16 - GREENER THAN GRASS
Lacey
The Whitfield ballroom did what ballrooms do. Chandeliers. A string quartet. Women in heels and men in tuxedos and conversation that stayed under the music by mutual agreement.
I came through the lobby with my coat over my arm. The dress under it was midnight blue silk, spaghetti straps, a slit that had climbed an inch higher in the store mirror than I'd planned on and that I'd kept anyway.
The club had left a buzz running in me that wouldn't switch off. It had no business being here tonight. I had a donor to charm and an MRI suite to fund. I told it to be quiet and crossed the ballroom to the head table.
The head table sat elevated near the stage. Allie in sharp black. Jonah Reed and his wife Elena. Evelyn Cartwright in pearls beside Thomas. At the far end, alone with a wine glass in hand, in a tuxedo, was Derek Harrington.
I had not expected the tuxedo. Same gravity, same stillness, in a room that didn't come with his usual reasons for being grim. The silver at his temples caught the light.
I had stopped walking. Allie's voice brought me back.
"Lacey. You look stunning. We saved you the spot next to Mr. Harrington."
He turned to his name, his eyes inducing the throb I'd suppressed.
"Bonds," he said, and nodded.
I crossed the last six feet of carpet focused on my walk.
"Mr. Harrington." I nodded back.
The cologne. Citrus and something warmer under it, soap or skin. He'd presumably worn cologne for five years. I'd simply never been in the state of attention I was in tonight.
Evelyn lifted her flute. "To another good year at Centennial."
Glasses clinked. As I set mine down, Derek's eyes lingered past the end of the toast. Steady. I held it for a count and looked at my plate.
The dress. A man in black tie at the same table. That was all.
Allie leaned in. "Mr. Harrington, we're hoping to expand pediatric imaging. A cardiac MRI suite. Lacey's leading the charge."
I picked up the cue. "With Jessica in mind. Better resolution. Fewer invasive tests. Earlier interventions."
Derek carefully arranged his silverware. Then picked up a fork and aimed at the walnut on his salad plate. He took his time with it.
"Eight figures for marginal gains," he said. The dry low tone from board rounds.
I straightened. The strap of my dress slid half an inch with the motion and I felt every millimeter of it.
"MRI gets tissue characterization that ultrasound can't. Fibrosis. Earlier and safer means earlier soccer."
Jonah chuckled. "She's a negotiator, Derek."
Derek's mouth twitched. His eyes came back to mine and stayed a few moments, then went back to his plate, and I couldn't have told you his reaction. That was the trouble with the state I was in. It kept editorializing.
He picked a roll out of the basket and set it on my bread plate without asking. "Try it. Better than it looks."
I took a bite.
"You're right."
His eyes crinkled. The not-quite-smile. "Not everything I say is wrong."
The dinner happened around me. I traded a few sentences with Evelyn about the new dean, answered Elena about her son's college list, and spent most of my attention on the job of staying inside my own skin, which had picked tonight to keep announcing itself.
The dress wasn't helping. I kept feeling the strap shift and reset.
Derek didn't dance. He didn't work the room.
He answered the board members who came to him in short, flat sentences and sent them off, and every so often, without turning his head, his eyes found mine and held a second and let go.
Each time a small nod, like we were two people sharing the private joke of having to be here.
Each time the hum answered, low, and I told it again to quiet down.
Sometime after the plates were cleared, Jonah, two glasses in and feeling expansive, leaned down the table toward Derek.
"I have to ask." He waved his glass at the room, the banners, the foundation's name on the program. "All this. Does it make you happy? Giving it away like this. It must."
Derek turned his wine glass a quarter turn on the cloth and didn't answer right away.
"You can't control joy," he said. "Sometimes you have it and then it's gone."
The table didn't catch it. Jonah was already nodding like he thought he'd heard something profound.
But I caught the pause that came after, the half second where Derek wasn't at the table at all, somewhere back behind his own eyes.
Then he looked up and blinked, and came back into the room, and the reserve closed over it like water.
"Anyway, you don't have to be happy to accomplish important things."
And there it was, the line Jonah would remember, the grim and faintly superior thing that fit everything I already believed about this man. Duty over feeling, joy beside the point. I'd known men like that. I was raised by one.
Except.
The first thing he'd said. You can't control joy. Sometimes you have it and then it's gone, like a fact about the weather.
Around ten, the program started. Speeches. A video montage. Jessica's crayon heart with wings on the screen and Derek's small exhale beside me, just audible. I didn't look at him. I felt him not looking back.
Then the auction. Napa weekend for six figures. Chef's dinner for more. When Allie thanked the leadership donors from the podium with a nod to Mr. Harrington, Derek lifted his glass in a half-toast and his face did nothing else.
I leaned over during the applause, close enough that I had to think about the distance. "You could've at least smiled for the camera."
He turned his head a fraction. "I don't perform on cue, Bonds."
It should have annoyed me, but it started the hum. Bury that.
"Not even for a good cause?"
"Depends on the cause." He almost smiled. But didn't.
The auctioneer called the next item. A private tour of the new pediatric wing, hosted by our very own Dr. Lacey Bonds.
I shot a look at Allie across the table. She raised her champagne in mock innocence.
Bidding opened at five. Derek's hand went up first, casual, almost bored. Took it to ten. A cardiologist from a downtown center bid twelve. Derek went to fifteen. Twenty. The other man laughed and dropped out at twenty-five.
"Sold to Mr. Harrington."
Derek leaned back with his glass. "Looks like you're stuck with me again."
The flush went up my neck. "Lucky me."
Twenty-five thousand dollars for two hours of me walking a hallway. My attorney charges six hundred to explain that Brad is entitled to ask for more.
The applause died, the music came back, people drifted toward the bar and the doors. Allie caught my eye across the table one last time and vanished into the crowd, her work for the evening apparently complete.
Derek stood and buttoned his jacket with the precise motion certain men learn somewhere and never unlearn. "Walk you out?"
He said it like the answer was already settled, and I found myself on my feet.
We crossed the room at a pace set by him and I didn't have to hurry.
Once his hand came up near the small of my back to steer me around a knot of people, and I told myself it was old-fashioned manners and left the rest of it alone.
At the doors, he stopped and turned. The light caught his eyes and took some of the slate out of them.
"I enjoyed tonight, Bonds."
I didn't have a free hand to deal with the feeling that ran through me and was gone.
"You're easier company when you're not arguing with me," he said.
It was the kind of thing that should have set my teeth on edge, a man telling me I was more pleasant when I wasn't disagreeing with him, the exact sort of thing the Brad in my head would have said. I held onto the irritation. The other, cruder, thing held onto me.
He put out his hand. I gave him mine. His fingers closed around it, callused at the edges from whatever life he led outside of boardrooms, and he held my hand a beat longer than I expected. Then he seemed to notice he was doing it and let go.
"Good night, Bonds. I look forward to the tour."
"Good night, Derek."
He turned and walked toward the valet stand without another word.
I stood in the cool air coming through the open doors and told myself the lies I'd been telling myself all night. The dress. A man in a tuxedo at the same table. That was all it was.