9. Zoe
ZOE
Icannot cook. This is not modesty, it is a documented fact, sworn to by every smoke alarm I have ever lived beneath.
So when I decided to make Andrei lunch and carry it across the city to a building I was fairly certain had people buried under it, I understood I was either in love or losing my mind, and I was not prepared to rule out both at once.
The dish was a stew my mother could make in her sleep, and I had followed her recipe with the focus of a surgeon and produced, the first two times, something that looked like a crime scene.
The third attempt was edible. I sealed it into the good containers before it could change its mind, and I refused to think too hard about why one man’s opinion of a stew had come to matter more than any review I had ever earned in print.
The building does not have a sign. It does not appear in any directory, under my name or anyone’s, because the business Andrei conducts does not advertise.
The guards at the door knew my face now, which told me something about how far this had all gone.
A month ago I was a scandal they would have turned away at the curb.
Today one of them carried my bag of containers to the elevator and called me ma’am.
The elevator was mirrored on all four sides, which gave me the privilege of watching a successful grown woman fuss with a bag of soup the entire ride up, smoothing her hair, doubting her dress, rehearsing something light to lead with.
I have walked runways in front of the whole industry with less stage fright than I carried in that small steel box.
I found him on the top floor with his jacket off and his sleeves shoved up, leaning over a table covered in the kind of paperwork I knew better than to read upside down. He did not look up.
“I am working,” he said. “Do not bother me.”
“Really.” I let the word hang there. “Then I will go bother someone with manners. One of these terrifying men downstairs must be desperate for company and a hot meal.”
I turned for the elevator with my bag and what was left of my pride.
“Zoe.” A pause. “Follow me.”
I smiled at the closing elevator doors before I let him see my face. He had already walked off toward his private office, and I followed, because a win is so much sweeter when you do not stop to gloat over it.
I followed him down a corridor lined with doors that do not open for people like me, past men who studied the floor as he passed, and I understood all over again that the person clearing space on his desk for my soup was someone the rest of the world handled with great care.
It did something to me, being the exception to all of that. I worked very hard not to let it show.
I had never been inside his office before. It was all glass and dark wood and a view that made the whole city look like a thing he had bought and not yet decided what to do with.
I catalogued it the way I catalogue every room, the exits, the angles, a single photograph turned face down on a shelf I decided not to ask about.
Then I stopped, because he was watching me do it, and something in his expression said he had noticed I knew how.
I set the containers out on his desk, in the narrow space between the documents I was not meant to see.
“Are you sure you are not too busy?” I asked, suddenly aware I had let myself into a working day. “Because I can leave this and go. I really do not want to be in your way…”
“You are already here.” He pulled out a chair. “Sit. We eat.”
My smile widened until it very nearly hurt.
He moved a stack of files into a drawer and locked it without a word, and I pretended not to see the weapon that sat beside them. We do not talk about that part. There is a whole country of him I am not permitted to enter, and I have decided, for now, to love the man standing at its border.
“Tell me if it is good,” I said, watching him lift the fork as though it might be wired to something. “Be honest. But choose your honesty with great care.”
He tasted it. Chewed. Considered it with the gravity of a man defusing a device. “Bearable.”
“Bearable.” I put my own fork down. “That is it. I am never cooking for you again.”
“You are far too stubborn for that to be true.” He took a second bite, which dismantled the insult entirely. “You will be back in this office within the week, holding something worse.”
“That is the most words you have ever spent predicting my behavior,” I said. “Careful. Someone might think you have been paying attention.”
“I pay attention to threats.”
“So I am a threat now?”
“You are a woman who keeps getting into my building. The two categories overlap.”
He ate like a man who had not allowed himself to stop for days, which he almost certainly had not, and watching him work through it set something warm and ridiculous loose in my chest, the plain animal satisfaction of having fed someone I cared about.
I did not examine that either. I was building quite a habit of not examining things.
“Would it kill you,” I said, “to say thank you? Or to kiss me on the cheek, like a man with a working heart?”
“Have you no shame at all, woman?”
“Almost none. Just one kiss. I earned it. Do you have any idea how many fire extinguishers gave their lives for this meal?”
“A reminder.” He aimed the fork at me. “I am not your real boyfriend.”
“It is a friendly kiss. Friends kiss cheeks. It is practically a handshake with better manners.”
He set the fork down and looked at me the way he looks at a problem he intends to solve permanently. “You will not stop until I do it, will you?”
I nodded, the picture of innocence.
So I turned my cheek to him and waited, a well-behaved woman collecting a chaste little reward. He leaned in. At the last possible second I turned my head, and his mouth landed on mine instead, warm and startled and entirely according to plan. My plan, not his.
