Twelve
ESSIE
C arrying five coffees is an art not a skill, and a particularly demanding art on a morning when said coffees are destined for the investment bank where a guy I unsuccessfully propositioned is a senior vice president.
And by “a guy,” I do, in fact, mean my best friend/future stepbrother/sort of boss/guy who is apparently in love with me.
This is salvageable.
Sighing, I eye the sliver of open space on the ledge adjacent to the pick-up counter where a man in a suit has placed his phone and a copy of The Wall Street Journal . The whirring grind of coffee beans has already drowned out my two previous requests for him to kindly move his shit so I can adjust my cardboard coffee tray, but I can’t quit. I’m completely fine .
“Excuse me,” I repeat, standing on my toes to force my way into his periphery, but he still doesn’t hear me. “Hi, excuse me. I need a second to—”
“Jesus, I heard you,” he snaps, whirling to face me. He has a second phone against his other ear, and he shoots me a glare like I just uncovered an October surprise on his candidate (because his drab suit tells me he’s definitely a Hill staffer). “Yeah, hold on. This girl keeps trying to make me move,” he mutters into the phone.
I bite down, clenching my jaw while he gives me another annoyed look. He tucks his phone between his ear and his shoulder and slides his junk over with obvious flourish, trying to make a point.
He makes his point right into the woman standing next to him.
“Shit,” she blurts out as coffee rolls over her once-pristine camel coat. She slams her crushed paper cup onto the ledge and glares at the Hill staffer, who doesn’t even bother half-assing an apology.
I take a stack of napkins from the nearby dispenser. “Here.”
She blots the stain along the seam, but it’s useless.
“Wait.” I dig into my tote for my detergent pen. “Use this.”
Cautious, the woman takes the pen and studies it, holding it at arm’s length. Her eyes are dark charcoal, but a rim of red circles her irises. The hint of weariness stops at her eyes though. She’s absurdly pretty, truly one of the most stunning women I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing up close, which is saying a lot because Valeria and Cora are proof biology plays favorites. Her features are angular, more striking than subtle. The black hair cascading over her shoulder is a perfect mix of wavy and straight, and her gaze is piercing, just short of intimidating, even with confusion layered over her face. “Do you color it—”
“It’s simple,” I assure her. “Can I show you?”
While I clean her coat, I can feel her watching the fine motions of my hand. “You always have this?” she asks eventually.
“Habit. I raised three brothers.” Finished, I cap the pen and hold it out to her. “Keep it.”
She drops it into her purse before she exhales and straightens her coat. “Be honest: How do I look?”
“Gorgeous. Fuck it—let’s run away together,” I reply, using a line Valeria, Cora, and I say all the time.
The woman’s face splits into a smile. “I needed that today, actually.” She studies me before she asks, “How’s your day going?”
“Honestly? Not great.”
“No?” she asks, hitching her purse higher. “What happened?”
“Eleven months ago, my estranged father met the mother of my best guy friend, who I’ve had on the back burner. They fell in love, got engaged fast, and in four weeks, I’m going to become step-siblings with a guy I thought I’d date.” I let out a sigh. “And we got drunk and accidentally fucked on Halloween.”
“Wasn’t expecting that answer,” she replies, canting her head. “Seriously, should we run away?”
“Never. I’ve seen people run, and I know their problems don’t go with them. Those problems stay behind for someone else to fix.” I’m completely fine. I’m divulging my secrets to a stranger, but I’m completely fine. I pick up my coffees. “I’ll never become someone else’s problem.”
“Me neither. Al mal paso, darle prisa,” she responds surprising me with fluent Spanish. Just get the bad over with quickly— something my mother used to say. “Thanks for the pen and the pep talk.”
“Likewise,” I answer, giving her the most reassuring smile I can muster.
She smiles back.
And without another word, she taps the Hill staffer. When he looks at her, she snatches his phone from his ear and drops it right into her ruined coffee cup, submerging it. “Ciao!” she calls, waving as she goes, not bothering to look back at the carnage in her wake.
