8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
Willa
Iwoke up before her and didn’t move for an hour.
This was not like me. I’m an early riser by nature and a restless one — I wake up and my brain starts running, within ten minutes I’m out of bed and into the day.
I’ve left a number of beds at unkind hours over the years because lying still next to a sleeping person felt like a waste of time I could be spending doing something useful.
I lay still next to Willa for an hour and didn’t feel like I was wasting anything.
She slept the way she did everything once she committed to it: completely.
Face down, one arm flung across my chest, her hair everywhere, dead to the world after nineteen hours awake and the best service of her life.
At some point in the night she’d stolen most of the duvet and I’d let her.
The morning came up gray and then gold over the city and the light moved across the bed.
She didn’t stir. I lay there underneath her arm and watched it happen and thought about the fact that I’d spent thirty-four years making sure no one ever stayed long enough for me to learn how they slept.
I knew how she slept now. Face down. Duvet thief. Made a small noise around six and then went quiet again. I had the whole catalogue, and I wanted the rest of it, every morning, for as long as she’d let me have them.
She woke up around eight, slowly, in stages, and the first thing she did was open one eye and look at me with deep suspicion.
“How long have you been awake?”
“Not long,” I lied.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m going to start wearing a mask, you read me too easily.”
She made a noise and burrowed further into the pillow, and I watched her remember, in real time, where she was and what had happened, and a slow flush came up the back of her neck.
“I stayed.”
“You stayed.”
“I have to be at the club at —“ She lifted her head and squinted at the window like it could tell her the time. “What time is it. I have prep. I have —“
“It’s eight. You’re not on until two. I checked the schedule.
” I pushed her hair off her face. “I had someone go to your apartment this morning. Your things are in the dressing room — clothes, your work bag, the toiletry kit from your bathroom. I had them get the plant too. It’s on the kitchen windowsill. It looked like it needed light.”
She went very still.
“You broke into my apartment?!”
“No, darling. I sent someone to gain entry to your apartment. I wasn’t going to make you put yesterday’s chef whites back on and do the walk of shame on the subway.
And you said you had nothing to wear, so.
” I shrugged, like it was nothing, like I hadn’t lain awake half the night deciding whether it would be too much and concluding that I didn’t care if it was.
“Your plants in the kitchen. Your toothbrush is in the bathroom. Second sink. It’s yours now. ”
She looked at me for a long moment, and I watched several things move across her face — surprise, the instinct to push back, something softer underneath it that won out.
“You’re insane, Jagger.”
“Only for you, darling.”
“You really moved my plant in?”
“It needed light. Your apartment faces an air shaft, Willa, that plant was dying a slow death out of spite. It’s happier here. It told me.”
“You can’t just move a woman’s plant into your apartment after one night.”
“I can, though. I did. It’s done. The plant lives here now and so does your toothbrush and you’re going to have to come back to see them both, which was, admittedly, part of my reasoning.
Or you move in with them.” I kissed her forehead.
“There’s coffee. I had the service send oat milk and vanilla syrup.
I’m told it’s a crime against the bean but I’m prepared to commit it for you. ”
She put her face in my chest and I felt her smile against my skin. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and when she spoke her voice was slightly muffled.
“This is a lot, Jagger.”
“I know.”
“You moved my plant in.”
“I’m aware of what I did.”
“Most men would’ve sent me home at 3AM.”
“I’ve sent you home in a car three times and I hated it every time. I’m not doing it again unless you ask me to.” I tipped her chin up. “Too much?”
She thought about it. I let her. I’d learned not to fill her silences, and the longer this one went the more I had to fight the urge to fill it.
“No,” she said finally. “It’s not too much. It’s just — nobody’s ever wanted me around like this. I’m recalibrating.”
“Recalibrate over coffee. The crime-coffee’s getting cold.”
She wore my shirt to the kitchen, which I had not planned for and which nearly took me off my feet.
She fed her plant a splash of water from a glass and told it, very seriously, that it lived here now and would have to make peace with that.
I stood in my own kitchen at eight in the morning watching a woman in my shirt talk to a houseplant and understood that I was never going to want anything else as long as I lived.
* * *
Three days later she got booked for an outside catering event and everything changed.
It wasn’t even at the club. That was the thing — it was an offsite gala the Sterling Club was co-hosting at a venue downtown, an arts foundation fundraiser, the kind of thing where the club lent its name and a few of its staff and brought in an outside catering company to handle the volume.
Willa was on the roster because the foundation had specifically asked for a dessert presence and Lola had volunteered her flagship pastry chef.
I went because Willa was working. I’d told her I’d always know where she was and I’d meant it.
I was making good on the promise to be transparent and slightly boring about my whereabouts, and the whereabouts that night was a converted warehouse downtown with three hundred guests, a string quartet, and a catering operation running out of a temporary kitchen at the back.
I was mid-conversation with a foundation board member when I felt it.
I’d been watching Willa across the room the way I always watched her — half my attention on the man talking at me about endowment structures, the other half on her at the dessert station, plating with that easy confidence I’d watched her build over the past weeks.
She was laughing at something one of the servers said.
She looked relaxed. She looked like she owned the corner of the room she was standing in.
And then...
She didn’t.
