Chapter 8
TESSA
Tessa zipped the back of the dress and faced the mirror.
The emerald silk did things to her figure she hadn’t planned for. She’d bought it two years ago for a gala, worn it once, and hung it back into its garment bag the next morning. A man at her table had spent the night staring at her chest like she’d dressed for him.
She was wearing it tonight.
Her phone lit on the bathroom counter.
Gabriel: On my way. Traffic’s light.
She’d given him her address the night before because he’d insisted on picking her up, and she’d stopped pretending she had a reason to say no.
She slid her lipstick into her bag with her wallet, her keys, and the three granola bars she always carried. She checked the mirror one more time.
Two years ago, this dress had felt like a costume. Tonight it didn’t.
The buzzer rang at six fifty-eight. She pressed the intercom.
“Hello.”
“It’s Gabriel.”
“Come up, I’m on the fourth floor.”
She buzzed him in and hoped she looked more composed than she felt.
She opened the door and there he was, charcoal suit and white shirt, collar open, no tie. He’d shaved. The hallway smelled like cedar and clean soap, and her stomach flipped.
His gaze dropped to the neckline of her dress and stayed there.
“Tessa.” Her name came out like gravel. “Jesus.”
“Too much?”
“It’s a sin to cover that dress with a coat, but you’re going to need one.”
She laughed.
He stepped into the doorway, and she could feel the heat coming off him like summer pavement.
“What time is the reservation?” she asked.
“Eight.”
“Then we have a minute. Come in.”
He came in and looked at her living room like he was starving for more of her. He stopped at the photograph wall.
“That’s my mom,” she said. “In front of the house I bought her in Jersey.”
“You bought her a house, and you still live in an apartment.”
“She took care of me. Now I take care of her. I have a lot more years to get what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“Tonight, I want dinner.” She handed him her coat. “Help me cover this sin.”
He took the coat and helped her into it, his palms resting on her shoulders a beat longer than they needed to before he opened the door.
A black car waited at the curb, the driver standing by the door. Gabriel waved him off and opened the door himself.
“You hired a car?”
“It’s easier than parking.”
She slid onto the cool leather. Gabriel got in beside her, gave the driver an address in Tribeca, and the privacy screen rose between them and the front seat. His thigh pressed against hers from hip to knee.
“You’re enjoying this,” he said.
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because you brought a hired car for a four-mile drive to a restaurant, that’s presumably not changing addresses.”
“I wanted my hands free.”
“For what.”
“This.” He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers, resting their joined palms on his thigh. “You’re nervous.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because you’ve been talking more since I walked into your apartment, and you aren’t a woman who talks to fill silence.”
“I haven’t been on a real date in two years, Gabriel. I’m allowed to be.”
“Two years. What happened that ended it?”
“He didn’t like that I worked Saturdays. He gave me a choice between him and a wedding I’d been booked on for nine months. I catered the wedding. He’d cleaned out his side of the closet by the time I got home.”
He laughed, tipping his head back the way he used to when something genuinely surprised him, and she felt the sound of it in her own chest.
“That isn’t the answer to why,” he said.
“No. It isn’t.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because Union Square could still be written off as a coincidence. The Strand was pushing it. This is on purpose.”
“It is.” He turned her palm over and ran his thumb along the inside of her wrist. “I like that about tonight.”
The car turned onto the bridge, and Manhattan opened in front of them in a glittering sweep of glass and water and light.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“A small family place in Tribeca, run by three generations. They make the best Bolognese in the city. I tried to copy the recipe once and Knox banned me from the kitchen.”
“Knox? In a kitchen?”
“Knox cooks when he needs to think. He’s good at it. I’m a hazard.”
“If you don’t cook, what do you eat?”
“Takeout, mostly. There’s a Tuesday-night standing order at a place near my office that you wouldn’t approve of.”
“Probably not.”
“Don’t ask.”
“Now I have to ask.”
“Let’s just say they have golden arches.”
“Gabriel.”
“A man has to eat.”
“At a place known for ball pits and the toys in the kids’ meals?”
“In my defense, I’ve never been in the ball pit.”
“That’s the lowest bar I’ve ever heard you set, Sterling.”
The car pulled up to a small restaurant with warm light spilling onto the sidewalk. The host knew Gabriel by name and walked them to a back-corner table where two candles flashed, and the menu was a single typed sheet.
