Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Logan
I'm awake before the alarm. This is not unusual.
What is unusual is the first conscious thought — not the day's agenda, not the overnight correspondence, but her.
The weight of her on the desk. The sound she made.
The way she looked at me afterward — that single over-the-shoulder glance before she said goodnight and walked out like she hadn't just rearranged everything.
I'm already hard before I've fully registered that I'm awake.
I press my hand against myself through the sheet — not with any intention, just the involuntary response of a body that has decided, regardless of what my mind is doing, to remember last night in complete detail as I stare at the ceiling.
She's with Caleb.
My brother's girlfriend was on my desk last night and I put her there. That fact sits in my chest like something cold and I don't flinch from it. I let it land where it needs to land. But I can still taste her.
I try to shake the sensation as I get up and go to the bathroom. I turn the shower to cold and stand under it for ninety seconds. By the time I get out I have the morning organized in my head. I finish dressing and head to the office.
What happened last night will not happen again. That is not sentiment. It is a calculation — the complications are too significant and I am a man who understands the cost of a bad decision. I made one last night. I won't make another. I'm certain of this.
Her laptop is open when I walk in. Her water glass is beside it, her bag on the back of her chair. She isn't at her desk yet. I note it and walk into my office.
I sit down. I open the overnight correspondence.
I read the first three items without retaining a word of any of them.
I close the correspondence and put my elbows on the desk, press my fingers against my mouth, and sit there for a moment.
The office is quiet around me — the floor not yet fully awake, the city doing its early morning thing outside the windows.
There is no version of last night that fits cleanly inside the life I run.
I know that. I've known it since I woke up.
I reach for the brief on my desk and get back to work. It's the only answer that makes any sense this morning. Fifteen minutes later there's a knock at my door.
"Come in."
She opens the door and walks to the front of my desk and stops. Pencil skirt, dark, fitted to the knee. Cream blouse. Her hair is down today, slightly softer than usual. Her cheeks have a warmth to them that the office light doesn't account for. Her lips—
"Good morning." Her voice is completely steady.
"You have a 9:00 meeting with the Vertex team.
The Nakamura follow-up is confirmed for eleven.
Patricia flagged two items in your correspondence that need responses before the end of the day — I've drafted both, they're in your queue.
The client timeline revision needs a sign-off before it goes to Keith. And your lunch is still open."
She holds out the folder and I take it. Our fingers don't touch. I'm aware of how close they come. Her perfume reaches me as she steps back — the same scent from last night, softer now, layered with something that is just her. I look at the folder. I look at the first page. I keep my eyes there.
"The Nakamura brief," I say.
"I need it before 11."
"It's already on your desk." She nods toward the stack on my left that I somehow didn't register when I sat down.
I look at it. I look back at her. "Fine."
She nods once and turns to leave.
"Sutton."
She stops. She turns around fully this time — facing me directly, her expression composed in the way of someone who has decided exactly how today is going to go.
"The phase three revision," I say.
"Clean version with the corrected flags. By 12 noon."
“Of course,” she says, and then a beat. Something moves through her eyes that does not reach the rest of her face.
"You'll have it," she says.
She walks out and closes the door quietly behind her. I put my eyes on the Nakamura brief. I read every word of it. I read it twice.
The day is long and we do not discuss it.
This is the correct outcome — the professional reset, wordless and mutual.
By the time the Vertex meeting ends and the Nakamura call wraps and the phase three revision lands in my queue at 11:58 I have almost convinced myself that we are simply two people doing their jobs.
Almost.
She was right about the flags. The revision reflects the correct call — which means I've signed off on something that matches her original assessment. She is professional enough not to acknowledge this. I am professional enough to sign the document and move on.
At 3:15 she appears in my doorway with a logistics question. I answer it in four sentences. She nods and goes back to her desk. I watch her go. One second. Then I turn back to my screen.
By 6:30 in the evening the floor has cleared.
