Chapter Seven
The Taste
He told her to dress for dinner.
Not asked. Told. A note on her desk Friday afternoon in his handwriting—clean and slanted and precise, the penmanship of a man who had been educated somewhere that still required it: Tonight. Eight o'clock. The residence. Dress accordingly.
She held the note for a long moment.
She dressed accordingly.
The black dress had been hanging in her closet since the move, the kind of dress you owned for occasions that hadn't yet arrived.
Floor-length, fitted through the waist and hips, a neckline that wasn't indecent but wasn't innocent either.
She put on the crescent moon. She did her hair up.
She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror for longer than was strictly necessary and told herself this was a professional dinner, a dinner between colleagues who happened to share a floor and a connecting hallway and an unlocked door.
She was dressed for neither of those things.
She walked through the hallway at one minute past eight. She knocked.
He opened the door himself.
She hadn't been in his residence before.
She had heard it through the wall, mapped it by sound—the movements, the calls, the drawer she had memorized.
The reality of it was something else. Wide and low-lit, dark wood and deep furniture, the same floor-to-ceiling windows as her suite but twice the scale.
Manhattan laid out below like a circuit board, every light a current running somewhere intentional.
The table was set for two at the far end of the room, near the window, candles burning low, something on the air that was food and wine and the precise warmth of a private space that had been made ready for someone.
She looked at all of it. Then at him.
He was in black. Jacket, no tie, the collar open the same single button as the night with the wine, and she was beginning to understand that the open collar was a register—that when Jeremiah Youngblood loosened one button it was the equivalent of another man taking off his shirt.
His eyes moved over her once. Unhurried. Complete. From the necklace at her throat to the hem of the dress, and back up, and his expression at the end of it was the expression of a man reviewing something he had already known would look exactly like this and finding the knowing confirmed.
"Ariah," he said.
Just her name. Just that.
She walked in.
The food was extraordinary. She didn't ask who had made it.
Courses arrived and were cleared by a woman she didn't see clearly, a presence at the edge of the room that materialized and withdrew so smoothly it barely registered.
Jeremiah ate with the focused appreciation of a man who noticed quality in everything and commented on almost none of it.
They talked. She hadn't expected to talk the way they talked—not professionally, not carefully, but the way two people talked when they had been paying attention to each other for weeks and were finally in a room without a desk between them.
He asked about her grandmother, and she answered, and she wasn't sure how they got there except that he had a way of steering conversation by removing obstacles rather than directing traffic, opening spaces and letting her walk into them.
"You were raised by her," he said. Not a question.
"From twelve. My mother had her own difficulties.
" She cut into the food in front of her.
"My grandmother was the one who made things make sense.
She had an explanation for everything—not comfortable explanations, not the kind that made you feel better.
The kind that were accurate." She paused.
"She's the one who told me that most people were frightened of the truth and that I shouldn't be. "
"Are you?" he asked.
"Usually not."
He looked at her. "Usually."
"There are truths I'm still working up to," she said, and she held his gaze when she said it, and she watched him understand that she was talking about more than her grandmother.
For a moment, he said nothing. He lifted his wine glass and looked out at the city.
"I was raised by my father," he said. "He was a man who believed that the world was divided into people who shaped events and people who were shaped by them. He considered sentiment a liability. He was correct about most things and wrong about everything that mattered."
She watched his profile. The jaw. The way the candlelight made his face look like something carved. "What was he wrong about?"
He turned to look at her. Those gray eyes, full of the precise light that only appeared when he wasn't managing his expression—the light that had no name she had yet found.
"He believed that wanting something made you weak. That desire was a variable to be minimized." He paused. "He was wrong. Desire is the only engine that matters. The only question is whether you control it or it controls you."
"And you?" she said. "Which is it for you?"
He looked at her for a long time. Long enough that she felt it against her skin like a hand not quite touching.
"I control it," he said. "I've always controlled it. There has only ever been one thing that has tested that."
She didn't ask what.
She didn't ask because she already knew, and knowing sat in her chest like the wine—warm and spreading and entirely too present to pretend otherwise.