I pulled back laughing before he could decide whether to be angry. “Keep eating, oldie.”
“You are…”
“One of a kind. I know, Andrei.” I waved the fork at him. “You can finish the sentence next time.”
A knock, and one of his men stepped in with a folder, then stopped short when he saw me. Recognition lit his whole face.
“You are Zoe Williams.” He said it like a small miracle. “Even lovelier in person. And if I may say it, I admire you. Not the work, you. The way you carry yourself, the refusal to ever let them win.”
“Wow.” I laid a hand over my heart. “Thank you. You would be amazed how rarely anyone troubles themselves with the second part.”
“Most people are not quick enough to keep up with you,” he said. “It is simpler for them to throw names instead.”
I liked him at once, in the doomed way you like a person you will never be allowed to see again. He had no idea he had just signed something.
I watched the temperature fall across Andrei’s face by several degrees, and I will not pretend it did not delight me. The most controlling man I have ever met, undone by a junior employee with a folder and a kind word.
Andrei coughed, a short, deliberate, wholly fake sound that could have stripped the varnish off the desk. “What is it?”
The man drew himself up like a soldier who has realized too late where he is standing. He gave his business in a few clipped words, something about a signature and a delayed shipment, his voice shrinking with every syllable.
“Is that all?” Andrei did not wait for the answer. “Then go. My girlfriend and I are discussing something important.”
We had been discussing whether his review of my cooking qualified as a crime against persons, but I chose not to correct the record.
Andrei watched him go with the flat patience of a man memorizing a face for later. I made a private note to learn the boy’s name and protect him from whatever was being decided behind those eyes.
The man left at a pace that suggested he was fond of being alive.
“My girlfriend and I are discussing something important,” I echoed, batting my lashes at him. “You were jealous. A grown and genuinely frightening man, jealous of a boy with a folder.”
“Quit it, Zoe.”
I should not have poked the bear. I poke the bear because the bear, for reasons neither of us will say out loud, has decided not to eat me.
“He admired my personality.” I beamed. “You have never once admired my personality.”
He had no answer for that, which is as close as he comes to conceding a point. He only aimed his fork at the container in front of me, a command in the shape of a gesture.
“Eat your terrible food.”
He never did finish his sentence about being jealous, and I did not force him to. Some victories you pocket quietly and spend later, when the man least expects the reminder.
When the containers were empty and he had finished every bearable bite, I found I was not ready to leave, and I had run clean out of clever ways to say so.
The afternoon had gone gold and slow, and the thought of home waiting at the top of that tower, beautiful and silent and entirely mine, made something in me flinch. So I did the brave thing, which in my case has always meant asking out loud for the thing I want.
“Can I stay? Here, in your office. I will be quiet, I have work I can do, I just…” I waved a hand at nothing. “I do not want to go back to an empty penthouse yet.”
He looked at me a beat longer than the question deserved. “Fine. Behave.”
“I am always behaved.”
“You turned a kiss on the cheek into an ambush ten minutes ago.”
“Behaved,” I said, “is a spectrum.”
He almost smiled. I have learned to live for that almost, the way it tugs one corner of his mouth before he wrestles it back into line, a small war he has been losing a little more often lately.
He had things to do that did not involve me, which is rather the point of an office, and he left me curled in the enormous chair by the window with my sketchpad across my knees.
I drew without deciding to, as I do when my guard is down.
What took shape under the pencil was not for any client, all clean lines and a neckline cut like a held breath, the kind of thing I sketch only for myself, late, when no one is buying.
There was more hope stitched into it than I normally permit.
I turned the page before the thought could finish and started something safer.
For the first time in weeks my hands moved with no one waiting on the result.
No deadline at my neck, no lens waiting for me to be worth photographing, only a pencil and good light and the low sound of him on a phone somewhere down the hall, speaking a language I do not know in a voice too even to be anything but dangerous.
It should not have soothed me. It was the most soothing thing I had heard in a year.
Somewhere in the hush, in the late gold of the sun through that absurd view, the pencil slowed and stopped in my hand. I did not mean to fall asleep. I never do.
Sleep is a thing I ration like a soldier under siege. I do not hand it out in strange chairs inside dangerous buildings. And yet.
I woke the way you only wake somewhere safe, slowly, before I had agreed to it.
There was a hand in my hair, smoothing it back from my face, gentle in a way his hands were never built to be, a man who has spent his whole life learning to break things relearning, very slowly, how to hold one without crushing it.
“I do not know what to do with you anymore,” he said, very quietly, to a woman he believed was sound asleep.
I kept my eyes closed. I kept my breathing slow and even and entirely dishonest. I have built a career on knowing precisely when to perform, and this was the easiest role I have ever played, because the smile I was holding back was the only true thing in the room.