Chapter 11
Elena
I don’t sleep.
I lie on Nadia’s couch and stare at the ceiling with all the lights off and my brain going at about nine thousand miles an hour.
I’m having a completely shameless internal crisis about the fact that I had the best sex of my life with my boss on his very expensive couch in his very tasteful office while Manhattan watched through forty floors of glass like it couldn’t care less.
Here is my internal inventory of emotions, filed in order of volume:
Mortified. Absolutely. One hundred percent. Not in the good way, in the wake-up-at-three-a.m.-and-press-a-pillow-over-your-face way.
Also: not sorry. Not one single cell in my body is sorry. And I have tried to find a sorry cell. I’ve done a sweep.
The sex was, to be clinical about it, extraordinary.
The kind of extraordinary that recalibrates your understanding of what that word means.
I’ve had good sex. I’ve had acceptable sex.
I’ve had the kind of forgettable sex that you file under “tried” and move on from.
This was none of those things. This was the kind of sex you tell your grandchildren about in a heavily edited version when they’re forty-five and they thought they knew everything.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience at minimum, and if it never happens again I will carry it in my chest like a small private sun until I’m very, very old.
The man pays attention. That’s the thing no one tells you about controlled, guarded, impossible men.
When they finally give you their full attention it is like standing in a spotlight.
It is like being the only thing in the room.
He learned me in approximately forty-five minutes with the focused precision of someone who considers incompleteness a personal failure.
I did not survive it gracefully, and I don’t regret it.
Every time I close my eyes I’m back on that couch with his voice in my ear and his hands everywhere and the city completely indifferent behind his glass walls like it sees this all the time.
It probably does.
I roll onto my side and address the couch cushion directly. We are not doing this. We are not spiraling about a man we work for. We made an informed choice with our whole chest and we are dealing with the consequences like a grown woman.
The consequences being: possible termination, certain awkwardness, and the small matter of whether he’s married.
I don’t think he’s married. Two months of close observation has turned up no ring, no spousal phone calls, no photographs in his office.
Although that might mean nothing, given that I know he has a son and there’s no photograph of him either.
In my well documented novel, Patrick doesn’t like photographs. They trap people in one specific, static moment, and people are more than any single moment. I agree with that.
Also, he is not the type, to cheat on his wife.
I’ve decided this with the certainty of someone who absolutely can’t afford to be wrong about it.
Patrick Aldera is the kind of man who would rather carry something heavy and silent for ten years than do anything dishonest. It’s one of the things about him that is simultaneously extremely attractive and utterly exhausting.
So he’s not married. Probably. Almost certainly. Ninety-four percent.
The other six percent I’ll deal with in the morning.
The job, though. The job is a problem I understand with more precision.
If eleven days of sitting on a vendor confirmation and single-handedly nudging a collection launch into the wrong quarter didn’t get me fired, sleeping with him might, and I can’t afford to lose this job.
I can’t go back to Nadia’s couch with nothing.
She would be kind about it, she would be practical and useful and exactly herself, and I would not survive the kindness.
So here is my plan: I will work harder. I will be organized. I will understand fabrication timelines and vendor protocols and all the logistics of a furniture empire and I will never, not once, not even in the quietest private corner of my skull, think about his hands.
I fall asleep somewhere around four.
I wake up thinking about his hands.
We are going to be a problem.
The next morning I sit at my desk, coffee in hand, and there it is. The email from Milan. Waiting like a punishment.
I read it three times. Then twice more. It is about a fabrication timeline for a new collection and it is either slightly delayed or significantly delayed depending on which paragraph you believe, it has been cc’d to six people, two of whom I can’t identify, and it requires a response from me that I don’t know how to write because I still don’t know, fundamentally, what the correct position on a fabrication delay sounds like from the perspective of the fortieth floor.
I open a reply window. I close it. I open it again and consider whether I can find a plausible-sounding template online without anyone knowing, when I hear the elevator, and then a small voice at full volume:
“Are we there?”
And Patrick: “Yes we are.”
I look up.
