Chapter 4
VIOLET
I attach the file on purpose.
Chapter Nineteen. Draft. You said don't stop until it's done. V.W.
I read it four times. I check the address twice, which is a joke, because there's exactly one address in the thread now and it belongs to the CEO of this company. Then I hit send and sit back and put both hands over my face like a woman watching a car accident she has personally arranged.
The office is beautiful after seven. Just the hum of the lights, the tick of the heating, the elevator chiming for the cleaning crew forty floors up. It's my favorite time to write, and until Friday it was the only two hours of the week that belonged to nobody but me.
I call home first.
"Wolfe residence, this is Patrick." He says it exactly the way Rudi taught him, and it ruins me every single time.
"Hi, baby."
"MOM." A clatter. "Rudi made the pasta with the red on it and I ate all of it and also I ate a carrot."
"You ate a carrot."
"One carrot." He's a man who won't be caught overstating a case. "Are you coming home?"
"Soon. Two more hours and then I'll come and kiss you even if you're asleep."
"I'll be asleep."
"I'll do it anyway."
"That's weird," says my son, delighted, and then Rudi takes the phone and tells me he's been fine and to stop apologizing, and I hang up with the specific guilt of a woman who has just bought herself two hours with somebody else's bedtime.
Then I call Kylie.
"That file has an author field," she says instead of hello.
"I know."
"I've been in their mail server since three.
The queue purge was clean and I put a hole in the backup where the hole needed to be.
As far as anything that could ever be subpoenaed is concerned, you didn't send an email on Friday.
" Her voice drops half a step. "And Patrick isn't on a single form in that building.
Not insurance, not emergency contact, nothing.
That was the whole point of him not being on anything. "
The relief is so total I have to sit down properly.
"You could go to prison for that sentence."
"I could go to prison for building you. That ship sailed with a marching band." The typing stops. "Now the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"I ran the sweep. He's exactly where he's been for fourteen months. No transfer, no travel, no reassignment." A pause I don't love. "There's a flag from Monday. Somebody pulled an old case file he was second chair on in 2019. Could be anybody, those get pulled for discovery all the time."
"Kylie."
"It's an archive query. It doesn't have his name on the request. I only mention it because I said I'd mention everything."
"Okay."
"He doesn't know where you are, Vi. He can't."
"Okay," I say again, and I look out the window while I say it.
My office faces the street from the eighth floor, low enough to watch the taxis crawl and the headlights smear in the dark.
There's a black sedan parked across the street with its engine running and a man leaning against the driver's door, hands in his pockets, face turned away from the streetlight.
Everything in my chest goes tight and cold at once.
He's the right height. He's the right shape. Lance used to stand exactly like that, weight on one hip, the practiced boredom of a man who has decided he's the most patient person on any given street.
"Vi? You went quiet."
"There's a car."
"Where?"
"Across from the building. Man standing next to it."
"Okay. Describe him."
And then he moves. He steps forward into the amber wash of the streetlight, and he's checking his phone, and he is bored out of his skull, and he is my supervisor.
"It's Chance." I go boneless in the chair. "It's Chance. He's waiting for Nadia. He stayed late because I dumped half my job on him this morning."
Kylie exhales. "You have got to stop doing this to yourself."
"I know."
"You really do."
"I know." I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. "You should see what it's doing to my word count."
"Speaking of." Her voice changes gear entirely. "You emailed him a sex scene forty minutes ago, didn't you."
"How do you..."
"Because I've known you since you were twenty and you always confess by not mentioning something." A beat. "Vi. Is this a good idea?"
"No."
"Are you going to do it anyway?"
Down the hall, a door opens.
Footsteps. Measured, too heavy for the cleaning crew and coming in this direction, and I know them, which is its own kind of confession.
"I have to go," I whisper, and hang up.
He fills the doorway.
Jacket gone. Waistcoat unbuttoned, sleeves turned back over his forearms. Tanned skin, dark hair, the glint of a watch worth more than everything I own including my child's bicycle.
"Miss Wolfe. You're still here."
"You said don't stop until it's finished."
"I did." He's looking at me the way he looked at me yesterday: slow, thorough, top to bottom and back. It should make me want to fold my arms across myself. It does the opposite. "You sent me a chapter."
"I did."
