7. Chapter 7
Christina
I wake before him.
The room is gray-blue at that hour before the sun commits, and Julian is asleep on his back with one arm thrown over his head and the sheet riding low across his hips.
His face has none of the things it carries in daylight.
No magazine face. No careful face. Just a man with his mouth slightly open, breathing slow, a line across his cheek from the pillow.
Last day.
I prop myself on an elbow and study him, the dark lashes that are honestly wasted on a man, and I make a decision the same reckless way I made one at the back of a ballroom.
I kiss the underside of his jaw. His breathing changes. I kiss lower, the warm line of his throat, his collarbone, and his hand comes up into my hair before his eyes are even open. His voice when it comes is gravel from the bottom of sleep.
"It's not even six."
"You're a surgeon. You've been awake since five."
"I was being polite about it." He rolls slow, taking me with him, and the gray light slides across his shoulders as they fill my whole view. His mouth finds the spot below my ear immediately. "Good morning."
"Don't talk." I pull him down by the back of his neck. "We're on a schedule."
He doesn't talk. He's good with instructions when they suit him.
The sheet goes somewhere. I push him onto his back and slide down his body, kissing a path over his chest, his stomach, the sharp cut of his hips.
My fingers hook the waistband of his boxers and pull them down.
His cock springs free, already half hard, thick and heavy against his thigh.
I wrap my hand around the base and stroke slowly, feeling the velvety skin warm under my palm.
He stiffens instantly, growing thicker, harder in my grip.
The head swells, flushed and glistening, and I lean down, running my tongue around it, tasting the salt of him.
"Christina." His voice is rough, wrecked already.
I take him into my mouth, sinking down as far as I can until he bumps the back of my throat.
I hollow my cheeks and suck, pulling back slow then sliding down again, setting a rhythm with my hand twisting at the base while my tongue swirls around the head on every upstroke.
His hips twitch but I press them down, holding him still, taking control.
Wet sounds fill the quiet room mixed with his low groans.
I look up at him through my lashes and his eyes are dark, locked on me, one hand fisted in my hair, guiding but not forcing.
His cock throbs harder in my mouth now, fully rigid, thick veins standing out under my tongue.
I suck faster, tighter, hollowing my cheeks more, working him with my hand in time with my mouth. His breathing turns ragged, his thighs tense under me.
"Oh fuck—" He groans deep in his chest, the sound raw and broken. "I'm going to come—"
I don't pull back. I take him deeper, sucking hard, flicking my tongue right under the head, and he explodes in my mouth with a long low groan that vibrates through his whole body.
Hot, thick pulses hit the back of my throat and I swallow every drop, milking him through it until he's spent and shuddering.
I pull off slowly, licking him clean, then sit up and wipe the corner of my mouth.
He hauls me up immediately and kisses me deep, tasting himself on my swollen lips, his tongue sliding against mine with a hungry sound. His hands cradle my face and the kiss goes on until we're both out of air.
After, I lie across the wreck of the bed with my leg over his and watch dust drift through the first real bar of sun, while his fingertips climb my spine, bone by bone, a doctor counting.
"Thirty-three," he says at the top. "All accounted for."
"You're so weird," I say.
"I can't help it."
We're extremely late getting downstairs.
He makes the coffee while I sit on the counter with my bare legs swinging, eating pistachios out of the bag from the market, throwing one at him every time he says something arrogant, which costs me a lot of pistachios.
The lake out the big windows is flat silver.
The morning is perfect right up until his phone rings on the counter.
He looks at the screen. The easy thing leaves his face between one second and the next.
"Dianna," he says, and answers it on speaker, holding my eyes. "I'm here. Christina's here too."
"Good. That saves me a call." Dianna's voice is brisk, a woman walking fast while she talks. "Chicago Confidential ran a follow-up last night. I need you both calm about it."
"How bad," I say.
"There's a photo of you two at the market in Harbor Springs.
Somebody with a phone — looks like a tourist got lucky.
You're at a cart. He's putting candy in it.
Honestly it's a sweet picture, in a different life I'd frame it.
