13. Arielle
ARIELLE
The dress is the wrong color and I know it the second I put it on.
Bianca picked it out, of course, because Bianca picks out everything I wear to events she wasn't invited to, and the woman has a gift for putting me in things that make every other woman in the room hate me on sight.
It's a deep wine red, off-the-shoulder, cut to fall over the small swell at my waist without disguising it, and when I turn sideways in the mirror at six-thirty on a Saturday night in the second week of December, the dress tells the truth about my body in a way I have not let a dress do in three months.
"You look like you're announcing something," Bianca says from the doorway, where she has been supervising my eyeliner like a foreman.
"I am announcing something. I'm announcing that I have run out of blazers that button."
"Ari. You look like a woman who is going to that gala on Nolan Ashford's arm because she chose to, not because somebody dragged her there. Own it. Walk in like you bought the building yourself."
"He did buy the building. He bought the one next door, too."
"Then walk in like you drew them both."
The Ashford Foundation winter gala is at the Drake, in a ballroom with a forty-foot Christmas tree and the kind of crystal that takes a team of women in white gloves an entire afternoon to put on a table.
Nolan picks me up at seven in a black tuxedo and a coat he didn't button against the snow, and when I open my door he does the thing he has been doing since the night on Hubbard, which is to look at me once, fully, and then look away as if he has caught himself doing something he hasn't earned.
“You don’t need to do this,” he says as the driver takes Lake Shore. “For clarity’s sake: the option is still open to go home, pull on jeans, order Thai, and let me report a sudden flu to the foundation.”
"You don't have a flu."
"I am willing to develop one."
"Nolan. We have been over this. Three reporters have already published photographs of you walking me into a doctor's office.
If I do not show up tonight, the rumor becomes a scandal.
If I do show up tonight, the rumor becomes a sentence in Crain's and we move on.
I am not letting your mother's foundation become collateral damage because I am twenty weeks pregnant and uncomfortable in heels. "
"You don't have to wear the heels."
"I'm wearing the heels. Don't take that from me. The heels are the only reason I'm going to look any of those people in the eye."
He laughs under his breath and reaches across the seat.
He doesn't take my hand. He sets his hand, palm up, on the leather between us, and leaves it there, and I have my own hand in his before I have decided to.
His thumb moves once across my knuckles and then stops, like he doesn't want to scare it off.
The ballroom is exactly what I expected and somehow worse.
There are women I recognize from the Tribune society pages, women who have built their entire identities around being seen at events like this one, and they look at me when I walk in on Nolan's arm with the same expression they would give a stain on the carpet.
Two of them stop talking mid-sentence. One of them lifts her champagne flute in front of her mouth and says something behind it.
"Breathe," Nolan says, low, beside my ear. "You are the most interesting person in this room and they know it. That's the only reason they're staring."
"They're staring because I'm five months pregnant in a wine-colored dress at a black-tie event."
"They're staring because I am holding your hand in public, which I have not done at one of these things in eleven years. Pick whichever one makes you feel better."
A woman in cream silk floats over with the inevitability of weather. She is tall, brunette, beautiful in the icy, expensive way of women who have been told they were beautiful since they were eight, and the smile she gives Nolan is the smile of a person who has rehearsed it in mirrors.
"Nolan. You didn't tell me you were bringing a guest." Her eyes flick to me and back to him without landing. "Or you did tell me, and I forgot. Which I doubt."
“Celeste, this is Arielle Sutton. She’s the lead architect on the Overtown corridor’s flagship site. Arielle, Celeste Whitmore — she runs acquisitions for Brennan Holdings.”
"Ah." Celeste's smile widens by an exact, calibrated degree. "The architect. Of course. I've been hearing about you for months. Although honestly, I assumed you were older. The way Nolan talks about your vision, I pictured someone with grandchildren."
"I get that a lot," I say. "It's the heels."
