Chapter Six
The First Night
She unpacked slowly.
Not because she had much—three boxes, a garment bag, the things she had grabbed when she thought she was staying a week and had steadily supplemented since then without examining what the supplementing meant.
She unpacked slowly because the suite was very still and very beautiful and unpacking felt like a declaration she wasn't ready to make aloud.
She hung her clothes in the walk-in closet that was larger than her old bathroom.
She put her books on the nightstand. She arranged her toiletries on the marble counter in the en suite and stood back and looked at them and thought: this is what it looks like when you move in somewhere. Not visit. Move.
She had been telling herself for nine days that she was visiting.
At eight-fifteen there was a knock at her door.
Not the outer door to the corridor—the internal door, the one in the far wall of the living room that she had registered on her first night and hadn't once approached.
She hadn't asked what was on the other side of it.
She had been extremely careful about not asking.
She crossed the room. Opened it.
Jeremiah stood in a short connecting hallway—maybe ten feet of hardwood and low light between her suite and what she could now see was his residence.
He had changed from his work clothes. Dark trousers, a shirt open one button at the collar, no jacket.
It was the least assembled she had ever seen him and somehow it made him more formidable, the way removing scaffolding makes you understand the structure underneath was load-bearing all along.
He was holding a glass of wine.
He extended it to her.
She took it because her hands needed something to do.
"I thought you were on forty-eight," she said.
"I am. This is forty-eight." He gestured, a small movement that encompassed the hallway, the door she was standing in. "Your suite occupies the east wing. My residence is the west. The building lists them as separate units."
She looked at the hallway. Ten feet. A door on each end.
"We're connected," she said.
"Yes."
She took a breath. "You told me forty-four."
"The suite's mailing address is forty-four. The physical floor is forty-eight." He held her gaze. Calm. Sure. The face of a man who had constructed this exact truth very carefully. "I didn't lie to you."
"You omitted substantially."
"Yes," he said. Just that. No apology, no justification. The acknowledgment of a man who had decided the omission was worth whatever this moment cost.
She looked at the wine in her hand. Then at him. Then at the ten feet of hallway that separated their beds by the length of a parking space.
"This door," she said. "Does it lock?"
"From your side. You have the only key."
She registered that. Filed it alongside everything else in that long, careful index she had been building.
He had given her the lock. He had also built the hallway.
She was holding wine he had brought to her door without being asked and his shirt was open at the collar and she was aware—acutely, inconveniently aware—of the breadth of him filling the frame.
"The rule," he said, and she realized he had been waiting for her to settle before he said it, watching her process the way he always watched her process, with that complete and patient attention. "The internal doors on this floor stay unlocked. That's the only rule I'm asking you to follow."
She stared at him. "That's not a small ask."
"No."
"You want access to my space."
"I want to know a door between us isn't locked," he said. "There's a difference. I won't use it without your invitation. But I won't live on the other side of a lock from you. Not while someone is watching you. Not while you're in my building."
She heard both the stated reason and the one underneath it. She was getting better at hearing both simultaneously.
"And if I don't agree?" she asked.
"Then you don't agree and I respect that." He paused. One beat. "And I'll spend every night on the other side of that door knowing I can't reach you if something happens, and that will be its own kind of problem for me."
The honesty of it landed wrong—which was to say it landed exactly right, in the place behind her sternum where his honesty always landed, where she kept the things she wasn't ready to look at directly.
She sipped the wine. It was very good. She hadn't expected anything less.
"The door stays unlocked," she said. "But I knock. And you knock. Every time."
"Every time," he agreed.
She nodded. Stepped back into her suite.
She didn't close the internal door.
* * *
She ate dinner alone beside the window. Food had appeared in her refrigerator with the same seamless efficiency that governed everything in Jeremiah's orbit.
Forty-eight floors below, the city glittered and shifted, endlessly awake.
She drank the rest of the wine and let her thoughts return, again and again, to doors.
About the ones you chose not to lock.
About what that meant for the design of a life.
At ten-thirty she heard him on the other side of the internal wall—not through the door, the wall itself, the faint sound of movement, a drawer closing, the low register of his voice on a call she couldn't make out.
The sounds of a person living. The sounds you only heard when walls were thin enough or when you were paying the kind of attention she was paying.
She turned off her lamp.
She lay in the dark and listened to the city and to the barely-audible evidence of him twelve feet away and thought about the word unlocked and what she was doing with it.
She didn't sleep for a long time.
When she did, she slept deeply, dreamlessly, the way she had slept since she arrived here and couldn't account for—the sleep of someone in a place that felt, against all logic, like the safest room she had ever been in.
* * *
He knocked at seven-fifteen.
She was already up, dressed, coffee in hand at her kitchen counter, because she had learned by now that the only way to meet Jeremiah Youngblood on anything approaching level ground was to be ready before he arrived.
She crossed to the internal door. Opened it.
He was dressed for the office. Jacket, tie, the full armor of him, and he was holding two cups of coffee—his own, and a second one in the same mug she had been using for two weeks, the one that lived in his kitchen and that she had apparently been assigned without discussion.
He extended it.
She already had coffee. She took his anyway. Set her own cup on the counter behind her.
"Morning," he said.
"You have a driver," she said. "You don't need to walk me in."
"I'm not walking you in. I'm having coffee in a hallway."
She looked at him over the rim of the mug. He looked back. The hallway was ten feet long and they were standing at opposite ends of it and it was still the most proximate she had felt to another person in longer than she could clearly remember.
"How did you know I was already up?" she asked.
A pause. The almost-smile. "I know your habits."
"You've known me five weeks."
"I pay attention."
She wanted to press on that—to ask what that meant exactly, to map the edges of what he knew about her habits and how—but she was learning, slowly and against her instincts, that some questions were doors of their own, and she wasn't ready for everything on the other side of this one.
"I'll be ready in ten minutes," she said instead.
"Take fifteen." He turned back toward his residence. "The building has a breakfast service on forty. I've added you to my account."
"I don't need—"
"Ariah."
She stopped.
He looked at her over his shoulder. That gray gaze, steady as ever, and beneath the steadiness something that wasn't patience and not hunger and was entirely both—the look of a man who had been waiting for something for so long that the waiting had become its own form of devotion.
"Let me do this," he said, his voice low. "The small things. Just the small things. Let me do them."
It was the closest he had come to asking for anything.
She stood in her doorway with his coffee in her hand and the unlocked door behind her and the city blazing through every window and felt something in her chest shift—not break, not surrender, something more like a door moving on its hinge, swinging open an inch, just an inch, and the light coming through.
"The small things," she said.
"Just those."
She nodded. Went back inside to get her bag.
He was still in the hallway when she came back out.
He walked with her to the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby and stood beside her in the mirrored car the way he had been standing beside her since the first morning, in every elevator, every room, every corridor—close enough that she felt the warmth of him but never touching her, always at the exact distance of a man who knew what he wanted and was willing to be patient about the getting of it.
She watched their reflections. Side by side. His jacket and her coat and between them, at her throat, the crescent moon.
She thought about the unlocked door.
About the coffee she hadn't needed and taken anyway.
About the word let and what it meant when a man like this used it.
The elevator opened. They stepped into the lobby together.
She didn't examine any of it.
She was getting very good at that.