Chapter 17
The vodka soda was doing nothing.
Elizabeth set the glass down on the bar top, the base clicking against wood, and tried to focus on what Denise was saying. Something about a case, or a client, or the new associate rotation. She’d completely lost the thread.
Kelsey’s hand rested on the small of her back. Skin on skin. The cowl neckline in front meant coverage, professionalism, control. The back of the dress was a different story entirely. Kelsey’s palm sat just above the base of Elizabeth’s spine, warm and steady, and Elizabeth could feel each finger.
Four of them. Resting lightly. The pinky slightly lower than the others, just brushing the silk where the fabric picked up again. The thumb settled near the curve of her waist.
Elizabeth had chosen this dress because it was elegant and modern and because the front gave away nothing. She had not, somehow, accounted for the back. For the fact that when your fake girlfriend touches you there, there is no barrier between her hand and your nervous system.
“...and Kyle’s been saying we should move to Westchester, which, I told him, over my actual dead body.”
Denise laughed at her own joke. She was thirty-five, dark-haired, wearing a fitted burgundy sheath that made her look like she belonged on a magazine cover rather than in a courtroom.
Her husband Kyle stood slightly behind her right shoulder, drink in hand, pleasant smile fixed in place.
He had the look of a man who’d long ago made peace with being decorative at his wife’s professional events.
“Where are you guys?” Denise turned to Kelsey with the easy warmth of someone who collected new people the way other lawyers collected billable hours. “In the city?”
“Astoria,” Kelsey said. “Queens.”
“Oh, I love Astoria. We almost rented there before we got the place in Gramercy. The food alone.”
“The food is insane. There’s this one bakery that does these amazing cookies, and I’m not exaggerating, I would commit actual crimes for them.”
Denise laughed. “Okay, I need the name.”
“Artopolis. But go early, they sell out.”
Elizabeth took another sip of vodka and tried to look like she was listening.
Kelsey’s thumb had started moving. Small circles. Deliberate or unconscious? Elizabeth couldn’t tell. Either option was a problem.
She shouldn’t have stared.
An hour ago, when Kelsey had stepped out of the bathroom, Elizabeth had been at the mirror fastening her second earring. She’d glanced up, meaning to say something about the time, and the words had died somewhere between her brain and her mouth.
Pale gold silk. A halter neckline that tied behind Kelsey’s neck and plunged in a sharp, clean V that stopped just above her sternum. The dress clung to her waist, her hips, the fabric heavy enough to drape but light enough to shift when she breathed.
Elizabeth had seen Kelsey in her work uniform a hundred times. Black apron, fitted tee, jeans. She’d registered that Kelsey was attractive in the way you registered any fact: noted, filed, moved on.
This wasn’t a fact to be filed.
This was Kelsey’s collarbones, bare and angular. The soft shadow at the lowest point of the V, the line of her throat when she’d swallowed hard and asked, her voice going small, Is it too much?
Elizabeth had frozen. Stood there. Let the silence pull open like a wound while her body responded to something her brain wasn’t ready to authorize.
Heat in her face and lower, in her chest, behind her ribs.
A dull, physical pull that had nothing to do with contracts or appearances or Grace’s wedding.
She should have said You look beautiful.
She should have crossed the room and straightened the necklace that sat slightly off-center in the plunge, her fingers brushing Kelsey’s skin, and said, This is perfect, you’re perfect, stop worrying.
She should have done anything other than stand there with one earring in and her lips parted and her composure six feet behind her.
Instead, she’d managed “amazing.” Like a movie review. Like she was rating a restaurant.
And then turned away, because if she’d kept looking, she would have done something she couldn’t take back.
She’d watched in the mirror as Kelsey’s expression shifted.
Something bright dimming behind her eyes, her mouth pressing flat, her hands going to the fabric at her waist and smoothing it in that anxious tell.
Kelsey had glanced down at herself like she was seeing the dress through someone else’s judgment and finding it wanting.