I leave without stopping at her desk. The ride home is quiet.
The apartment is exactly as I left it. I pour a drink and finish it this time, standing at the window, the city spread below me.
I think with deliberate care about the Nakamura expansion and the upcoming board review and everything else that belongs in the mind of the man I'm supposed to be. It mostly works.
***
Saturday morning I'm on the back nine before 9:00.
Charlie is two strokes ahead, which is standard.
Paul is where Paul always is — slightly behind both of us and more interested in the conversation than the score.
The morning is clear and cool and we move through the back nine at the unhurried pace of men who have been doing this long enough that the golf is mostly an excuse.
"You're off today," Charlie says. He lines up his shot with the focus of someone who takes the game seriously even when pretending not to.
"I'm fine," I say.
"Your drive on seven was short. You're off."
I don't answer. He hits. Clean, long, exactly where he intended. He picks up his tee and looks at me.
Paul, who has been quiet in the way he gets when he's paying more attention than he appears to be, says:
"How's the assistant situation working out?"
I look at him. He examines the face of his club.
"She handles the role well," I say.
"Mm." He sets up his shot.
"She was at the Dallas event with you."
"It was a foundation gala. I needed someone who knew the business."
"Right." He swings. The ball lands short. He doesn't seem bothered.
"Charlie said she held her own in the room."
Charlie has developed a sudden interest in the middle distance.
"She did," I say.
We walk toward the green. The conversation moves on — a mutual contact's new venture, the club's renovation plans, Charlie's youngest starting high school in the fall. The easy rhythm of men who have known each other long enough to move in and out of topics without effort.
Eighteenth hole. Paul lines up his shot and then straightens without taking it. He looks at me.
"You sleeping alright?"
"Fine," I say.
"You look like a man who's been fighting something in his own head for a while."
"Work has been demanding."
"It's always demanding," he quips, and then pauses.
"This feels different."
I look at him. He looks back without any urgency.
"It's a complicated situation," I say.
That's all I say. Paul nods once. Charlie says nothing. We finish the hole.
At lunch Paul leans back in his chair and says, conversationally:
"Whatever it is — make sure you know what you're doing before you do it."
He picks up his glass and finishes his drink. Subject closed. I think about that the entire ride home.
The following week we find our footing.
The client crisis reaches resolution — the integration timeline accepted by the client, the late nights finished, the floor returning to its normal hours. We are efficient together. We always have been. The work moves forward and neither of us gives it reason not to.
What doesn't move is the thing sitting between us that neither of us is addressing.
It's in every ordinary moment — the half-second of eye contact when I hand her a document, the way she doesn't linger at my doorway when a conversation ends, the fact that I've restructured the morning briefing so it happens across the full width of my desk.
It is present and it is unspoken and we are both, by unspoken agreement, leaving it exactly there.
I am managing it. That's what I tell myself.
Thursday afternoon Keith stops by my office.
A few members of the client relations team are gathering at Harlow's down the street — end of crisis drinks, informal, an hour or so.
He mentions it the way he mentions everything, without particular weight.
Good for morale, he says. Then he adds that Sutton organized it and leaves.
I think about it for only a moment, and then I put on my jacket and go.
Harlow's is warm and low-lit, the kind of bar that exists for exactly this purpose.
By the time I arrive the team has claimed a section near the back — six people, drinks already in hand, the looseness of a group that has been through something together and is relieved to be on the other side of it.
She's near the bar when I walk in, standing with two women from the team, laughing at something — a real laugh, unguarded, her head tilted back slightly.
She's let her hair down from its workday arrangement and it falls around her shoulders the way it did in Dallas.
I cross the room and greet the team and I don't look back at her.
The hour passes easily. I move through the conversations. I stay longer than I planned. The team is in good spirits — the resolution has done what shared pressure always does when it finally lifts, creating a warmth between people who don't normally operate this closely.