Chapter 26 As It Was
As It Was
Theo
The florist confirmation had been the white whale of the entire operation.
Four weeks, two vendor changes, one very uncomfortable phone call in which Theo had been put on hold for forty minutes and had eaten an entire bag of pretzels out of stress, and now here it was, finally, sitting in the cell like it had never been a problem at all.
She typed CONFIRMED! with unnecessary emphasis and permitted herself one brief, entirely unprofessional noise of triumph.
"That's it," she said. "That is genuinely, actually, finally it."
Catherine looked up from the place cards she'd been writing out in her careful hand. "Everything?"
"Every single item. Green across the board." Theo turned the laptop around so Catherine could see the spreadsheet, all those rows, all those cells, every one of them resolved. "We're done. Everything is set for Saturday."
Catherine looked at it for a long moment. Then she bent to the bag at her feet and produced a bottle of Dom Pérignon, setting it on the desk between them with a grin that was entirely too pleased with itself.
Theo stared at the bottle.
Of course. If anyone was going to produce a three-thousand-dollar bottle of champagne on a Tuesday afternoon like it was office stationery, it would be Catherine Matthews.
Meanwhile, Catherine had begun surveying the office with the composure she adopted when she was about to say something impolite and was choosing, with effort, not to.
Her gaze moved over the stacks of donor files, the motivational poster Josiah had put up as a joke that Theo had somehow never taken down, the two dead plants on the windowsill she kept meaning to replace with fake ones, and the general atmosphere of productive chaos Theo had long since stopped noticing.
“Please tell me you have champagne glasses,” Catherine said.
“I have mugs.”
Catherine looked at her.
“They’re clean,” Theo added.
“That wasn’t my concern.”
Theo pulled open the desk drawer and produced the two mugs she'd had in there since approximately her first week: her World's Okayest Doctor one, and a plain blue one with a chip in the handle that had been there when she arrived and almost certainly belonged to someone who'd left the organization years ago.
She set them on the desk. Catherine looked at them for a moment with an expression of gentle, resigned acceptance, and then unwrapped the foil from the bottle, eased the cork out with a quiet, controlled pop, and poured.
She handed Theo the chipped blue mug. She took the World's Okayest Doctor for herself without comment.
"To a job well done," Catherine said, lifting it.
"To a job well done." Theo echoed, clinking hers against it.
The champagne was exceptional, which made the mugs genuinely funny, and Theo caught Catherine's eyes over the rim, and they were both smiling before they'd even swallowed.
It tasted like relief. Like months of logistics and donor calls and seating charts and the florist, God, the florist, finally being over.
Theo leaned back in her chair and let herself feel the satisfaction of something finished, something that had required a great deal from both of them, sitting resolved on her laptop screen.
"We actually did it," Theo said.
"No, you did it. I came in at the eleventh hour, a month before, and helped you tie up the loose ends.”
Theo huffed out a small laugh. “Yeah, no. We both know that’s not true. I had a moment in week three where I genuinely wasn't sure we’d finish everything in time."
“Week three was difficult,” Catherine agreed, with the diplomatic understatement of someone who had been sitting in this office the afternoon a donor threatened to withdraw five figures because his name appeared below someone he considered socially inferior on the program. “But we managed.”
"We did," Theo agreed, smiling.
They finished the champagne in their mismatched mugs while the evening settled around them, the light going amber through the window, the building quieting as staff filtered out.
They talked about the gala, about what they were looking forward to and what they weren't. They laughed about the seating chart that had required three separate revisions before Theo finally sat Sandra next to Arthur Levinson, whose voice carried across rooms like a foghorn, while Catherine rebuilt the rest of the table around the damage.
At some point, Theo stopped tracking the conversation as a conversation and just let it be what it was. Two people in an office at the end of a long day with a bottle of good champagne and nowhere else to be.
She looked at Catherine across the desk. The green spreadsheet still open on the laptop. The closed notebooks. The bottle between them catching the last of the amber light.
And something in her chest let go. Not dramatically.
Not all at once. Just quietly, the way tension releases when you've been holding something for so long, you'd stopped noticing the effort of it.
She hadn't forgiven Catherine in a single moment; she understood that now.
It had been happening in increments, across coffee shops and meeting rooms and dinner tables, and she hadn't noticed until just now, sitting here, that it was already done.
When she looked up, Catherine was watching her with that careful smile, the one that meant she wasn't sure yet whether she was allowed to be happy.
Theo realized she was smiling and decided to answer for her. "You realize it's been exactly a year tomorrow," she said, tilting her head.
Catherine took a second, then laughed softly. "Since the noise complaint?"
"Since you decided two in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to give a private recital." Theo leaned forward. "Strong opening, for the record."
"I thought so," Catherine said, completely without shame. "I'm very glad you banged on my door, Theodora."
