6. Elena
Elena
I wake up in a room bigger than my whole apartment, and before my brain hands me the trunk or the hood or the man, it hands me the square footage.
Two-forty, maybe two-fifty, and that’s not counting the bathroom I can see through a doorway that has its own chandelier, because naturally the bathroom has a chandelier.
I got three hours of sleep. I know it’s three because I watched the sky go from black to the bruised gray it’s wearing now, and somewhere in the middle of hating the ceiling I lost the fight with my own body and dropped, which I resent, because going under in the bed of a man who had me abducted feels like a vote I didn’t cast. The sheets are a thread count my salary has never met.
I lie in them and resent how good they feel.
A soft knock and then a woman lets herself in with a stack of folded clothes balanced on one arm like she’s done it ten thousand times.
“Good morning, koukla. I’m Penelope. I tried to talk him into letting you sleep, but that man’s never lost an argument to common sense in his life, so.” She sets the clothes down. “Up we get.”
She’s somewhere past sixty, silver coming in at the temples, soft around the eyes. She lays the clothes at the foot of the bed, slacks and a sweater.
“These aren’t mine,” I say.
“They are now, and the right size too. He had someone out buying them before the shops were even open, which is very him, solve it at four in the morning, wake half the city, never once consider just asking you. I gave up being surprised by it decades ago.” She squares the edges of the stack until they’re flush, a habit I have too.
“I guessed at the sweater. You looked like you run cold.”
“I was taken out of bed in a tank top at three in the morning. I’d have run cold in a sauna.”
She laughs, caught off guard by it. “There it is. He warned me you had a mouth.”
“He’d know. He sat next to it for four minutes at a bar and apparently decided that was a hiring interview.” I push up against the headboard, dragging the ridiculous sheets with me. “How long have you been working for him?”
“Working.” She turns the word over like it tastes funny. “I changed that man’s diapers, koukla. I had him before he had teeth. The teeth were an improvement and also the start of every problem I’ve had since.”
I sit up the rest of the way, because I came in here braced for a staff member who flinches when he exhales, but the first person through the door talks about him like a son who doesn’t call enough.
“You were his nanny.”
“I was everything his mother didn’t have time to be, may she rest in peace, and then I was his housekeeper, and now I’m whatever this is.
” She gestures vaguely at the room. “Mostly I make sure he eats. He forgets. He’s forgotten since he was small.
Put a problem in front of that boy, and his dinner would go stone cold while he beat it.
He hasn’t changed a thread, he’s only got a bigger plate to neglect. ”
“That fits the data. By the time his men finished gift-wrapping me and dropped me off, he was still in last night’s suit, running on the same fumes.”
“Of course he did.” She shakes her head, fond and worn out at the same time.
“Other men sleep. Adrianos has a thought and goes to war with it until one of them is left standing.” She picks the discarded tank top up off the floor and folds it, a reflex older than I am.
“Eat what I bring you. All of it. I don’t care what you make of him, your head’s the reason you’re in this house, and a head doesn’t run on principle. ”
“You read minds, or only mine?”
“I’ve fed a hundred stubborn people under this roof, and I’ll feed two more before lunch.
You’re not even the worst of today.” At the door she stops, one hand on the frame, and the fondness goes out of her face into something more careful.
“He’s in a bad way, this last day. I won’t say more, it isn’t mine to give away.
But if he’s hard with you, it isn’t about you.
There’s more than money bleeding in this house right now. Try to keep that in mind.”
She’s gone before I can ask what she meant.
I get dressed, because the sweater’s warm and my dignity got out of the car somewhere around the grated bridge deck, and there’s no version of today where cold and proud beats warm and proud.
The dining room has the same glass wall as the office, the city poured out below it going through its usual morning routine like it has no idea I’m up here against my will.
Penelope sets down a plate of eggs, tomato, and thick-cut bread, a small dish of honey, and a cup of coffee that smells strong.
I look at it, then eat, because starving myself would only hurt me.
“Good?” Penelope asks, topping up a coffee I didn’t ask her to.
“Infuriatingly. You’re too good at this to be wasted on him.”