* * *
They moved to the seating area after dinner, the couch and low chairs arranged near the window, and the city below them was so vast and indifferent that sitting here felt like being above the laws that governed it.
He poured more wine. She sat across from him, shoes off because somewhere between the first course and the third she had stopped performing composed professional and started simply being in the room.
"Tell me something true," he said.
She looked at him over her glass. "About what?"
"About what you think of me."
She was quiet for a moment. Weighing it. She had her grandmother's instinct for accuracy, and accuracy required courage, and she had spent six weeks in this man's orbit collecting observations she hadn't yet assembled into a statement.
"I think you're the most controlled person I've ever met," she said.
"I think that control isn't your nature—it's your practice.
I think something in you is very loud and you have spent a long time making it quiet.
" She held his gaze. "I think you're not safe.
I think you know you're not safe. And I think you have arranged my entire life for the past several weeks in ways I'm only partially aware of, and that the parts I'm not aware of would frighten me considerably more than the parts I am. "
Silence.
He was very still. She had never seen him entirely still before—there was always something moving at the surface, some calibration happening, some small adjustment.
Now he was absolutely motionless, watching her the way you watched a fire you had built in a controlled space suddenly show you how large it could get.
"That's what you think," he said.
"That's what I know."
"And yet you're here."
"And yet I'm here," she agreed. She kept her voice level. "Which tells you something about me that I'm also still working out."
He set down his glass. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his body angled toward her with the focused directness of a man done with peripheral vision, done with the managed distance between them.
"I'll tell you something true," he said. "In return."
She waited.
"Most people who come into contact with my world eventually realize what it requires of them and they leave.
Not because I drive them out. Because proximity to genuine power is uncomfortable for people who aren't built for it.
It asks something of you that you can't fake.
" He held her gaze. "You have been on my floor for three weeks.
You have pushed back on every arrangement I've made.
You have negotiated every boundary. You have looked at me—" He stopped.
Drew a breath that was, for him, an enormous thing.
"The way you look at me, Ariah. No one looks at me the way you do.
Like you can see everything and you haven't run yet. "
The candlelight was very low. The city blazed below them. Between them, the coffee table and two feet of air and the entire weight of everything that had been accumulating since she had stepped out of a mirrored elevator on a Thursday afternoon.
"I haven't run yet," she said, her voice low.
"No," he said. "You haven't."
His eyes dropped to the necklace. The crescent at her throat. She watched him look at it the way she had watched him look at it a hundred times—with that private completeness, that expression that lived below language.
"Why the moon?" she asked. She hadn't asked before. "My grandmother's necklace. Why a crescent?"
He looked up from the necklace to her face.
"She told you it was her gift to you?"
"Yes."
"Did she tell you why she chose it?"
Ariah shook her head slowly.
"The crescent," he said, "is never the full thing. It's always in the process of becoming. Always between one state and another." He looked at her, that gray gaze carrying something vast and patient. "She chose it for you because she knew what you were going to become. She just didn't know when."
The room was so quiet she could hear herself breathe.
"How do you know that?" she whispered.
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then, instead of answering, he reached across the table and touched the pendant with one finger—just one, barely touching the metal, barely touching her skin beneath it—and that single point of contact moved through her like a current through water, complete and immediate and entirely beyond her management.
He pulled his hand back.
"It's late," he said. His voice was low. Rougher than usual, the first roughness she had heard in it, the first evidence of the thing he had said he controlled.
She stood. Found her shoes. Put them on.
He walked her to the hallway door. She stepped through it. Turned to look at him from her side.
He stood in the frame and looked back and said nothing and she said nothing and the unlocked door between them was the only honest sentence in the room.
She went to bed.
She lay in the dark and pressed her fingers to her collarbone where he had touched the crescent and felt the warmth of it long after it had any reason to remain.
She thought about desire and engines.
She thought about things that were only ever between one state and another.
She thought: I'm in so much trouble.
She thought it with her grandmother's accuracy, and she didn't look away.