"And the dress, clearly." Her eyes drop, briefly, to my waist, and back up.
"How brave of you to wear something so fitted.
I always think pregnancy is the one season where a woman should give herself permission to disappear a little.
But then, I suppose if I had managed to get pregnant by Nolan Ashford, I might wear it like a press release too. "
The ballroom does not actually go quiet. It just goes quiet in the six feet around the four of us, which is somehow worse.
I open my mouth. I have something ready. I have had something ready since I put the dress on at six-thirty, because I knew there would be a Celeste. There is always a Celeste.
I do not get to use it.
"Celeste." Nolan's voice is mild. It is the same voice he used on Don Garvey in the conference room in October.
"I'd like to introduce you properly, because I'm not sure I managed it the first time.
This is Arielle Sutton, the lead architect on the Overtown corridor, and the mother of my child.
We're expecting a daughter in April. I'd appreciate it if you'd extend her the same professional courtesy you've extended me over the last eight years, which has at times been considerable and which I have not forgotten. Are we clear?"
Celeste's smile does not move. Her eyes, however, do.
"Of course, Nolan. Congratulations to you both."
"Thank you. Excuse us. The foundation chair wanted a word."
He turns me toward the head of the room with his hand at the small of my back, and we are six steps across the marble before I can speak.
A reporter near the silent auction lifts her phone.
Two photographers somewhere behind us click.
A man with a name badge who I half-recognize from a city council vote shakes Nolan's free hand and says congratulations as if he is reading it off a card.
"Smile through the next sixty seconds," Nolan says, low, without turning his head. "Smile, and then I will take you outside. Sixty seconds, Arielle. You can be furious at me on the drive home. I have earned it. Sixty seconds."
I smile. I shake the foundation chair's hand.
I smile at the reporter. I let Nolan put his hand on the small of my back and steer me out a side door into a service corridor that smells like silver polish and somebody else's perfume, and the second the door closes behind us I take his hand off my back.
"Don't," I say. "Don't take me outside like I am a guest who has had too much wine. I'm sober. I am not having a moment. I am furious."
"I know you are."
"You announced me, Nolan. In front of cameras. Without asking."
"I shut Celeste down. There's a difference, and I would like the chance to explain the difference, although I will also accept that you are not in the mood for a distinction tonight."
"There is no difference. You introduced me as the mother of your child in front of a reporter, on the record, in a building full of people who write things down.
You made a decision about how I am described in public, in print, in twelve hours' time, without consulting me, and you did it because Celeste Whitmore embarrassed you, not me, you, and you used my body as the surface you needed to reassert your authority on. "
"That is not what I did."
"That is exactly what you did. I had a sentence ready, Nolan. I have had a sentence ready for women like Celeste since I was seventeen years old. I did not need rescuing. I needed the ten seconds you took from me."
He doesn't argue. He doesn't try to. He stands in the service corridor in his tuxedo with his hand still half-raised from where I pushed it off my back, and he looks at me like a man who has just been told what he already knew and was hoping nobody would notice.
“Take me to your apartment,” I say. “Not mine — I’m not having this fight in front of my doorman. We’ll have it at your place, and you’ll listen.”
"Arielle."
"Nolan. The car. Now."
The penthouse is quiet when we walk in. He drops his keys in the bowl by the door. I do not take off my coat.
"You don't get to do that to me, Nolan. Not once.
Not ever. Not even when you think you're saving me.
You don't get to put your name on me in public and call it protection.
That is the thing my mother spent thirty years protecting me from, and you did it in a room full of cameras, and I am so angry at you I can taste it, and I am also?—"
"Also what."
"Also tired of pretending I don't want you to."
His hand is on my jaw before I have finished the sentence. He does not kiss me. He waits, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, his breath uneven against mine.
"Tell me," he says, "or push me off. Both are fine. Don't make me guess."
"I'm not pushing you off."
He kisses me, slow, and whatever we were fighting about simply falls away.