" Paper rustles on her end. "They identified you, Christina.
Full name, your title, your firm. You're no longer the mysterious bidder.
The headline connects the dots. And there's a quote.
" She stops walking, wherever she is. "A source close to the firm calls the winning bid a serious lapse in professional judgment. "
The kitchen is quiet. The pistachio bag crinkles in my fist where my hand has closed by itself.
"Read it again," I say. "The quote."
"A source close to the firm calls the winning bid a serious lapse in professional judgment."
Lapse in professional judgment. I've heard those exact words in a conference room, in that order, in a voice with a smile underneath it.
"Christina?" Dianna says. "Still there?"
"I'm here."
"The hospital's official position is that the auction raised a record amount for the pediatric unit and we're grateful to every donor. That's the only position. Julian, you say nothing to anybody. You've done enough damage smiling in photographs. Fly safe." She hangs up.
Julian sets the phone down. He comes around the island and stands in front of me, between my knees, his hands settling on the counter on either side of me. His face has gone quiet and serious.
"Say the thing you're thinking," he says.
"I'm thinking somebody at my office gave a gossip column a quote about me while I was out of town." I unclench my hand from the bag and set it down flat on the counter. "And I'm thinking I know her exact shade of lipstick."
"I can call the column. Dianna knows the editor, we can push back on the quote, get the hospital to put out something that—"
"No." I put my hand flat in the middle of his chest. "This is the part where I need you to hear me.
You calling anybody makes it bigger. The hospital defending me makes it bigger.
The only thing that fixes this is me, in my office, doing my job so well it gets boring again.
" I slide off the counter, which puts me directly against him, which does nothing for the authority I'm trying to project, so I step around him. "I need to pack."
We close the house down together. I strip the bed even though the manager's folder says not to bother, because my mother raised me. Julian watches me do it from the doorway with his coffee mug held against his chest.
"The folder says housekeeping handles it."
"The folder doesn't know me." I ball the sheets and drop them at the foot of the bed. I stand there one second too long looking at the bare mattress, and he looks at it too, and the room gets loud with everything neither of us is saying about it.
"I'll get the bags," he says quietly.
He takes the bags downstairs. I do the lap with the checklist, moving room to room, lights off, sliders latched, coffee machine unplugged, the duck keychain back on its hook in the boathouse.
At the front door I stop and look back at the great room one last time, the lake going on forever through the windows.
The couch. The kitchen island. The sixty-one steps.
I let myself have five full seconds of it.
Then I set the code and pull the door shut.
The drive back through Harbor Springs is quiet.
Main street is barely awake, the flower boxes catching the early light, and we don't stop.
We take the same road south to the airfield with the windows cracked and the radio low and the private drive through the birch trees in the rearview going smaller and smaller until it's gone.
The airfield sits exactly as we left it. The plane is already waiting with its stairs down, the same pilot at the bottom of them, and we climb into the same cream leather cabin. This time I take the seat beside him instead of across.
When the wheels leave the ground, I put my hand into his on the armrest without looking at him.
He closes his fingers around it without looking at me.
We stay that way for most of an hour while the lake slides backward underneath us and turns into farmland, then suburbs, then the gray spread of the city coming up at the edges.
Somewhere over the farmland I turn my head against the headrest toward him.
"Can I ask you something I might not be allowed to ask?"
"You bought the weekend. Ask."
"Your mom." His hand changes in mine. It doesn't pull away. It pays attention. "Your father said late wife at the podium, and I did the math against the car." I keep my voice soft. "What was she like?"
He looks past me out the window for a while. I let him.
"Loud," he says finally. "In a house with two quiet men, she was the radio.
She sang wrong lyrics on purpose to make my father correct her, because correcting her was the most talking he'd do all day, and she knew it.
" He stops. Starts again, lower. "She would've found you extremely funny.
That's the highest compliment that exists in my family. She found almost nobody funny."
I put my head on his shoulder, and neither of us says anything else until the city comes up under the wing.
