Chapter Eighteen - Elias
Priya gave Nora the title on a Thursday.
He heard about it secondhand first — a text from Nora mid-afternoon, three words and nothing else: *got it.
official.* He'd been in the middle of a client call and had to physically stop himself from grinning at his laptop screen like an idiot in front of a room full of people who did not need to know why.
He found her at her desk an hour later, trying and failing to look like she wasn't still a little stunned by it.
"Congratulations," he said. "Officially. On the record."
"Thank you." She glanced around the mostly empty floor before letting herself smile properly, the guarded version dropping away for just a second. "Priya said the decision wasn't close. Said Dana actually made the case for me in the room, which — I did not expect that, honestly."
"People surprise you."
"Some people." She held the look, something warm and a little disbelieving in it. "You really didn't have to do the thing you did. Stepping back. Even though I yelled at you about it."
"I know. I'd still do it again."
"That's either very romantic or very frustrating. I haven't decided."
"Take your time. I'm not going anywhere." He said it lightly, but something under it landed with more weight than the joke implied, and he watched her catch that weight too, hold it a second before letting it settle.
Dana never mentioned the conversation in Priya's office again.
Neither did he. Some things settled into the background of an office the way weather did — present, occasionally referenced, mostly just the air everyone worked in.
The title held. The account held. Nora ran her first solo pitch meeting three weeks later and came back grinning in a way that made the whole floor look up.
That was three months ago now.
He noticed the season changing mostly by what Nora wore to the office and what she peeled off the second she got somewhere that wasn't the office — boots in October, thick socks she complained about for exactly as long as it took to get them off.
Tonight it was his apartment, a Saturday, the first real cold snap of the year pressing up against the windows while something with too much garlic burned quietly ignored on the stove behind them.
She was on his couch, feet already bare, already in his lap before either of them had said anything about it — an old habit now, unremarkable, the kind of thing that had stopped being a question months ago and had just become how Saturdays went.
He had one hand wrapped loose around her ankle, thumb tracing slow circles that weren't going anywhere in particular, not trying to accomplish anything, just there because he liked being there.
"You're burning the garlic," she said, not opening her eyes.
"I'm aware."
"You could go save it."
"I could." He didn't move. "I've made a series of choices tonight and I'm at peace with all of them."
She laughed, low, and stretched further into the couch, further into his lap, and he thought — not for the first time, though it landed differently every time it came around — about a woman in a conference room five months ago who'd shaken his hand like she had something to prove and worn shoes sharp enough to be a weapon, and how far that woman was, tonight, from anyone who needed armor for anything.
Bare feet, garlic smoke drifting in from the kitchen, a title on her email signature she'd earned with nobody's help but her own, and his hand doing nothing more urgent than holding onto something that trusted him enough to just be held.
"Hey," she said, eyes still closed. "Say something. You went quiet."
"Just thinking."
"About?"
He pressed his thumb once, slow, into the arch of her foot, the same spot that had undone him the first time, months ago, across a conference table neither of them talked about like it had been the beginning of anything — though it had been, obviously, everything had started right there, a woman kicking her shoes off because her feet hurt and a man who couldn't look away.
"About how you used to wear the good shoes like they were a job interview every single day," he said. "And now you don't even own the ones with the red soles anymore."
"I do too own them. They're in the closet. I just don't need them for you."
"No," he agreed, and let the smoke keep drifting, and the garlic keep burning, and didn't move from where he was. "You really don't."