Because Elizabeth had done that. With her silence, with her three-second stare and her clipped response and her immediate retreat to logistics. She’d made Kelsey feel wrong.
“So wait, you’re a barista? That’s how you two met?”
Denise’s question pulled Elizabeth back to the bar. The wood was cool under her fingertips. Ice shifted in her glass.
Kelsey’s thumb paused its circuit, then resumed. “She came in every morning. Same order, same time. I just made sure her cappuccino was perfect and eventually she noticed.”
“That’s so much better than an app.”
“Anything’s better than an app,” Kyle offered from behind his wife, his first real contribution. Denise patted his arm without looking at him.
“How long have you two been together?”
“Few months,” Kelsey said. “She’s pretty private, so we kept it quiet for a while.”
“That tracks.” Denise glanced at Elizabeth with a grin. “No offense, Elizabeth, but getting personal details out of you is like pulling teeth. I’ve worked with you for three years, and I just learned last month you had an ex-wife.”
“I contain multitudes,” Elizabeth said, and Denise laughed.
Kelsey looked up at her then. The angle brought her face close, and Elizabeth could smell her perfume, something warm and a little sweet that she hadn’t been wearing when they signed the contract at the wine bar.
“She does,” Kelsey said, still looking at Elizabeth. Her eyes were very brown and very warm, and she was smiling, but the smile had a question in it. A small, careful question that Denise and Kyle couldn’t see, but Elizabeth could read like case law.
Are we okay?
No. They were not okay. Elizabeth was standing in a hotel bar with a hand on her bare back and a thumb drawing circles into her skin and a week of avoidance sitting between them like a deposition she’d refused to give, and she could still see the way Kelsey’s face had fallen in the hotel room when Elizabeth couldn’t find the right words.
Elizabeth’s hand found the vodka soda. She lifted it. The ice had melted, diluting what little bite it had. She drank it anyway.
Denise was asking about the coffee shop now, what the regulars were like, whether Kelsey had any good customer horror stories. Kelsey was telling some story about a man who’d tried to pay for his office’s coffee order in cryptocurrency, and Denise was delighted. Kyle checked his phone behind them.
Elizabeth watched Kelsey talk. The way she angled her body toward Denise, open and generous, her free hand moving as she spoke.
The way she laughed from her whole face, eyes crinkling, nose scrunching, nothing held in reserve.
Denise was responding to it the way everyone responded to it.
The way the party at James’s brownstone had responded to it.
Kelsey was warm the way a room with good light was warm, the kind you wanted to stand in.
And her other hand stayed on Elizabeth’s back.
Through all of it. Through the anecdote and the laughter and the easy back-and-forth with a woman closer to her own age who shared her references and her energy.
Kelsey’s hand stayed exactly where it was, her fingers spread against Elizabeth’s bare skin, steady and present and not going anywhere.
Denise touched Kelsey’s arm lightly while making a point about some neighborhood restaurant, and Kelsey smiled but didn’t shift her weight, didn’t lean in, didn’t move her hand from Elizabeth’s spine.
Elizabeth set her empty glass on the bar.
“...right, Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth blinked. Denise was looking at her expectantly, eyebrows raised, champagne glass paused halfway to her mouth. Kelsey had gone still beside her, the small circles on Elizabeth’s back suspended mid-rotation.
She’d missed something. An entire exchange, from the feel of it. Denise and Kyle were both watching her with the particular patience people reserved for someone who’d obviously drifted.
“Sorry.” The word scraped out rough, half a register lower than she intended. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I was just saying you never bring anyone to firm events.” Denise’s smile was warm. “Kyle and I were starting to think you were married to your job.”
Kyle nodded behind her, grinning into his bourbon. “Denise literally has a running bet with Martinez about whether you’d show up solo today.”
“Had,” Denise corrected. “Past tense. I just lost a hundred dollars.” She raised her glass toward Kelsey in mock salute.
Elizabeth made herself smile. The right smile, the one that said I’m a good sport about this. The muscles in her face knew the shape.
