CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sarah was not what Rodney expected.
He'd imagined someone severe. Someone who matched Mordechai's intensity, sharp-edged, controlled, the kind of assistant who ran a law firm with military precision and didn't suffer fools.
Instead, the woman behind the large glass desk was small and round and white-haired and had a ball of yarn in her lap and reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.
She looked up at Rodney with warm brown eyes and a smile that reminded him, with a sudden ache, of his grandmother.
"Rodney, this is Sarah." Mordechai guided him forward with a hand on his lower back. "Sarah, Rodney will hopefully end up taking over for you. He's to spend the day with you, learning everything you know."
Rodney opened his mouth to protest. He'd assumed he'd be spending the day with Mordechai, which was the entire reason he'd called out of work, which was the entire reason his ass still burned from the eight perfectly measured strikes that had been his punishment for calling out of work, which was a chain of cause and effect he was choosing not to examine too closely.
"But—" he started.
Mordechai shook his head. The expression was fond but final. "I have to work. We'll have lunch together. Go be nice to Sarah."
He vanished into his office, and Rodney was left standing in front of a grandmotherly woman who was already studying him with the shrewd, kind assessment of someone who'd been watching people her entire life and had gotten very good at it.
"Sit down, dear," Sarah said, nodding to the chair beside her desk. "Tell me about yourself while I finish this row. My great-grandson is getting a blanket for his birthday and I'm three rows behind."
Rodney sat. The chair was comfortable. Through the glass wall behind him, he could see Mordechai at his desk, already buried in papers.
The office was elegant, dark wood, good art, the same quietly expensive aesthetic that characterized everything in Mordechai's life.
But it was also lived-in. There were coffee rings on the desk, and a stack of legal pads, and a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST LAWYER in a font that suggested it was a gift from someone who knew him well enough to be irreverent.
"I'm from Arkansas," Rodney said, because that was usually where he started. "I worked at a grocery store before I moved to Vegas. And then at a call center. And now I'm—" He paused. "I'm not entirely sure what I am right now."
Sarah laughed. Her knitting needles clicked in a rhythm that was as soothing as a heartbeat. "You're Mordechai's new person. That's what you are. And before you worry about what that means, let me tell you, in all the years I've known that boy, I've never seen him bring someone to the office."
"Never?"
"Not once. Not in twenty-five years." She glanced up from her knitting, and her eyes were sharp behind the reading glasses. "He's brought clients, of course. And the occasional friend, though Mordechai doesn't have many of those. But never someone he looks at the way he looks at you."
Rodney didn't know what to say to that, so he looked at his hands, which was becoming his default response to emotional information he couldn't process.
The morning passed in a way that was both educational and bewildering.
Sarah's actual job duties were straightforward, answer phones, manage appointments, coordinate with clients, order gifts for various occasions, but they occupied maybe two hours of her eight-hour day.
The remaining six were devoted to knitting, reading the newspaper, checking her horoscope, and dispensing unsolicited commentary on the state of the world.
"Capricorn today says 'trust the process,'" she announced, reading from the newspaper. "That's Mordechai. He never trusts the process. He trusts himself and expects the process to keep up."
"What am I?" Rodney asked.
"When's your birthday?"
"March fifteenth."
"Pisces." She scanned the page. "'A new connection deepens in unexpected ways. Embrace vulnerability.' Well, that's on the nose, isn't it?"
Rodney blushed so thoroughly that Sarah laughed and patted his hand.
She told him about the filing system… alphabetical by client, color-coded by case type, with a separate binder for Mordechai's personal contacts that she described as "organized chaos, emphasis on the chaos".
She showed him the phone system, two lines, one for clients, one for Mordechai's private number, "and if a woman named Patricia calls on the private line, tell her he's in a meeting, he's never in a meeting for Patricia, she's his mother, and she only calls when she wants money for plane tickets".
She walked him through the lunch ordering protocol, handing him a blue three-ring binder and a credit card.
"His favorites are circled. You make the decision.
If he's working through lunch, order for both of you.
If he's going out with a client, make the reservation.
" She paused. "There are notes about which clients like which restaurants.
Don't send Henderson to Siam Palace, his ex-wife is a hostess there and it gets ugly. "
Rodney flipped through the binder. Every single restaurant was Asian. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean. He kept flipping, expecting a pizza place or a burger joint to appear, but no.
"He really likes Asian food," Rodney said.
"He spent a summer in Thailand as a teenager.
