20. “Side Room”
“SIDE ROOM”
Ihad seen him before she had.
I had clocked him at the bar at eight-fifteen. I had clocked him at the perimeter of the dance floor at eight-forty. I had clocked the credential — a name that did not match the press list I had memorized in the car on the way over — the second I had a clean angle.
I had hoped he would not raise the camera.
He had raised the camera.
The song ended.
I walked Eden off the dance floor with my hand at the small of her back.
I did not rush. I did not let her rush. We crossed the floor at the pace of two people who had finished a slow dance and were going to find a glass of water.
Killian made eye contact with me from the edge of the bar and read my face in one second and stepped slightly to his left to block the sightline from the doorway where Ellery was standing.
Killian was a good friend.
The corridor outside the ballroom was carpeted in the dark red the Pierre had been carpeted in since 1953.
Sconces every six feet. The smell of the building — furniture polish and old velvet and the faint, ancient smell of cigar smoke that never came out of a building like this no matter how many times you cleaned it.
The corridor was empty when we walked into it.
The cloakroom door was closed. The far end was the men’s room.
Two doors past that, a small unmarked door I had been past three times before with a clipboard in my hand at past Hartwell events.
I walked Eden out of the ballroom through the side exit, down the carpeted corridor, past the cloakroom, and into the small salon two doors down where the foundation stored the silent-auction items between rounds.
The salon had a lock. I had been in this salon at three different fundraisers. I knew it had a lock.
The room was dim. The auction items were already gone — they had been moved to the front lobby for the closing tally.
There was a small velvet couch and a long table and the single sconce on the wall and a heavy silk curtain pulled across the window.
The room smelled like old paper and the slightly bitter tang of brass polish.
I locked it.
Eden stood in the middle of the room.
Her cheeks were high pink. Her hair was beginning to come out of its arrangement at the back.
The pearl earrings caught the light from the single sconce on the wall.
The dress was darker than dark in this light.
The whole long line of her bare back was visible to me where the silk fell open from her shoulders.
She turned to me.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“What do we do.”
“We do not go on record tonight. We do not give a statement. We do not file an injunction. We let the photograph exist if he files it, and we wait.”
“Wait for what.”
“For your divorce to be final. The papers are filed. They are working through the seventy-two-hour notice. By Tuesday, Tristan signs. By Wednesday, you are legally divorced. The Sunday after that, we tell your family. The Monday after that, your father announces. By Tuesday morning of next week, every photograph Ellery has ever taken of you is a photograph of an engaged woman who has been openly the senator’s daughter’s fiance for forty-eight hours and the story is dead before it lands. ”
She thought about it.
She nodded.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. We wait. I am not going to fight you on the timeline. You have been right about every timeline since I walked into your office.”
I crossed the room.
I crossed the room because I had to.
I had been holding her on a dance floor in front of three hundred people in her mother’s dress for the last twenty minutes and I had been walking the long line of self-control I had been walking for six weeks, and the small salon was empty, and the door was locked, and her bare back was inches from my hands, and there was a man in a black tux in the corridor outside who had been photographing the woman I had decided on.
I crossed the room.
I kissed her.
I kissed her against the door because the door was the closest vertical surface and because my body had a question that did not have a sentence.
Her mouth opened under mine. She made a sound that was almost laughter and was not laughter.
She put both her hands flat on my chest under my jacket. She did not push me back.
She pulled me closer.
“Atlas,” she said against my mouth.
“I know.”
“We have a ballroom of people.”
“I know.”
“My father is sitting six tables from the door.”
“I know.”
She kissed me harder.
Her hands went up around my neck. Her body came up against mine like she had been waiting for the door to lock the entire dance, which she had, which I had.
The pearls of her earrings were cool against my jaw and the silk of her dress was warm against my forearm and her perfume was a thing I would smell for the rest of my life when I closed my eyes.
Her body came up against mine in the silk and the heat and the smell of her perfume and the small particular pressure of her hipbone against mine that I had not stopped feeling for the entire dance.
I lifted her, two inches, and pressed her against the door.
The skirt of her dress slid up her thighs.
The silk made a sound. She wrapped one leg around the back of my thigh, the small black satin heel of her shoe pressing into the back of my knee.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“How long do we have.”
“Five minutes. Maybe seven.”
“That is enough.”
“Eden.”
“It is enough. I do not want all of it. I want some of it. I want you to put your hands on me and remember what I look like in this dress and I want to walk back into that ballroom knowing that the only man in the building who has touched me tonight was the one I am going to marry.”
I did not have a counter to that.
I did not want one.
I kissed her throat.
The hollow at the base of it. The line of her jaw.