Theo held her gaze. “Yeah. Me too.”
Catherine held her gaze, her composure just beginning to slip at the edges. "I wanted to ask you something.”
Her posture was straight, the way it always was, but something underneath it was slightly less certain than usual.
“Okay.”
"The gala." She said it evenly, but her fingers had stilled on the mug. "I'll be there regardless, obviously. I'm on the donor list, I've been part of the planning, I care about The Mission." She paused. "But I wondered if you would consider coming as my date?”
Theo's brain began to assemble something thoughtful and measured in response and then simply didn't, because the answer was there before the thought had finished forming, obvious and immediate and not requiring the analysis she'd been preparing to give it.
"Yes," she said.
Catherine blinked. She'd clearly been prepared for more of a conversation. "Just like that?"
"Just like that."
“I just—I want to be clear about what I mean,” Catherine said, like someone who had thought carefully about what she wanted to say and meant to get it right.
“I'm not asking to walk back into things as they were.
I know I have more work to do, and I'm not asking you to trust me before I've earned it.
But I am asking you to be my date. To walk in with me.
To be there with me." Her eyes were steady on Theo's face. "In a romantic sense."
"I know what you meant," Theo said. "It’s still a yes."
Something moved across Catherine’s face, quiet and genuine, the kind of expression that wasn’t performed for anyone.
“Good,” Catherine said, though she couldn’t quite stop the smile that found its way onto her face.
Theo felt one pulling at her own. “Good.”
A while later, once the champagne was finished and the light through Theo's office window had set, they gathered their coats, and Theo locked up behind them.
They walked out together through the corridor, past the empty reception desk and the noticeboard with its outdated flyers, and out through the front doors into the cold.
The air carried the edge of a January evening in New York, sharp enough to make you aware of your face and grateful for your coat. The block was quiet, The Mission offices dark behind them, the nearest streetlight pooling pale light onto the pavement.
Catherine’s cab was two minutes away, the small car icon moving steadily through the grid on her phone.
They lingered there, talking about Saturday, about when Catherine would pick Theo up, the conversation settling into something easy.
And because Theo’s filter had clearly taken the evening off after half a bottle of champagne, she said, “Hang on. Is the gala going to be our first date?”
Catherine tilted her head. "That depends."
"On what?"
"On whether you're counting the recital. The dinners at Yorkies. The night of the blackout." She paused. "Because if you are, the gala is considerably further down the list than second."
Theo considered this. "Those weren't dates. Even if I wanted them to be, you didn't know that. So they don't count."
"I see. Well, I want to do this properly," Catherine said.
The lightness in her voice had shifted into something more careful, more honest. "I want to take you somewhere and arrive with a romantic gesture and spend the whole evening embarrassingly aware of you across a table.
I want it to count." She met Theo's eyes.
"So as far as I'm concerned, the gala is our first. And I intend to make it worth the wait. "
Theo's face was doing something she had absolutely no control over.
Catherine looked at her for a moment, taking it in, like she had nowhere else to be.
Then she leaned in and kissed her cheek.
Slow and deliberate, her lips warm against Theo's skin, her hand coming up to rest at Theo's jaw with a lightness that was somehow worse than pressure.
She didn't pull back immediately. Just stayed there for a breath, close enough that Theo could feel the warmth of her, the faint scent of her, and then she did pull back, but only barely, her face still near enough that Theo was acutely aware of the distance she'd left between them, which was not very much distance at all.
Theo looked at her. Catherine looked back. The cab was still two minutes away.
Theo stepped forward and kissed her cheek. Slowly. Then the other. She wasn't sure why it felt important to take her time, only that it did.
Catherine's breath caught, just slightly. Her eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened, something in them again had shifted, darker and steadier, and she looked at Theo the way you looked at something you had decided you were going to have.
Catherine leaned in again. Kissed Theo’s left cheek, her mouth just barely parted—close enough to the corner of Theo's lips that it was almost something else entirely.
Then her right, the same deliberate placement, the same almost. Then she pulled back only far enough to make the distance between them a deliberate thing, a held thing, her gaze dropping once to Theo's mouth before returning to her eyes, and Theo's heart was doing something that had completely abandoned any pretense of dignity.
Then Catherine brushed her nose slowly against Theo's, just once, and kissed it.
She stepped back, a smile settling into place, satisfied and entirely unapologetic.
Behind Theo, the cab pulled up to the curb. Catherine leaned in one last time, her lips brushing Theo's ear.
“See you Saturday," she said softly.
Then she was gone, the door closing behind her, the taxi pulling smoothly out into traffic until it disappeared.
Theo stood on the pavement for a moment, aware she had just been outmaneuvered by a kiss on the nose. And she was, she decided, absolutely and completely fine with that.