Chapter 1 #2
“You love me because I tell you the truth. And the truth is, you’re being a pussy.”
My mouth fell wide open. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. You are letting your pride cosplay as morality. You don’t want to ask him for help because then you might owe somebody something. You’d rather keep getting eaten alive by women like Marlena Cross who look like they eat interns for breakfast.”
“That is unfair.”
“It is accurate.”
“She probably cheated on the way up anyway,” I muttered, because I was petty and unemployed and the wine had found the soft spot in my restraint.
“Marlena. There’s no way that woman got where she is on talent alone.
She’s blackmailing somebody. Or sleeping with somebody.
Or sacrificing assistants under a full moon. ”
Jules made a face and reached for her phone again.
Jules: blech
“I’m confiscating that,” I said.
“You’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
I sat back and pressed my fingertips to my temples.
The wine bar had started to fill around us, soft voices rising under the low brass light fixtures, the air smelling of garlic, rain, and perfume.
Everyone else seemed to have arrived from a life that was moving in a straight line.
Couples leaned into each other and women in blazers laughed over martinis.
A man at the bar took a call and said, very seriously, “Push the meeting to Singapore,” as if the world were a chessboard and he had been born knowing how to move the pieces.
“I don’t even know what I’d say,” I admitted.
Jules’s expression shifted again, the teasing still there but gentler underneath. “You tell him the truth.”
“That my resume looks like a crime scene?”
“That you’ve had a rough couple of years. That you’re not asking for a handout. That you need a chance somewhere sane. That you’ll work hard.”
“Everyone says they’ll work hard.”
“Then say it better and with finesse.”
“That’s your advice?”
“Yes. You’re good at words. Use them.”
I looked down at my phone. Callum’s contact was still in there, though I had never once used it for anything more urgent than thank-you texts after Christmas presents or the occasional birthday reply.
I could picture him receiving my email in some immaculate office, his dark brows drawing together, his mouth firming with disappointment or pity.
Pity was worse. I could survive being judged.
I had been judged professionally by women with pretty faces and no souls, but pity from Callum felt like something I would have to peel off my skin with a knife.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
Jules groaned. “That means no.”
“It means I’ll think about it.”
“It means you’ll go home, take off your bra, spiral for forty minutes, maybe do something embarrassing and self-soothing, and then decide it’s too late to send an email.”
I stared at her and she stared back at me with this serene look on her face.
“You know,” I said, “sometimes I miss when you used to pretend to have boundaries.”
“I never pretended that.”
After we split the fries and Jules bullied me into letting her pay, I took the train home with my phone burning in my pocket.
My apartment was on the third floor of a narrow old building with radiators that clanked like ghosts and windows that leaked cold air even in April.
It was not charming enough to be called charming by anyone who didn’t own property.
But it was mine. Mostly. Mine and the bank’s and the student loan company’s and the landlord’s, all in that particular order.
Inside, I kicked off my shoes, peeled myself out of my work-adjacent black dress, and stood in the dim bedroom in my tights and slip, staring at the heap of laundry on the chair as if it might rise up and offer me some career counseling.
Rain ticked softly against the window. My apartment smelled faintly of lavender detergent and the expensive candle Jules had given me after my last breakup, which she had called ‘a ritual object for banishing mediocre men.’
I should have opened my laptop immediately and written the email while the wine still had me brave and Jules’s voice still had me irritated enough to confuse that irritation with momentum.
Instead, I brushed my teeth, washed my face, put on an old, oversized T-shirt from college, and got into bed with my phone, which, to be brutally honest, was a mistake.
The internet was not a place to go when you were unemployed, lonely, slightly tipsy, and trying not to think about your godfather’s hands.
I told myself I was being practical. If I was going to contact him, I should know what Rowe Structural Group was doing lately.
This was just research. I was just doing my due diligence and being a responsible adult.
So, I searched the company and found the usual things: awards, projects, a glowing profile about urban innovation, a photograph of Callum standing in a hard hat at some construction site with wind flattening his jacket against his chest. He looked older than he had in my childhood memories, of course he did, but not softer.
Time had carved into him respectfully. There were lines at the corners of his eyes now, silver threaded through his dark hair, and a severe and thoughtful expression on his face that made him look like he was solving a problem the rest of the room had not yet realized even existed.
I zoomed in before I could stop myself.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I whispered into my empty bedroom.
He was just a man. A tall, powerful, unavailable man who had known my father, had once given me a silver charm bracelet for my sixteenth birthday, and had hugged me at my mother’s funeral with one hand spread warm between my shoulder blades while I fell apart in the stupid floral dress my aunt had said was appropriate.
That history should have made my attraction to him impossible.
Maybe for a better person, it would have.
For me, though, it made it complicated and shameful, which apparently did nothing to make it less vividly intense.
I set my phone face down on the blanket and closed my eyes.
And there he was anyway.
I didn’t envision the Callum from the funeral, the birthday-card version, or even the distant godfather version who asked whether my car was reliable and whether I had filed my taxes yet.
The Callum my mind produced in the dark was the one from the charity dinner, standing too close behind me in a crowd with his hand on my back.
I tried to think about anything else. Rent.
Marlena’s pinched mouth. The cereal situation.
My employment history lying mangled in a PDF.
Instead, my imagination wandered straight through every locked door I had tried to build.
I thought of his suit jacket brushing my arm.
How he had always made me feel steadied, even when I hated needing steadying.
Then, worse, I imagined that same steadiness changing into something else like his hand closing around my wrist, not to guide me through a crowd, but to keep me exactly where he wanted me.
I turned onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow, furious with myself, warm all over, embarrassed even though I was all alone.
The fantasy did not become less potent because I disapproved of it.
It seemed to like my disapproval. It fed on it.
I let myself drift inside it for a few reckless minutes.
I pictured going to Rowe Tower the next morning for an interview, my hair down, wearing something professional but not too severe, an outfit that said I could be trusted with confidential matters and also knew how to walk in heels.
I pictured Callum behind a wide desk, looking up from a file, his expression unreadable.
I pictured him saying my name and standing, and the air between us thickening with all the things we would never say.
Then I pictured him telling me to come closer, and me doing it, even though my heart would be beating too fast and my hands would be shaking.
I pictured him looking at me for a long, quiet moment before he told me to bend over the desk.
And I would, because I trusted him and because I wanted him and because my body would obey his voice before my pride could object.
I would feel his hands on my hips, firm and possessive, pulling me back just enough to make me gasp.
He would lift the skirt of my dress or the hem of my blouse, whatever I had chosen for this fantasy job interview, and his fingers would slide under the waistband of my panties and drag them down my thighs.
I would be wet already, shamefully ready, and he would see it.
He would know, and instead of shaming me for it, he would approve.
He would smooth his hand over my bare ass, maybe spank me hard enough to sting just a little bit, just enough to make me jump and whimper, and he would tell me I was going to take what he gave me like a good girl.
Then he would undo his belt and his trousers, and I would feel the hot, hard length of him press against me, teasing, before he finally pushed inside me, filling me slowly while I clutched the edge of his desk and tried not to cry out.
He would fuck me over his desk, deep and slightly rough, his hand in my hair, pulling just enough to remind me who was in charge, and I would come around his cock, clenching and shuddering, while he told me I was perfect, that I had been made for this, that he had waited for me.