3. Imogen #2
“Listen to me.” She lays the pages down on the carpet between the little tubs of sauce, smooths them flat, looks at me. “Tuition or not, Imogen, that’s a red flag in a good suit.”
“The recommendation could make my entire career.”
“So could a lot of things that don’t come with a live-in clause.” She digs out the last dumpling, her face giving away nothing. “I’m only saying I’ve watched men laminate less and mean worse.”
I don’t have a comeback, so I eat until the comeback stops mattering.
Then Bex helps me pack, which mostly means she sits on my bed eating the last of the dumplings while I try to fit two months of my life into one duffel and a tote. She vetoes nothing, offers nothing, just watches me fold the same cardigan twice because my head isn’t in the room.
“You’ll call me,” she orders at the door.
“I’ll call you.”
“One more laminated page and I’m coming to get you.” Bex never jokes about extraction, and then she’s gone and I’m in a cab across town with everything I own that matters in my lap.
The penthouse at night is quieter than it has any right to be. Ashton’s waiting in the lobby when the cab drops me, no suit now, just a dark T-shirt and loose pants like he was already halfway to bed, and he takes the heavier bag off my shoulder before I can stop him.
“You didn’t have to come down,” I say.
“The elevator needs a code after ten. It’s easier if I’m here.” He keys it with his back half to me, and the doors open onto a mirrored box. He steps in and turns to face them.
Which is when I make my mistake. My eyes go to him, all of him, and then they keep going, down, because Bex put the idea in my head with her stupid exhibit and her stupid trousers-don’t-lie speech, and now I’m standing in an elevator confirming her thesis against my will.
Firm. She was right. I hate that she was right.
Heat climbs up my neck and I stare hard at the floor number ticking up, willing my face to do literally anything else.
“Problem?” he asks, not turning around.
“Nope.” It comes out higher than I’d like. “Long day.”
The box is small. It was probably a normal size this morning and has shrunk considerably since, and every floor we climb the air gets thicker, his shoulder a foot from mine, the smell of him cut right through it, cedar and clean sweat and the cold he carried in.
He doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at him.
We ride forty floors pretending the other one isn’t there, and not one of those floors believes us.
The doors open. I exhale like I’ve been underwater.
He walks me down a hall I haven’t been down and opens a door onto a guest suite bigger than the apartment I pay for, an actual bed, a window stuffed full of lit-up city.
“You’re in here until we move to the site,” he says. Then he tips his head at the door straight across the hall, six feet off, maybe less. “That one’s mine. Luke wakes up at night, he comes to me first. You stay in bed.”
“Got it. You’re across the hall. Six feet. Very, ah.” I hear the words leaving and cannot call them back. “Convenient. For the Luke thing. Proximity-wise.”
He raises one brow, the closest he’s come to a reaction all night, then turns and goes into his room without giving me a single thing to work with.
I close my door and unpack enough to find my toothbrush, change into the only shirt I packed that counts as pajamas, and get into a bed so soft it feels like an apology for the weird clause.
Then I lie there. The ceiling is very white.
His door is very close. I count the gap between us in feet and then in worse units, and somewhere around one in the morning I give up on sleep entirely and go foraging.
The kitchen at night is a different beast, all hard pale surfaces and the low growl of a refrigerator that runs quieter than my whole building.
I don’t turn the lights on. Turning the lights on is what a person does when they’re allowed to be somewhere, and I am working on the assumption that a live-in tutor raiding the fridge at one in the morning exists in a legal gray area.
I find the prize on the second shelf. Half a chocolate cake under a glass dome, somebody’s celebration or somebody’s bad week, no telling which. It is calling to me by name.
I tell myself I’ll cut a slice. A civilized slice, onto a plate, like a houseguest. Then I open three drawers in the dark looking for where a billionaire keeps his forks, find them, and somewhere between the drawer and the cake the plan quietly dies.
A plate is a step for people who got caught, and I have no intention of getting caught.
I’ll have two bites standing up, put the dome back, and disappear, and tomorrow the cake will simply be a little more gone and no one will ask questions.
So I’m bent over the open fridge in a too-big shirt and not much under it, hair past saving, eating chocolate cake straight off the stand with a fork like a raccoon who got into somewhere expensive, when the lights come up behind me.
“We own plates,” he says. “I could show you where.”
I turn with my mouth full and the fork still in it. Ashton fills the doorway in nothing but a pair of pajama pants slung low, no shirt, no armor, hair shoved back off his forehead like sleep gave up on him the same as it gave up on me.
And, okay. Bex owes me an apology, because nothing she dragged out of me over dumplings comes close.
The man is built like the gym is a personality trait.
Abs I could do my laundry on, the real kind, hard ridges that actually catch the low light, a torso that tapers down into those pants in a line I am not strong enough to ignore at one in the morning on no sleep. Firm was the understatement of my life.
I’m staring. I know I’m staring and I cannot stop, and a piece of chocolate cake chooses this exact moment to give up its grip on the corner of my mouth and drop, soft and damning, onto the front of my old shirt.
His eyes go over the shirt, the bare legs, the fork still hanging out of my mouth, and then they climb to my mouth and stop there.