He is small and blond, moving at a velocity that treats walking as a general suggestion rather than a rule.
His curls are springing off in at least four directions, and there’s a dinosaur on his shirt.
He stops in front of my desk and looks up at me with enormous dark eyes, studying me with an inspection that is both thorough and completely unhurried.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
He tilts his head. “You have blue eyes.”
“I do.”
“My dad has brown ones.” He leans on my desk with the ease of someone who has never once worried about how he is being perceived. “Do you have any snacks?”
“Half a granola bar.”
He considers this with seriousness. “What kind?”
“Honey oat.”
He makes the precise expression of someone with strong opinions, being diplomatic about them.
“Erick.” Patrick’s voice comes from across the reception, and I don’t startle. I straighten my spine and compose my face into something professional and calm and completely unaffected and then I look up.
He is in his jacket. Put together the way he is always put together, which is to say as though the concept of looking disheveled has simply never occurred to him as a biological possibility.
He has his hand on Erick’s shoulder, that specific light parental grip that communicates don’t run without actually saying it.
He looks at me, and the air in the room does a thing I’m not acknowledging.
“That’s my son,” he says. Evenly. No preamble.
“His nanny is unavailable today. I have a call with the Paris office that runs approximately an hour, and I can’t reschedule.
” He pauses in the way he pauses when he is selecting words carefully, like each one has weight and he’s accounting for it.
“Would you be able to keep an eye on him while I’m on the call? ”
The correct answer is yes, of course, I’m your assistant, this is within the scope of the role.
What my brain does instead: he brought his son here.
To this office. He brought his son to my desk specifically and he is asking me, the woman he slept with on that couch sixteen hours ago and then said I can’t do this to while she was still standing in the doorway, he is asking me to spend an hour with the small blond person he is responsible for on this earth.
This is a choice. He could have called from home. He could have found someone else. He is a man with an entire organization below him and presumably the means to arrange alternative childcare on short notice, and he is here, and Erick is here, and I’m running the story before I can stop it.
Patrick Aldera does not do things without intent. He is precise about everything: what he says, what he doesn’t say, where he looks and for how long. A man like that does not walk in with the most important person in his life unless it means something.
He wants me to know him.
He likes me.
Stop. Stop right there. We are not doing this.
He couldn’t find the nanny. That’s a story too. It has fewer moving parts and a much less devastating ending if I’m wrong.
“Of course,” I say. Professional voice. Steady voice. A voice that has absolutely no muscle memory of his name.
Erick looks up at his father. “Can I sit at her desk?”
“Her name is Elena.”
“Can I sit at Elena’s desk?”
Patrick’s eyes come back to me. Something moves across his face I haven’t catalogued before, softer than his usual expressions, gone before I can fully name it.
“If she says yes.”
“Pull up that chair,” I tell him, pointing to the one against the wall. “And yes, you can definitely sit at my desk.”
Patrick disappears into his office. The door clicks. And I’m alone with this small, magnificent disaster of a person who drags the chair over with more sound effects than the task technically requires and settles in on his knees, arms on my desk.
He looks at my monitor. He looks at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to understand an email from Italy.”
He thinks about this seriously. “Do you want to draw instead?”
I look at him. I look at the Milan email. I look at him again.
“Yes,” I say. “I really do.”
I pull out a notepad and tear a page for each of us. I give him the good pens, the color ones I use for annotations, and keep a regular blue ballpoint for myself. He accepts them with the gravity of someone receiving tools for important work.
“We should make a story,” I say. “You draw something, then I draw the next thing, and we figure it out as we go.”
He looks at me like I have proposed the most reasonable idea anyone has ever had. “Okay.” He picks up the orange pen without deliberating. “I’ll start.”
He draws a T. rex. Rough and magnificent and in orange entirely, with full conviction.
“That’s the T. rex,” he says. “He’s the strongest. His name is Rex.”
“Original.”
“I know.” He slides the sheet toward me with full seriousness.
I draw a castle. Turrets, a gate, a flag. I slide it back.