“That’s what I keep telling him, koukla, but he keeps signing my checks, so we’re at an impasse.” She lifts the plate while I’m wiping honey off my thumb and angles her head at the hall. “He’s waiting. Go on. He doesn’t bite before noon.”
“That’s an oddly precise guarantee.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got. After noon, you’re on your own with him.”
He’s at the desk when I come in, and the photograph is gone from the shelf. I see the gap before I see him, the clean empty rectangle where it stood last night.
That frame took the fight right out of me last night.
One second I was building the argument that would corner him, the next I was just staring at the two of them, creased up, laughing in the sun, easy with each other, close, a Kalliopi I’d had and lost and never once known he’d had too.
He didn’t only hire her. That much was in the photo.
And I stood there holding the fact that I knew her, that she was my best friend and somehow also part of his life, and I never had the first clue, and I said none of it, and this morning the frame’s gone, so he caught me reacting to something even if he doesn’t know what.
I don’t know why he moved the photo, and I’m not going to ask.
“Slept well?” he asks.
“Three hours. I passed out mid-hating-your-ceiling, which feels like my own nervous system defecting to your side, and I’d like it noted that I did not authorize the nap.”
“Noted.” He’s in a clean suit, which means he slept, or didn’t and changed.
Either way, last night’s wreck has been put away with the photo.
His eyes move over me once, the sweater, the slacks, and then come back up.
My breathing does the same thing it did at the bar when his attention is on me, the hitch I keep not authorizing.
I hate that the desk feels too narrow. It’s an enormous desk.
“They fit,” he says.
“Penelope’s the only thing holding this place up, by the way.
Be nicer to her than you are to everyone else.
” I take the chair without being offered it, mostly to stop standing there letting him look at me.
“She also mentioned she changed your diapers. So whatever this is you’re doing across the desk, the menace, the eye thing, I need you to know it’s losing to a mental image of you bald and screaming and in a diaper.
Your whole terrifying-man act is getting beaten by an infant. Him. Tiny you. He’s winning.”
“You talk more when you’re rattled.” He sits back, and the smile arrives in no hurry, the whole thing, warm and unfair, worn by a man who’s known for decades exactly what his own face is worth in a room. “I’m beginning to enjoy it. Most people go quiet when I look at them. You become entertaining.”
“I talk more when I’m awake. You’ve met me twice, both times with a head injury’s worth of adrenaline in me, so you don’t actually know what I’m like, you just think you do.
” Which I shouldn’t have said, because now I’ve as good as confirmed that he rattles me, but I keep talking because shutting up now would just prove it twice over.
“Don’t look pleased. You don’t get to look pleased about that. ”
“I’m not pleased.” The grin comes easy, because it always does, his default setting, charm idling under everything he says. “I’m delighted. There’s a difference, and you, of all people, should want me using the right word.”
“See, that’s the problem with you. Most men I can fluster, and they have the decency to hide it.
You just admit it and turn it back on me, which is deeply unsporting.
” I cross my legs, mostly to do something with myself that isn’t holding his eye.
“And you look like hell, by the way. The suit’s an upgrade.
The face is the exact one you had on at three in the morning.
Whatever ate your night didn’t finish, it’s still in there gnawing. ”
He doesn’t answer. The grin goes, not all at once, just slides off and doesn’t come back, and the room gets quieter than the silence strictly needs to be.
I hit something. I wasn’t aiming; I never am.
My mouth gets to the soft place a half second before my brain flags that there’s a soft place there at all, and now it’s too late.
Penelope’s line comes back to me about there being more than money bleeding in this house.
“Are we skipping the apology?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“I don’t apologize for things that worked.” The charm comes back up like a light on a dimmer, smooth, easy, a man who’s decided the bad moment is behind them and simply moved the room past it. “But I’m glad you’re here. That’s the closest you’ll get, and from me it’s practically a sonnet.”
“That is not an apology. That’s you enjoying yourself in the general direction of an apology.”
“It’s the same thing in my house.” He tips his head at the monitor. “Come here. Let me show you what’s worth waking the city to buy you pants.”