His parents were always traveling. Most of the time he went with them, but sometimes—" Sarah's knitting needles slowed.
"Sometimes they went without him, and it was just the two of us.
I'd try to entertain him, but he was a quiet boy.
Self-contained. Spent a lot of time in his room reading.
He didn't need me the way most children need people, but I think he wanted me there all the same. Just, in the building. Present."
The picture she was painting, a child left behind by traveling parents, raised by a nanny, self-sufficient before he should have been, deepened everything Rodney already knew about Mordechai.
The controlled precision. The structured life.
The loneliness he didn't acknowledge. It all made sense when you imagined a small boy in a big house, reading books while his parents explored the world without him.
"My second husband was a panda," Sarah said.
Rodney's head came up. He already knew that, but hadn’t expected her to bring it up.
"Theodore. Sweet man. Gentle as the day is long.
Big, round, soft, just like you." She smiled at the memory.
"He never wanted to upset anyone. Never wanted to cause trouble.
He'd go along with whatever people asked of him, even when it wasn't good for him, because saying no felt harder than saying yes.
He let himself be pulled in directions he never should have gone, rather than standing up for what he wanted. "
The words hit Rodney with the precision of something aimed directly at him. He sat very still and said nothing.
"I think," Sarah continued, with the gentle relentlessness of someone who knew exactly what she was doing, "that if someone like Mordechai had been in Theodore's life, not as a lover, not like you two, but as someone who helped him stay on track.
Who gave him structure and expectations and consequences.
Who told him 'this is the line, and I'll hold you to it,' I think Theodore would have been a different man. A happier one."
Rodney looked through the glass wall at Mordechai. He was on the phone, one hand gesturing, his face sharp with concentration. As if sensing Rodney's gaze, he looked up. Met his eyes through the glass. And smiled. A small, private smile that Rodney doubted anyone in the world saw except him.
He waved. Mordechai waved back.
"He's happy," Rodney said quietly.
"He is." Sarah set down her knitting. "Happier than I've seen him in years.
And I've been asking what changed, and he told me it was a secret, and now he's brought you here and the answer couldn't be more obvious.
" She reached over and squeezed Rodney's hand.
Her grip was warm and papery and firm. "Take care of him, Rodney.
He doesn't know how to ask for what he needs.
He only knows how to give people what they need.
So, you'll have to figure out the asking for both of you. "
Rodney squeezed back. "I will."
"Good." She picked up her knitting. "Now order lunch. I'm starving, and if I have to eat another salad I'm going to stage a revolt."
Rodney ordered Thai. Pad see ew for Mordechai, green curry for Sarah, tom kha for himself. When the food arrived, he brought Mordechai's to his office and knocked.
"Come in." Mordechai looked up from a fortress of legal pads and smiled. "You survived Sarah."
"She's wonderful."
"She's a menace who moonlights as a grandmother. Did she tell you about her panda husband?"
"She did."
Mordechai's expression went warm in a way that wasn't quite a smile but lived in the same neighborhood. "She's been waiting twenty years for me to bring home a panda. She's going to be insufferable about it." He nodded at the food. "Stay and eat with me?"
"I was hoping you'd ask."
They ate. And when the food was gone and the containers were cleared, Mordechai stood and said, with the same quiet authority he used for everything, "Shift with me."
The request was the same as it had been at the club, but here, in Mordechai's office, in daylight, with Sarah twenty feet away behind a glass wall, it felt different. More real. More domestic. Like something a couple did, not something a Dom and sub did.
Rodney shifted first. His panda form filled a corner of the office, round and black-and-white and blinking at the room with the perpetually bemused expression that pandas wore as factory standard.
Mordechai shifted next, the panther materializing in a fluid ripple of dark fur and muscle that still made Rodney's prey instincts twitch, though not as badly as before.
This time, there was no fear. Mordechai padded toward him, huge and silent and beautiful, and pressed his broad head against Rodney's flank. The same deliberate pressure from before. The same territorial claim.
Rodney leaned into it. The panther rumbled, a deep, resonant vibration that Rodney felt in his bones, and circled him once before settling on the carpet beside him.
Mordechai's long body curved along Rodney's, and his tail wrapped around Rodney's back leg, and his head came to rest on Rodney's massive front paw.
Through the glass, Sarah glanced back. Saw them. Smiled. And returned to her knitting.
Rodney closed his eyes. The panther's warmth was a furnace against his side. The rumble of his breathing was steady and slow. The office was quiet, the city was distant, and for the first time in his life, Rodney felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.