6. Celine
CELINE
The airport smells like burnt coffee and recycled air.
Priya walks beside her with their carry-ons, Lena’s with the broken wheel that wobbles left, Priya’s perfectly upright because Priya is the kind of person whose luggage cooperates. I walk on Lena’s other side. We’re not talking. We said everything last night at the kitchen table.
At the gate, Lena turns to me. She doesn’t say anything right away. She looks at my face the way she’s been looking at my face her whole life, reading the version of me underneath the version I’m presenting.
“Stop doing the math,” she says.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Celine.”
“Lena. Go.”
She hugs me. Hard. She smells like the conditioner she has used since high school. Her arms are thinner than they were six months ago. I hold on longer than I mean to. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright, but she doesn’t let anything fall.
“Video call,” I say. “Every day.”
“Every day,” she says.
Priya wraps an arm around her. Looks back at me once with an expression that means I’ve got her. The broken wheel wobbles through the security gate. I watch them until the crowd takes them.
Then I stand at the window for a long time looking at nothing.
The car Zane sent is at the curb. Black, quiet, the driver holding the door without being asked. I get in. I look out the window the whole ride uptown. The city does what the city does, indifferent, loud, already three hours into its day.
I don’t cry. I haven’t cried in a week. I don’t intend to start in the back of a car that belongs to the man whose penthouse I’m moving into today.
The penthouse is on the fifty-third floor.
I’ve been in this building for two weeks. I have never been above the forty-fourth. The elevator opens onto a private foyer with a single door, and the quality of silence that exists in places built to exclude the world rather than simply rise above it.
The housekeeper, a woman named Diane who has the efficient warmth of someone who has worked for difficult people long enough to have stopped being surprised by any of them, shows me to my room.
It’s larger than our living room at home.
The bed sits against one wall at a height that requires a small decision every morning.
The window looks over the park, bare trees, and the geometry of paths below.
I put my bag on the chair in the corner.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
I think about Lena somewhere over the Atlantic, Priya beside her, the broken wheel in the overhead compartment. I think about the house on Mercer sitting empty with the soap on the counter and three spots on the floor that creak.
I don’t think about how long I’m going to be here.
By Wednesday, I have his mornings mapped.
Coffee at seven, black, no sugar. Emails between seven and eight before Roman arrives with the day’s agenda.
He reads standing up, at the window in his office, which I did not expect.
I expected a desk. He reads at the window with the city behind him and a coffee going cold on the corner of the desk, and I’ve started making a second cup at seven forty-five so there’s a hot one ready when he’s done.
He has not asked me to do this. I do it because it’s efficient.
“You didn’t have to,” he says Thursday morning, looking at the cup.
“I was already making one.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he picks it up.
I go back to my desk.
Roman watches this exchange from the doorway with an expression he’s professional enough to keep almost invisible. Almost.
Thursday afternoon, we have a meeting with two men from a private equity group on the forty-second floor. I sit to Zane’s left with a notepad, which is where he told me to sit, and I take notes on everything said while running a parallel track in my head of everything not said.
There is a lot that’s not said. These men want something Zane has not agreed to give them. The whole meeting is a performance of civility stretched over that fact.
After they leave, Zane stands at the window with his jacket open.
“Your notes,” he says.
I hand them over, his gaze pausing for a moment on his ring on my finger. I’ve started wearing it all the time now. I tell myself it’s easier than trying to remember when to wear it and when to take it off. More practical. I try not to think about how I like the way it looks on my hand.
He reads through my notes, still at the window, the city doing its late-afternoon thing behind him.
“You flagged the Harmon clause,” he says.
“They mentioned it twice. The second time felt deliberate.”
He turns the page. Reads. Turns it back.
“It was,” he says.
He hands the notes back. Goes to his desk. Sits. Pulls the afternoon’s folders toward him as though I’ve already left the room.
I gather my things, and I go.
Friday evening, the penthouse is quiet in the way that large, expensive spaces are quiet. A different quality from the house on Mercer.
I’m on the couch with my laptop and Lena’s video call open on one side of the screen when Zane walks through. He doesn’t stop. He goes to the kitchen, pours something, and comes back through. Pauses.