"Whatever's waiting at your office," he says somewhere over the suburbs, quietly, to the window, "they're lucky to have you. The smart ones know it."
I don't answer that. I squeeze his hand once, and his thumb moves across my knuckles, and neither of us ruins it by saying anything else.
Midway. The Land Cruiser is in the terminal lot where he left it, the sun already hot through the windshield. He drives me north through the city with my suitcase in the back and the radio low, and the closer we get to my street the heavier the air in the car gets, both of us pretending otherwise.
He double-parks in front of my building with the hazards on. The guy behind us honks immediately, because it's Chicago.
Julian comes around and lifts my suitcase out before I can and sets it on the sidewalk.
We stand on the curb in the late afternoon with the hazards clicking and a city's worth of noise going on around us.
He puts his hands in his pockets, which I'm learning is what he does instead of reaching for things he's decided not to reach for.
"The terms stand," he says. Not a question. Doing it exactly the way I asked for.
"They stand."
He nods slowly, looking at me, the afternoon light catching the gray at his temple. The man waits out a full honk from the car behind him without so much as blinking.
"Thank you for the weekend, Christina." His voice stays even. "For the record that you keep, the one in your head where it was you who kissed me first, write this down too. Best three days I've had in six years."
He gets in the truck. He pulls out into traffic with one hand raised out the window, not looking back.
I stand on the sidewalk next to my suitcase until the cracked rear bumper disappears around the corner.
Then I stand there a little longer.
Upstairs, my apartment smells of the candle I forgot to throw out and the quiet of three days with nobody in it.
I kick my shoes off at the door and leave my suitcase standing in the hallway like a stranger waiting to be acknowledged.
The fridge has condiments, half a lemon gone hard, and one yogurt of uncertain ambition.
I eat peanut butter on crackers standing over the sink, watching my own reflection get darker in the window as the light goes.
I water the one plant I've kept alive for two years, and the apartment is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator thinking.
There's one voicemail. My mom, from this afternoon, half shouting over the diner rush behind her. Stan came, the part's in, the shower got so hot she saw colors.
I run a bath because I've earned one, and I'm testing the water with my hand when my phone rings on the bathroom tile. KATE.
"You're alive," she says. "Blink twice."
"I'm alive."
"Good, okay, good. Status report, and then you can tell me everything or nothing at all.
" A door closes on her end, the bedroom voice, the conspirator register.
"It was a day, Christina. The column was on the break room table by nine.
A printed copy. On the table, face up, right by the coffee machine where everybody gathers.
I watched Rachel walk past it four times without touching it, which is how I know she put it there. "
"You didn't see her put it there."
"I saw her do a lap of the entire floor at nine fifteen with her phone and a smile.
She stopped by my desk and asked if I'd heard from you.
" Kate exhales. "Bree took the printout and recycled it around ten, because Bree is the only one of us going to heaven.
How was the lake. Actually no — hold on — that's not the question.
" Her voice comes down from the gossip and lands somewhere real. "Are you okay?"
I look at the bath filling. Steam rising. My hand is still in the water.
"Ask me tomorrow," I say.
"That bad or that good?"
"Both. Neither. Kate, I held his hand on the plane for an hour and I'm furious about it."
"Oh no," she says softly. "Oh, honey. You're in it."
"I'm not in anything."
"You held a man's hand for an hour over Lake Michigan and you're mad about it. You don't hold hands, Christina. I've watched you shake hands at the end of a date."
"I'm not in anything. There's an arrangement, it's handled, we landed, it's done." The water has gone past warm to hot on my wrist and I haven't moved it. "I'll see you at eight thirty. Guard the cinnamon bagel if there are bagels. I have a feeling I'll need it."
"Christina."
"I'm hanging up now. I love you. Countertop photos are coming, I took eleven."
I've just turned off the tap when the phone buzzes against the tile. A text. Then immediately another one.
VIVIAN.
My office. Eight sharp. Before you take your coat off, before the kitchen, before Kate. You come straight up to me.
Then the second message, sitting right underneath the first.
Don't talk to Rachel tonight. Not one word. I mean it.