I saw it happen from forty feet away. One second she was laughing, plating, easy.
The next she’d gone rigid. The color dropped out of her face.
Her hands stopped moving. Her whole body had locked up like something had reached into her and switched her off, and I knew that stillness, because I’d spent weeks learning her, and nothing about it was good.
I followed her eyeline to a man by the service entrance.
Late twenties, maybe thirty. Dark hair pushed back, chef’s whites with the catering company’s logo on the breast. Good-looking in a very manicured way, the kind of man who’d put effort into looking effortless.
He was talking to another caterer, gesturing, taking up more room than the conversation needed. He hadn’t seen Willa yet.
I didn’t know who he was. But I’d spent weeks memorizing her face, and the expression on it now wasn’t surprise or annoyance or even dislike. It was fear. The deep kind the body produces on its own, ahead of thought, when it recognizes a threat it learned a long time ago.
Dwayne.
I knew it the way you know a number’s about to come up.
I didn’t have proof and I didn’t need it.
There was exactly one person who could put that look on Willa's face, and he was standing forty feet away in a borrowed kitchen gesturing at a colleague.
Every calm, controlled, useful instinct I had went very quiet and was replaced by something older and a great deal less civilized.
I excused myself from the board member mid-sentence and crossed the floor.
I didn’t rush. Rushing would have made a scene, and a scene was the last thing she needed.
I crossed the room at a normal pace with nothing on my face.
I came up to the dessert station from the side, and I put myself between Willa and the service entrance so that when she looked up the first thing she saw was me, and the second thing she couldn’t see at all, because I was blocking it.
“Hey.” Easy. Warm. The voice I used when everything was fine. “Look at me a second.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were swimming, somewhere else, somewhere two years back.
“He’s here,” she whispered. “He’s with the catering company. I didn’t — I didn’t know he’d be here, I didn’t know, I can’t —“
“I know. I’ve got it.” I put one hand on the side of her neck, the way I had in the kitchen the night the chiller died, my thumb under her jaw, grounding her. The other hand I kept low and flat against her back. “You’re going to look at me and breathe. Don’t look at the room. Just me.”
“I can’t be in the same room as him, Jagger, I can’t —“
“You’re not going to be. But right now I need you to breathe, because you’re spiraling, and I’m not going to let you spiral in front of three hundred people.
Look at me.” I held her gaze and kept my voice low and level and absolutely certain, because certainty was the thing she needed — solid ground, a person who wasn’t rattled.
“There it is. Stay with me. In through your nose. Good girl.”
She breathed. Her eyes started to focus. The worst of the panic pulled back an inch.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” I said.
“We’re not running, there's no scene being made. You’re going to finish this plate, because your hands know how even when the rest of you doesn’t, and then you’re going to tell the captain you’re feeling unwell and you’re stepping out, which is true.
And I’m going to walk you out the front.
He won’t see you, because I’ll be between you and him the entire way. Can you do that?”
“He’ll see me leave —“
“He won’t see anything. I promise you. I’m a very large obstacle and I’m extremely motivated.” That got my girl smiling. “Finish the plate, Willa. One plate. Then we go.”
She finished the plate. Her hands shook but they knew the way.
She set the last element down and stepped back, and I felt her start to come back into herself just enough to function.
She found the captain. She said what she needed to say.
The captain, who could clearly see something was wrong, waved her off without argument.
And I walked her out.
I kept my body between her and the service entrance the whole way across the floor, angled so that every step she took was screened, and she kept her eyes on me and her hand fisted in the side of my jacket like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
We went out through the front, past the quartet, out into the cold downtown night, and the second the doors closed behind us, she sagged against the brick wall of the building and pressed both hands over her face.
I didn’t touch her right away. I stood close, blocking the wind, and let her have a second.
“I’m sorry,” she said from behind her hands. “I’m sorry, I completely fell apart, I haven’t reacted to him like that in months, I thought I was past it —“
“Don’t apologize to me. Not for that.” I took her wrists, gently, and drew her hands down from her face so I could see her.
She was pale and her eyes were red and she looked furious with herself, which I hated more than the fear.
“You saw a man who spent two years making you feel small walk into a room you were working in. Your body did what bodies do. That’s not falling apart. That’s a smoke alarm working.”
“It’s humiliating.”
“It’s human.” I pulled her into me and she came, and I wrapped both arms around her and put my mouth against her hair, and I felt the fine tremor still going through her start, slowly, to ease.
“You got through it. You finished the plate. You walked out with your head up. He never even saw you. You handled it, Willa. I just stood in the way.”
She held onto the front of my coat and breathed against my chest, and the city moved around us, and over the top of her head I looked back at the warehouse doors and thought, with great calm and total clarity, about a man in borrowed chef’s whites who had no idea yet how thoroughly his life was about to change.
I didn’t say any of that to her. I held her on a cold pavement downtown and told her she was safe, which was true, and that I had her, which was also true.
The rest of it I kept to myself.
I’d had the name since a night by the fire, when she trusted me with it.
Now I had the face, and the company stitched on his chest, and that was all I was ever going to need.
And the part of me that had spent a lifetime fixing problems quietly, surgically, without anyone ever seeing my hand in it, had already started, somewhere underneath the calm, to work.