhere in the back of my head a voice notes that I am whacking the CEO of a major insurance corporation with a decorative cushion in his own library, and I do not care.
“I wanted to tell you in person.” He catches the pillow mid-swing, and then he catches my wrist, and he pulls, and suddenly I’m right up against him with my heart going stupid.
“And I wanted three days where you looked at me like I was just Richard. Not the money, not the company, just me. Everybody I’ve met since I was twenty-two wanted the wallet first and worked backward.
You wanted nothing from me. Do you have any idea how good that felt?
You should see your face right now, by the way. ”
“My face is furious.”
“Your face is gorgeous.” His voice drops. “Surprised?”
“Pissed.”
“Same thing, with you.” And he kisses me, quick and warm, and it absolutely derails whatever I was about to yell at him, which I’m sure was the point. When he pulls back I’m a little dizzy and a lot annoyed about being dizzy. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you your room.”
My room.
My room is the size of my old house. I’m not exaggerating for effect.
There’s a bed big enough to lose a person in, a walk-in closet I could move into, a bathroom with a tub deep enough to drown my whole old life in, and a set of glass doors that open onto a balcony looking out over a garden that goes on and on into the dark.
I walk to the glass and put my hand against it.
Somewhere out there a few hundred dollars used to be the whole margin between me and disaster.
I’d lie awake doing the math, what I could sell, how long the savings would stretch, whether I’d have to call my mother.
I never once let myself picture anything like this, because picturing things you can’t have is how you end up disappointed, and I’d had enough disappointment to last a lifetime.
“This is too much,” I say.
“It’s just a room.” He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me take it all in with this quiet, satisfied look. “Decorate it however you want. Paint it, fill it with plants, whatever. There’s a gym in the basement, pool out back, the garden’s yours to wander whenever.”
“Richard, I can’t afford to live here. I can’t afford to look at this room.”
“You’re not paying rent.”
“I have to pay something. I’m not going to just freeload off you, that’s insane.”
“You’d be doing me a favor, honestly. This house echoes. I rattle around in it like a marble in a jar.” He says it light, but there’s a real note under it that I file away with the rest. “And you’ll be earning a salary. A good one.”
“How good?”
He tells me.
I sit down on the edge of the enormous bed because my legs stop holding me up. I make him repeat it, certain I misheard, and he repeats it, patient, and no, I heard right the first time. It’s not a salary. It’s a number out of someone else’s life.
“That’s more than Henry made in a year,” I say faintly.
“Good.” His voice is even. “You deserve more than Henry.”
I press my hands to my face for a second, just to have somewhere to put them.
Twenty-four hours ago I was sleeping on a cabin bunk with a wedding ring at the bottom of a lake and exactly a few hundred scraped-together dollars to my name.
I had a couch lined up at Tara’s and a vague plan to find any job that would take me, and that plan had felt brave.
Now I’m sitting in a room the size of a house, being offered a number that would have taken Henry years, by a man who kissed me senseless against a cabin wall last night and is currently leaning in his doorway like none of this is remarkable at all.
Then a thought surfaces through all the noise and I lower my hands and look at him.
“The assistant position,” I say. “The one you’re getting me into. Who is it for? Whose assistant am I going to be?”
He smiles, slow, and it’s the one that’s been making me crazy since the lake.
“Me. Looking forward to working with you, Em.”