4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Willa
Iwoke up at nine thirteen in the morning and for a full ten seconds I had no idea where I was.
Then it all came back. My apartment. My bed.
Eight hours of sleep, the most I’d gotten in a single stretch in two weeks according to my phone.
I felt like a different person inhabiting a slightly familiar body.
I stared at the ceiling and tried to piece the night before together in the right order.
Jagger had kissed me in my kitchen. That was the headline. Everything else came second.
I had planned to lie in bed and have a quiet personal crisis about it, but my body was bizarrely well rested and my brain had other ideas.
Within five minutes I was up, in the shower, and already planning the second course of the tasting menu while I shampooed my hair.
The blood orange concept wasn’t working.
The texture was off. I needed to either commit to a softer cream or switch directions entirely and do a sorbet.
The sorbet idea kept pulling at me in a way I’d learned to trust over the years.
My instincts on flavor were the one part of me Dwayne had never managed to break, mostly because he’d never bothered to listen long enough to try.
I got out of the shower with a clear plan for the second course and a slow, low burn of something underneath it that had nothing to do with food.
I made coffee and stood at the window. I tried to figure out what to do with my face for the rest of the day, because Jagger Cross had kissed me in my kitchen and I had to go back to that kitchen in three hours and pretend I was a professional.
I unlocked my phone to check the time. There was a notification on Instagram. Evie had sent me a story, which was unusual because Evie didn’t really do stories. I tapped through expecting some sort of inside joke from last night’s service.
It wasn’t a joke.
It was a screenshot of a Page Six post from that morning, time stamped seven a.m. The photo showed Jagger walking out of Carbone last night. The time stamp on the image said eleven forty p.m., about forty minutes after he had put me in a car outside the club.
He wasn’t alone.
He was holding the door for a woman. She was taller than him in her heels, with long blonde hair falling down her back in perfect waves.
She wore a red dress that was impressive in its construction.
The caption read: Jagger Cross spotted with Playboy cover model Sienna Sloane after dinner at Carbone, Friday night.
I stared at the photo. Then I stared at it some more. Finally I locked my phone, set it face down on the counter, and got dressed for work without really registering what I was putting on.
The truth was I had known this might happen.
I’d been telling myself I knew since the night I met him.
Men like Jagger Cross didn’t actually settle.
They played things out for as long as it amused them and then moved on.
I had let him kiss me in my kitchen, felt my body go warm and stupid, let him put me in a car and kiss my forehead, and then slept eight hours like an idiot.
He had put me in a car at eleven. Forty minutes later he was walking a Playboy cover model out of Carbone.
I had to give it to him. The man was efficient.
I got to the club at noon. Coat off, hair tied up, notebook open on the counter with the new plan for the second course.
I lost myself in the work the way I always did.
I broke down a case of blood oranges, got their zest into the sugar, and stood at my counter peeling fruit with a paring knife.
A slow feeling built inside me that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite sadness.
Mostly I felt stupid. The particular kind of stupid that comes from ignoring your own instincts because a man with a nice face said something soft to you.
I didn’t expect to see Jagger until evening.
He had said tomorrow, and tomorrow meant night time in my mind.
So when the kitchen door swung open at one thirty in the afternoon and he walked in carrying a paper bag and a coffee, I jumped so hard I nearly took a layer off my own thumb.
“Sorry,” he said, setting the bag down on the corner of my counter. “I should’ve made noise.”
“You absolutely should have.”
“I brought you lunch. The coffee is how Matteo says you take it, which is apparently the only personal failing of yours.”
I looked at him. He stood at my counter in a black sweater that looked like cashmere and dark jeans. He looked relaxed, well rested, and pleased to be in my kitchen, like a man who hadn’t done anything wrong.
I went back to my oranges.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
He waited. I didn’t look up. I kept peeling.
“Willa.”
“Mm.”
“You’re not looking at me.”
“I’m peeling. I have to focus.”
“On an orange?”
“On forty oranges.”
He came around the counter. He didn’t push or crowd me. He simply leaned against the surface a couple of feet away and watched me work.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m working.”
“We were kissing last night. Now you can’t look at me. What happened?”
I set the knife down and wiped my hands on my apron. I'd decided not to ask. Asking gave him the upper hand because it meant I cared. I was going to stay professional, finish my oranges, and politely tell him later that I needed some space.
“Carbone,” I said.
He went still.
“Willa.”
“Sienna Sloane, apparently.”
“I can explain that.”
“You don’t have to. You don’t owe me an explanation. We kissed once! You’re a grown man with a life. You went to dinner. That’s fine. I’m just adjusting my expectations. It’s fine.”
"We kissed twice."
"It's fine!"
“Look at me.”
“I’m fine.”
“Willa. Look at me.”
I looked at him.
He was very still in a way I had only seen in predators on the Discovery Channel. The smile was gone. There was something underneath it that I hadn’t seen yet. It was quiet, focused, and not particularly comfortable to be on the receiving end of.
“Sienna Sloane is my sister-in-law’s cousin,” he said.
I stared at him.
What the fuck?
“She flew in from LA for her wedding next weekend. The pre-wedding dinner was at Carbone, and by eleven the party was carrying on with my sister-in-law’s parents.
Sienna was wrecked and didn’t have a car back to her hotel but her fiance won't let her take cabs. My brother text me just after eleven and asked me to run her uptown, because he was three drinks in and I wasn’t.
So I drove down, went in, said hello to my brother and his wife and the bride and groom, declined a drink, walked Sienna out, and dropped her at her hotel. ”
“You held the door for her.”
“I held the door because it was November and cold and I wasn’t going to make her stand on the curb. I was inside the building for about five minutes, total.”
“You drove?”
