Juliette
I’ve read the same line of the Gdansk contract four times and I still can’t seem to assimilate it.
This is new. This is, in fact, unprecedented.
I’m a woman who once reconciled a forty-page manifest in a moving car while my father shouted into a phone six inches from my ear.
Concentration is the one thing I've always owned outright, the one room in myself my father never got into.
But now I'm sitting at a borrowed desk in my husband-to-be's ops room with the harbor in the window and I can’t read a sentence because eleven feet away, Serik Mostovoi is doing something with a pen and his own mouth that I am apparently unable to ignore.
He kissed me three hours ago. I let him.
I more than let him. Now my blood is running at the wrong temperature and my pulse keeps tripping, and the worst part, the genuinely insulting part, is that he looks completely unbothered.
He's been working since we broke apart. Calls in two languages, a contract redline, an email that made someone's quarter considerably worse.
The man dismantled my composure and went straight back to dismantling other things, while I sit here reading the word demurrage like it's the first time I've ever encountered the English language.
I press my thighs together under the desk, which doesn’t help matters at all, and turn a page I haven't read so the sound of it might pass for productivity.
"You're not working," he says, without looking up from his screen.
"I'm reading."
"You're shuffling papers." Now he looks up, and there's that flicker again, the one I keep noticing, the one that wakes up the part of me I keep shoving back into its box.
"You've turned that page twice and read it zero times.
Your father raised an auditor. I'd recognize an auditor pretending to audit anywhere. "
"I'm calibrating."
"You're distracted." He sets his pen down and leans back in his chair.
The way his deep blue shirt strains against his broad chest is criminal.
"It's interesting. I've watched you hold your face through a bidding war, a phone call with your father, and a marriage proposal conducted over a counterfeit Vermeer.
None of those fazed you even remotely. Yet a kiss in an office has you reading Polish freight terms upside down. "
"They're not upside down."
"Juliette." His voice is quiet and amused and gets under my skin like an irritant. "Be careful."
"Of what?"
He stands. He doesn't come toward me, which is somehow worse, because it means whatever he's about to say he intends to say across the whole length of the room where I can't reach him to stop it.
"I read people for a living," he says. "It's not a metaphor.
It's the actual work, the thing I get paid for, the thing that's kept this family ahead of men who want us dead.
I read what a room is doing underneath what it's saying.
I've been doing it since I was a boy in a house where reading the room early was the difference between a bad night and a worse one.
" His eyes don't leave me. "Which means I know exactly what you're trying not to do over there.
I can see it in how you're sitting. I can hear it in your breathing.
You've gone careful and shallow, the way people do when they're trying to keep their body from shouting out loud.
" He pauses, but doesn’t take his eyes from mine.
"I can practically smell it on you, Juliette.
So. Be careful. Because if you keep sitting there running that hot and pretending it's freight terms, one of us is going to do something about it, and I'd rather it was you. "
The heat that goes through me is total and humiliating.
"That's quite a skill set," I manage. "Most men just stare."
"Most men aren't paying attention. I've explained this.
" He's still not moving, and I'm starting to understand that the stillness is the point, that he's leaving the entire distance between us as mine to close or not, the same way he left the kiss as my decision.
"I'm not going to touch you because you're flustered.
I told you last night, I have no interest in owning a woman, and that includes catching one off balance.
When it happens, it'll be because you decided, with your whole and obnoxiously functional brain, that you wanted it.
Not because I caught you breathing wrong. "
And that, of all the things he could have said, is the one that undoes me, because it's the exact opposite of everything I was ever taught to expect from a man who'd paid for me.
My father's words are suddenly in the room, uninvited, and I hear them again the way I heard them down the phone this morning, and before I've decided to, I'm saying them out loud.
"My father said you'd breed me and bench me."
The room goes still in a different register.
"He said it this morning," I go on, because now that it's out I want it all the way out, on the desk between us where I can see it.
"On the phone. He said men like you don't marry women like me for the conversation.
That you'd breed me and bench me, and in two years I'd be running your household and be grateful for it.
" I keep my voice level, which costs me.
"That's the entire transaction, as far as he's concerned.
I'm a vessel. You fill it, you dock it, you lose interest. He's been pricing me on that basis my whole life.
Ready for export. Untouched, until I'm not, and after that, storage. "
I don't know why I've told him this. It's the most unguarded thing I've said since I walked into his world, and I've handed it to a man I've known for less than a day. I brace for him to do something with it. Reassure me cheaply. Or worse, agree.
He does neither. He crosses the room now, but he doesn't reach for me. He sits on the edge of my desk, close, his bandaged hand resting on his thigh, and he looks at me with that thorough, unhurried attention that I'm beginning to feel in places attention has no business reaching.
"Your father," he says, "is a man who has never once in his life been given something valuable and known what he was holding.
So I'm not going to waste either of our time being angry at his opinion of you.
He's congenitally unqualified to have one.
" He pauses, and something shifts in his face, the composure thinning, a crack in the vault door opened on purpose.
"But I'll tell you the truth about the part he got wrong, because you've earned the truth and because I won't have his version living in your head rent-free. "
"Serik—"
"He thinks a child is the end of your worth.
The point where the vessel's served its purpose and gets docked.
" His voice has dropped into something lower and rougher; the same tone he used for do you want this in the hall, the language of decisions even when the words are English.
"I want to be precise with you, because you're a precise woman and you'll know if I round up.
The thought of you carrying my child doesn't bench you in my head, Juliette.
It does the opposite. I've been trying not to think about it since the kiss, and failing, which I'll remind you almost never happens to me. "
The temperature in my blood is no longer something I can pretend is about freight terms.
"You. Round with my child." He says it slowly, like he's reading it off the inside of his own skull and finding it more interesting than he expected.
"Still walking into my ops room at six in the morning to tell me I've got a leak in my Baltic leg.
Still ending phone calls before the other man's ready.
Still the sharpest person in every room I bring you into, except now there's proof on you that you're mine and you chose it.
" His jaw works once. "I'm a man who's spent his life keeping his face still, and I'm telling you that picture does something to me I don't have a word for, and lose interest is the furthest thing from it.
If you ever found yourself in that state, I think the actual problem would be getting any work done at all, because I wouldn't be able to stop looking at you.”
He reaches his hand forward, catching the cuff of my cardigan between his thumb and forefinger.
“I wouldn’t be able to stop worshipping you.”
I have no response. For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I have nothing. My whole body has gone warm and tight and traitorous, and underneath that, somewhere my father never reached, something else has gone very still and very certain.
"You can't just say things like that," I tell him, and my voice has lost all of its edge now, every inch of it.
"I only say true things. It's more efficient.
" He stands off the desk, releasing my sleeve without touching my wrist at all. It’s a maddening, deliberate restraint of a man who's decided this has to be mine to take, and the not-touching is louder than any hand would be.
"Your father sold you as a thing that stops being interesting the moment it's used.
He was wrong about your value when he set the price, and he's wrong about this.
There's no version of you I could ever lose interest in. I've run the model. It doesn't exist."
He goes back to his side of the room and pulls up his screen as he sits down like he hasn't just rearranged something structural in my chest, and the casualness of it, the sheer infuriating control, is the single most attractive thing I have ever witnessed.
I look down at the Gdansk contract.
I read the same line a fifth time. I get no further than I did the first four.
"Serik."
"Mm."
"I'm not going to be able to work in here today."
He doesn't look up, but I see it, the corner of his mouth, the thing that on another man would be a grin and on him is a whole confession.
"No," he agrees. "I don't imagine you are."