***
“How long have you been here?”
Startled, I look to my left where the rolling chair next to me squeaks as my manager, Weston Hannington, falls into it. Immediately, a look of annoyance paints his face. “We need better chairs,” he murmurs as if every chair in this office isn’t a Herman-Miller—twelve-hundred dollars at retail.
“Since seven thirty,” is my honest response.
“Did you get here before Cavendish?”
“After.”
On the other side of our open office, Dalton is meeting with his six interns and looking, by definition, glorious. Whoever tailors his suits should get a commemorative statue in the Capitol Rotunda because their ability to conceal his cock within such flawlessly fitted pants is nothing short of a generational talent.
“Your parents picked a bad year to get married,” Weston mentions. He tilts his head in Dalton’s direction. “Interns are always obsessed with Cavendish. My father said they were going to put you under him—”
Funny you should say that.
“—but with you two being brother and sister—”
“Step,” I murmur. “ Step .”
“—the risk of nepotism didn’t seem worth it.”
Hearing Weston Hannington talk about nepotism is rich. His father is the Warner Hannington—as in the Managing Director at Hannington-Hale, where I’ve been interning every Monday and Friday since September. Over the last two months, I’ve gleaned one standout takeaway: Banking is the riskiest chaos anyone mistakes for a professional career.
An investment bank is the in-between for nearly all major global financial transactions: underwriting, helping companies go public, mergers and acquisitions, etcetera. Within an investment bank, functions are separated into “trading desks” by the transactions they oversee. Dalton, Weston, and I all work on the forex (or foreign exchange) desk, where our work is in currency exchange. Out of all the desks, forex is by far the most volatile. Time doesn’t sleep, and currencies change twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—which is why Dalton works so much.
Money moves in places like Hannington-Hale; Dalton moves with it.
“Shouldn’t you be over there?” I ask Weston, glancing at Dalton again. Now, he’s shrugging off his navy suit jacket, and I briefly experience a pang of jealousy toward the silk inner lining touching the hard undulations of his deliciously muscled physique. Dalton never misses an arm day. Arm day probably misses Dalton when he’s not around.
“Cavendish asked me to make a call.” He reclines in his chair and looks at me.
Weston is young and strikingly attractive with stark black hair and powder blue eyes. His features are easy—long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and a modelesque, slim physique I know gets him into (and out of) trouble.
He bobs his chin at my monitor. “How’s all that going?”
By “all that,” he’s talking about the algorithmic forex model I’m building.
“I did a test using dollars to euros,” I explain, hovering my cursor over a line on my screen. “When the exchange dips below this threshold, we’d sell automatically. The delay would only be a fraction of a second.”
Weston can’t read or comprehend the lines of code I’ve written but nods anyway. “And it works?”
“The transaction happens within milliseconds instead of seconds like our current trading model.”
“Impressive,” a deep voice says from behind us.
Weston and I both jump. Unsurprisingly, when we turn around, Dalton is there, looking far too attractive for someone who has been in this bank since sunrise.
“Look at that, Romero,” he says, locking his eyes on mine. “You stripped all the emotion out of it. Efficient. Lucrative. Purely transactional. I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I’m playing to my strengths,” I reply, straightening my spine. I let my eyes drop to his crotch (for mere milliseconds—as efficient as can be) and I smirk. “If someone has a unique, highly lucrative gift, they should use it to its full potential.”
He holds my stare, and the corner of his lips rise, verging on that classic smile he seldom gives me when we’re at work. Promising . That glimmer is a sign my offer isn’t totally off the table.
And yet that flash of a smile fades when a sound breaks through the silence—buzzing.
Still staring, Dalton takes his phone out of his pocket. Whatever he sees makes him frown.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, watching as his eyes flick across his phone’s screen.
He doesn’t speak; he barely moves. In fact, it’s the longest I’ve ever seen him stay quiet until he steps back, steadies himself on a nearby chair, and blurts out, “Oh fuck .”