“She’s settled?” he asks, looking at the screen.
Lena waves at him from her hospital room in Zurich. “Hi. You must be the very kind boss.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than yesterday,” Lena says. “Thank you. For everything.”
“Get some rest,” he says. He moves toward the corridor and looks at me. “You should eat something.”
“I ate.”
He looks at me like he does not fully believe me. Then he goes.
I look at the screen. Lena is wearing an expression I recognize from twenty-three years of being read by her.
“Celine,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Lena. Go to sleep.”
She goes to sleep, eventually. I close the laptop and sit in the quiet of a penthouse that’s not mine, in a city that is, listening to the faint sound of the floor settling and somewhere down the corridor a door closing.
Rain hits the window in waves.
I’m in my room with a book I have read the same page of four times when the knock comes. Two quiet raps. The kind that are giving me the option to pretend I’m asleep.
I’m not asleep. I haven’t slept properly since Lena left.
“Come in,” I say.
He opens the door. Stands in the frame. Dark shirt, sleeves pushed to the forearm, no jacket. He looks like a man who has also been awake longer than is reasonable. He looks at me across the room. I look back at him.
A week’s worth of things sit between us in this room.
“You should leave,” I tell him.
He doesn’t move.
Rain lashes against the tall window behind me, a constant low roar that fills the silence.
Zane remains in the doorway, one shoulder leaning against the frame, his eyes steady on mine.
The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up to his elbows, exposing the corded muscle of his forearms. At forty-four, he carries his strength without effort, broad through the chest and shoulders, the kind of solid build that comes from years of discipline.
He doesn’t speak at first. He just watches me.
I sit up on the edge of the bed, heart hammering against my ribs. My palms feel damp. Every inch of my skin feels too tight, too aware of him standing there, of the ten days of careful distance that have finally worn down to nothing.
“You should leave,” I say again, softer this time.
Zane exhales through his nose. “If I leave now, you’ll spend the rest of the night pretending you didn’t want this.” His voice is low, rough around the edges. “We both know better.”
I hate that he’s right. I hate the way my body has already begun to ache for him.
I stand up slowly. My legs feel unsteady on the thick carpet as I cross the room toward him.
The moment I’m close enough, his hand lifts and slides into my hair at the nape of my neck.
His grip is firm, possessive. He pulls me in and kisses me like he has been waiting for permission, which he no longer wants to ask for.
The kiss is not gentle. His mouth claims mine, hot and demanding, tongue sliding deep as he tastes me.
I kiss him back just as hard, pouring every bit of frustration and exhaustion into it.
My hands fist in the front of his shirt, pulling him closer even as my mind screams that this is a terrible idea.
He breaks the kiss only to trail his mouth down the side of my throat. His teeth graze my skin, then bite down just hard enough to make me gasp.
One of his large hands grips my waist, fingers digging in as he walks me backward until my shoulders hit the cool wall beside the window. The contrast of cold glass against my back and the heat of his body pressing into me sends a sharp shiver through my limbs.
Zane’s thigh pushes between my legs, solid muscle pressing right against my center. I rock against it before I can stop myself, the friction pulling a low sound from my throat.
His hand moves down, yanking the hem of my thin shirt upward. I lift my arms without thinking. He strips it off in one impatient motion and tosses it aside.
His palm immediately covers my breast, heavy and warm. He squeezes, thumb dragging slowly over my nipple until it tightens into a hard peak. When he pinches it between his fingers, a bolt of sharp pleasure shoots straight down between my legs. I feel myself growing wetter, slick, and aching.
He lowers his head and takes my nipple into his mouth, sucking hard while his tongue flicks against the sensitive tip. My back arches off the wall. One of my hands slides into his hair, gripping tight as heat floods through my body.
His free hand slips down my stomach and under the waistband of my sleep shorts. He doesn’t tease. He slides two thick fingers through my folds, spreading the wetness he finds there, and pushes inside me in one smooth stroke.
The stretch is sudden and perfect. I moan, loud and broken, my head falling back against the glass. He curls his fingers, stroking that sensitive spot deep inside while the heel of his palm grinds against my clit with every movement. My thighs tremble around his hand.