But there it was. The thing she’d spent years building, spoken aloud in casual cocktail conversation as though it were funny.
As though it were a quirk. The woman who doesn’t bring anyone.
The woman who has her work and that’s enough.
Denise was confirming it in front of Kelsey, and the confirmation landed somewhere Elizabeth hadn’t braced for.
Because Kelsey had gone quiet. Not performing quiet, not strategically quiet.
Actually quiet, in the way that meant she was absorbing something.
Elizabeth could feel it in the shift of Kelsey’s hand on her back, fingers still warm but no longer moving.
Listening. Processing the fact that Elizabeth hadn’t brought someone to a firm event in years.
And Denise had just told Kelsey, in the cheerful shorthand of office gossip, that Elizabeth didn’t let people in. Didn’t do this. That the very act of bringing someone was so out of character that it had been the subject of a wager.
Elizabeth didn’t look at her. If she looked at her, she would see whatever Kelsey’s face was doing with this new piece of information, and she wasn’t ready to read it.
The bar was getting louder. More guests filtering in from the lobby, voices layering over each other, laughter and the bright percussion of ice in glasses. The cocktail hour had that tipping-point energy where the room goes from populated to crowded in the span of five minutes.
Someone pushed past. A man Elizabeth didn’t recognize, tall, his elbow catching the air near her shoulder as he reached for the bar. “Sorry, excuse me,” over his shoulder, already gone.
Kelsey stepped closer.
Not back. Not sideways. Into Elizabeth’s space, her front brushing Elizabeth’s side, and her hand slid from Elizabeth’s back to her hip to steady herself. The heel of Kelsey’s palm settled against her, fingers curling slightly into the navy silk.
Elizabeth stopped breathing.
She stood with her empty glass on the bar top, and Kelsey’s body against her side and no air in her chest and thought, very clearly: Move.
She didn’t move.
They were close enough now that the details collapsed into sensation. The warmth of Kelsey’s shoulder against her arm, the press of a hip bone through two layers of silk.
The crowd shifted. A pocket of space opened to Kelsey’s left. Enough room to step back, reestablish the six inches of distance that separated them.
Kelsey didn’t step back.
“Sorry,” Kelsey murmured, and her voice was lower than it had been with Denise. Rougher at the edges. Her hand stayed on Elizabeth’s hip, fingers curled against the silk in a way that was not steadying herself. That was holding on.
Her eyes dropped. Half a second, maybe less.
Down to Elizabeth’s mouth and then away, fast, to some fixed point past Elizabeth’s shoulder.
But Elizabeth saw it. She was trained to see it.
Sixteen years in courtrooms watching witnesses’ eyes for exactly this kind of involuntary tell, the glance that lasted a fraction too long, the one the person hoped no one caught.
Elizabeth’s pulse hit her throat. Her wrists. The soft hollow behind her ribs where something had been sitting all week, compressed and ignored and now expanding with the steady, mechanical force of a thing that would not stay contained.
She wanted to turn. Not step back, not recalibrate, not run the cost-benefit analysis her brain was already queuing up.
She wanted to turn her body into Kelsey’s, close the remaining inch, put her mouth against the skin below Kelsey’s ear.
She wanted to feel Kelsey’s breath catch the way it had in the garden at James’s party, that small, startled inhale when Elizabeth’s walls had cracked open for exactly one second before she’d sealed them back shut.
She wanted Kelsey to look at her mouth again and not look away.
Denise was saying something. The ceremony, starting soon, finding seats. The words arrived like a broadcast from another room. Elizabeth could feel every point of contact between her body and Kelsey’s.
“They’re about to start.” Kyle had his phone out, checking the time or a notification. He tucked it back in his jacket. “We should head over.”
Kelsey stepped back.
Her hand left Elizabeth’s hip. Fingers trailing across the silk for just a moment, the fabric pulling slightly before letting go, and then the space between them was back.
Kelsey met her gaze. “Shall we?”