A young waiter named Peter appeared, took their wine order, and disappeared.
Gabriel pulled out her chair, and once she’d sat, he took the seat across from her. The flame threw light across his face she’d remember the rest of her life. He was staring. She was too.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re beautiful.”
She felt the heat in her cheeks and ignored it. “Get used to hearing it back.”
“Working on it.”
Peter returned with the wine, poured, and was gone again. Tessa took a sip and let it sit on her tongue. It was good wine, the kind she’d have ordered for a client.
“Why Oath Capital?” she asked. “The name.”
“It sounds like something an investment firm should be called. We make an oath to do our best by our investors. Build wealth. Steward it well. The whole pitch.”
“That’s a marketing line.”
“It’s a good one.”
“You workshopped it.”
“Endlessly. Knox is unbearable with a thesaurus.”
She laughed. He laughed too, but his came a beat late, and she filed it under things that probably had a longer answer. The harder questions could wait. She’d wanted this version of him tonight—the one across the table, ordering wine, watching her like she was the only thing on the menu.
Peter brought warm bread, fried calamari, and olive oil.
They ate. She told him about Lucy, who had walked into her culinary school dorm uninvited at midnight on her third night and said I’m Lucy, I bake, you cater, we’re going to be friends, and I brought cookies.
Lucy had been right about all four. He told her Knox was a closet Hallmark movie watcher and would deny it under oath, and that Ronan’s closet was sorted by color, then season, then formality, with a printed key taped inside the door.
The Bolognese was good. Gabriel ate like a man who hadn’t realized he was hungry, or one who’d been ordering off the value menu way too long.
She watched him across the table and thought about the fact that she had wanted this conversation for years.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“Right now or in general?”
“In the bigger sense, like what are your dreams.”
“You want my dreams?” She sipped her wine. “I’d like a Sunday off.”
“That’s not a dream.”
“It is when you haven’t had one in three years.”
He paused. He didn’t look away, and he didn’t speak, and the silence between them felt like a promise she hadn’t heard yet. “Tell me more.”
“Okay. I want to keep building, but slowly. I don’t want to get bigger.
I want to get better. That’s the difference no one in business school teaches.
” She turned the stem of her glass between her fingers.
“I want my staff happy and well-paid. I remember being twenty-three and working three jobs. The version of me who’s signing their paychecks doesn’t get to forget that. ”
She tipped her glass toward him. “And I want a Sunday off. Your turn.”
“To stop pretending all these years were what I needed instead of what I picked.” He set his glass down. “And to find out if you and I get to be different people now than we were then.”
“That’s two things.”
“They’re related.”
She nodded.
Peter came with the dessert menu. Gabriel looked at her across the table.
“If we order dessert,” he said, “we aren’t leaving anytime soon.”
“No dessert then.”
“Two espressos, please.”
Peter vanished. They drank the espressos hot and bitter and gone, and Gabriel paid the check, and they stood up together in the warm light of the back-corner table.
Outside, the car was still waiting. He looked at it, then at her.
“We could walk,” he said. “If your shoes are comfortable enough.”
She glanced at her heels. “I can manage.”
“Then we walk.” He waved the driver off.
They started up the block, hand in hand, south toward the bridge.
“What’s the warehouse like?” he said. “I want to picture it.”
“The freight elevator smells like every meal we’ve ever made.
David sings off-key in the prep kitchen and pretends he doesn’t know how to stop.
Jessica keeps a candy drawer in her desk that I’m not supposed to know about.
My corkboard is full of event timelines I keep up there because I like to look at the ones I survived. ”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Six years.”
He whistled. “Average week?”
“Three to five events. We’re at our limit. I won’t take more without bringing on more people, and bringing on more people changes the company. I’m still deciding whether I want it changed.”
“You’ll know when.”
“You sound certain.”
“From what I’ve seen these last few weeks, you’ll get it right.”
They walked half a block in silence.
“What about you?” she asked. “Tell me what you do all day.”
“I read deals. I argue with Knox about deals. I decide which companies are worth Oath’s money and which ones are wasting my time.
I have a standing seven-thirty Monday with our investors.
I have a standing five o’clock Friday with Ronan that has become, since his honeymoon, a standing five o’clock Friday with Ronan and Devney, because Devney has decided I’m her project. ”
“Are you?”
“Apparently.”
“Devney seems good at projects.”
“I’m starting to understand that.”