“Well, my driver brought my car round and then went home. I’d had one bourbon at eight and nothing since, so I was fine to. I stopped for coffee on Sixth on the way home — eleven fifty-three, and yes, I kept the receipt.”
I didn’t say anything. I picked up an orange and set it down again. I had nowhere to put my hands now that this conversation was happening.
“You weren’t on a date.”
“I was a chauffeur. My brother owed me, my sister-in-law owed me before that, and now Sienna owes me too. I’m planning to collect on all three of them, in increasing order of pettiness.”
“Page Six said—”
“Page Six is a tabloid. They saw a photo of me with a blonde and ran the headline they always run. I haven’t read the post. They’ve been running ‘Jagger Cross spotted with’ headlines since I was twenty-two and they’ve been wrong about ninety percent of them.
Most of those women were my cousin or someone’s wife or a colleague I’d had a working dinner with. ”
He stepped closer, just a little.
“Willa. Did you really think I’d put you in a car, kiss you on the forehead, and then drive across town to take a model to dinner?”
I looked at him. The honest answer was yes.
That was exactly what I had thought, because that was what I’d been telling myself all week would happen and because it lined up with everything I had ever known about men in his tax bracket.
But standing in front of him now, with his face doing what it was doing, I couldn’t quite hold on to the certainty.
“Yes,” I said.
He flinched, just a fraction.
“I deserve that,” he said slowly. “Given what I look like on paper. Given the Google results. Given everything. I deserve that.”
“Jagger—”
“I’m going to fix it. I’m telling you now so you know.
I’m going to fix it so you don’t have to wonder every time my name shows up next to another woman’s.
I’ll figure out how. I haven’t worked it out yet because I’ve only ever worked at making people stop looking at me, not at making them look at me the right way. But I’ll figure it out.”
He came closer. He was a step away now, and I could smell him: soap and warm cotton, no cologne today.
“In the meantime,” he said, “I need you to ask me. When something like that comes up, you ask me and I tell you and we move on. I’d rather be asked the same question a hundred times than have you go quiet on me on the other side of a counter.”
I picked up the orange again and rolled it between my palms.
“I should’ve asked.”
“You shouldn’t have had to. I should’ve told you last night that my brother might call me. I knew he might. He’d texted me earlier in the day. I forgot, because I was kissing you and you’d just told me you’d been sleeping at the club. I had other things on my mind. So that one’s on me too.”
“How are we both apologizing for the same situation?”
“Because we’re both reasonable people and we both contributed to it. Mostly me. But you contributed by going quiet.”
I looked down at the orange in my hands. He waited.
“I had a really bad relationship,” I said to the orange.
“Two years of it. He lied to me constantly. He cheated on me twice that I know of and probably more. He was charming about every bit of it, and by the end I was the kind of person who stared at her phone for an hour every night because I’d stopped being able to tell what was true.
I left him six months ago and I’ve been very careful about not doing that to myself again. ”
“Willa.”
“I’m telling you because I owe you the context. So you understand why I went quiet.”
“I’m not him.”
“I know you’re not. That’s the problem. If you were him this would be easier.”
There was a long, quiet beat. He didn’t move toward me. I had the impression he was deliberately holding still, like he knew any small move might land wrong and he wanted me to come to him.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Take a minute. Tell me when you do.”
I rolled the orange between my hands. The thinking didn’t take as long as I expected.
“I need you to be patient with me when I do this,” I said.
“I’m going to do this. I’m going to see your name next to a woman’s and I’m going to go quiet.
I need you to do exactly what you just did, every time, until my brain catches up with what I actually know about you.
I need you to be patient and I need you not to get tired of it. ”
“I won’t get tired of it.”
“You will.”
“I won’t. I want you to ask me. Every time. I’ll answer every time.”
“And in the meantime—” “In the meantime I’m going to be aggravatingly transparent about my schedule.
You’ll know where I am. You’ll know who I’m with.
You’ll be able to find me at any hour of the day.
If a tabloid runs another headline you’ll already know the actual story because I’ll have told you about it before they ran it.
I’m going to make this so boring you’ll get sick of it. ”
I almost laughed.
“That’s a lot of work for one woman.”
“It’s not a lot of work. It’s not work at all. You’re not a woman, Willa. You’re the woman, and that’s a very different management problem.”
He came around and stopped in front of me. He didn’t touch me yet, but he was close enough that I could feel the warmth of him. He waited.
“You can come over here if you want,” he said. “I’m not going to do it for you.”
I set the orange down. I crossed the small space between us, put my hands on the front of his sweater, and rested my forehead against his collarbone.
He closed his arms around me very carefully.
I stood in my kitchen on a Saturday afternoon being held by a man who had spent the last ten minutes apologizing for something he hadn’t even technically done.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask,” I said into his sweater.
“I’m sorry I gave you a reason to wonder.”
He kissed the top of my head and stood there with his arms around me for a long minute. The slow burn that had been in my stomach since the photo cooled into something else.
After a while he stepped back. He put his hand on the side of my neck and tilted my face up.
“Eat your sandwich,” he said.
“You’re very fixated on me eating.”
“You haven’t slept in a week and you’re running on coffee. I have priorities.”
He kissed me. It was slow and certain and unhurried, his hand on the back of my neck and his thumb stroking along my jaw.
I felt the careful press of him through his sweater and the steady warmth of his palm, and I understood in a way I hadn’t quite understood last night that he wasn’t going anywhere.
When he pulled back I was a little dizzy.
“Eat,” he said.
I ate. We sat at the prep counter and ate sandwiches. I chose the brisket. He took the turkey. He asked me about the menu and I talked. He listened the way he always listened. I told him about the sorbet and he made one observation about acidity that I tucked away to think about later.
Around five I caught myself humming.
He didn’t say anything about it. But the corner of his mouth lifted while he was looking at his phone, and I knew he had heard.