"Forty minutes ago."
"Yes."
"Deliberately."
And here's the thing I've learned in two days: he tells you what he wants by leaving a silence where it should go. So I stand up, because I'm not doing this sitting down, and I make myself hold his eyes.
"You said you'd help me with the research, Mr. Russo. I assumed that meant you'd have to actually read something."
For a second, one, no more, he doesn't have an answer ready.
Then the corner of his mouth moves, and he says, "Come with me," and turns away without waiting.
I follow him down the hall.
His office is dim. Just the amber pool of a green-shaded desk lamp and the whole cold glitter of Midtown behind the glass. He's sitting on the front edge of his desk with a monitor turned toward the room, and my chapter is already open on it, and there is already a comment in the margin.
He has read it once and annotated it and I sent it thirty-nine minutes ago.
"Chapter nineteen," he says. "The back seat of the car."
"What about it?"
"Your hero puts his hand on her thigh, and she..." He glances at the screen. "'Gasps, and grips the leather seat.'"
"What's wrong with gripping the seat?"
"Nothing, if she's in a dentist's chair bracing for the drill." He turns his head and looks at me. "Come here."
My feet move before I authorize them. I stop a foot away with the laptop clutched to my chest like a breastplate, and he notices, and he takes it out of my arms, gently, by the top edge, like you'd take something from a child who's fallen asleep holding it, and sets it on the far side of the desk.
"The problem," he says, "is that you're writing her from outside. What she does. What she looks like doing it. You're not writing what's happening inside her."
"I described..."
"Sit down." Not a suggestion. He nods at the desk behind him. "Here."
"Is this how you take notes with everyone?"
"I don't take notes with anyone."
I go around and sit on the edge of his desk, and my skirt rides up two inches, and I reach to fix it, and he says, "Leave it."
I leave it.
He comes to stand in front of me, close enough that my knees are on either side of nothing at all, and everything in me is already humming at a frequency I could not explain to a doctor.
"In the scene," he says, in the voice of a man reviewing a contract, "he puts his hand here."
His palm settles on my knee.
My breath stops. Not catches. Stops.
"And you wrote that she gasps." His thumb draws a slow circle on the inside of my knee, just above the hem.
"She shouldn't. Not yet. Gasping is what a writer puts there because it's available.
" He looks up. "In the actual second, she goes still.
She stops breathing entirely, because she doesn't know where his hand is going, and the not-knowing is the entire event. Everything after that is just weather."
He's right, and I hate it, and worse: he's not describing my character. He's describing me, right now, sitting on his desk with my heart going like a bird against a window and no earthly idea whether I'm terrified or so turned on I can't see.
"She's in anticipation," he says. "And she can't tell yet whether it's the good kind. That's the part you skipped."
His hand slides higher. Two inches. Three. His fingers press into the soft inside of my thigh, and the firmness of it, the complete lack of apology in it, tells me exactly how much practice this man has.
"Now she gasps."
I gasp.
Goddammit.
"You're enjoying this," I manage.
"Immensely."
His other hand comes up to the side of my throat, thumb along the hinge of my jaw, and he tilts my face up until there is nowhere left to put my eyes except his. Not behind the hair, not behind the frames, not behind a year of being nobody.
"In your scene," he says, "he kisses her here first."
His mouth brushes my jaw. It isn't a kiss. It's the rumour of one, warm, and it sends a current straight down my spine and out through the soles of my feet.
"Then here."
The corner of my mouth. Barely touching. Close enough that I can taste whiskey and salt and something underneath it, darker.
"And then?" he says.
"Then he stops asking," I hear myself say.
Something in his face changes.
He kisses me, and it is not careful. It's slow and it's thorough and it's the kind of kiss that takes something out of you and doesn't give it back.
His hand tightens on my thigh and slides higher and I make a sound against his mouth that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life.
His tongue traces my lower lip and I open for him and then there is nothing but heat and pressure and his hand so close to where I'm aching that I can feel my own pulse there, hard, insistent, obscene.
I get a fistful of his waistcoat and pull him in. My hips shift on the edge of the desk, tilting toward his hand, showing him. I'm past being embarrassed about it. I want it more than I want to be a person with dignity.
I feel him smile against my mouth. Small. Knowing. Infuriating.