The pearl drop of her earring. I kept one hand at the back of her thigh holding her up and I let the other hand go up along the silk of her side and find the edge of the low back of the dress.
My fingers under the fabric. Skin. The freckles I knew by touch now.
The line of her spine. The small soft dip at the small of her back.
She made a sound.
The sound she made when she was past being able to be careful. The sound she made at three in the morning at her loft when there was nobody on any street outside.
We were in a salon in the Pierre Hotel.
I covered her mouth with mine to keep the sound in.
I will tell you what we did not do.
We did not undress.
We did not lie down. We did not finish. We did not give ourselves over to the thing the way we had given ourselves over to it in the loft six days ago.
I will tell you what we did do.
I unzipped the back of her dress two inches.
Just enough to let my hand inside the silk.
I put my mouth at the base of her throat.
I put one hand under the silk at her ribcage, against bare skin, and I held her there.
She unbuckled my belt with one hand because her other arm was around the back of my neck holding her up.
She unzipped me. She slid her hand inside and she found me and she said my name in a voice low enough that only the door heard it.
I lifted her.
I lifted her with both hands under her thighs and I held her against the door and the skirt of her mother’s dress fell around my forearms in a long black curtain.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“Now.”
I moved her satin underwear aside. I pressed into her against the door. The silk of the dress between us in places and not between us in others. Her mouth open against my temple. Her ankle hooked behind my back. The pearl drop of her left earring against my cheekbone.
She made the sound again. I covered her mouth again with my own.
We did not move much.
We did not need to move much.
The whole hour of dancing, the whole long week of waiting, the whole twenty-one days since I had put my mouth on her in the boathouse for the first time, had brought us both to a place where moving much was not the point.
The pressure was the point. The proximity was the point.
The fact of doing this in a small lockable salon in the Pierre while three hundred people drank champagne forty feet away was the point.
I felt her come.
It was small. It was quiet. It was almost soundless. She bit down on the place where my collar met my neck and she shuddered against me and she held my forearms with both her hands and her whole body went tight and then loose and then tight and then loose against me in the way her body did.
I held her there.
I did not finish.
I held her there and I waited for my own heart to slow down and I kissed her temple and I let her ankle slide down off my back and I set her on her feet again, slowly, my arms still around her in case her legs did not work for a second.
They did not.
I held her.
“Atlas.”
“I know.”
“I have to walk back into that ballroom in ninety seconds.”
“I know.”
“And eat dessert.”
“I know.”
“With my father.”
“I know.”
She made a sound that was halfway laughter and halfway something else.
She tipped her forehead against my chest. The line of her collarbone was flushed pink.
The pearl drop of her earring had caught against the lapel of my tux and I unhooked it carefully with my fingers.
Her breath came in slow against my shirt.
I kept my hand at the small of her back, on the bare skin under the silk where I had unzipped two inches.
I held her there for one more second.
I held her there because I could.
I held her there because it was the last private moment we were going to have for the next four hours, and I had spent enough years not having private moments with this woman that I had started counting the ones I did have.
She lifted her head.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“I am ready.”
“You are ready.”
“Lipstick.”
“Lipstick is shockingly intact.”
“Atlas.”
“What.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
She kissed the corner of my mouth, brief, the way she had kissed me a thousand times over the last six weeks when there were people in the next room.
Then the knock came.
A precise knock. Three soft taps. Then a voice.
“Atlas.”
It was Hawk Mercer.
Of course it was Hawk Mercer.
“Atlas,” he said again. Through the door.
Calm. Pitched low enough that the corridor would not hear.
“Senator’s looking for you. He’s at the table.
I told him you went to take a call. You have about ninety seconds to be in the corridor.
The man you do not want to meet is by the cloakroom.
I am going to walk him to the front of the building.
Take the back stairs to the corridor and come up the other side. I will see you back at the table.”
There was a beat.
“Eden, you’re a vision tonight,” Hawk added through the door, pleasantly, the way a man says it to a woman he has known since she was a child.
Then his footsteps moved away.
I looked at Eden.
Eden looked at me.
She started laughing.
It was very quiet. Mostly soundless. The kind of laugh that came up from the bottom of her chest and ended in her shoulders. She pressed her face into my chest and she shook and I held the back of her head and I let her have it.
“Hawk,” she said into my jacket.
“Hawk.”
“How does Hawk know.”
“Hawk has eyes.”
“Hawk has eyes.”
I straightened my own clothes. I helped her zip the back of her dress. I straightened her earring. I tucked one piece of her hair behind her ear. I put my own bow tie back into place. I checked her lipstick in the small mirror on the wall.
“Lipstick is somehow still perfect,” she said.
“You bought the right brand.”
“I bought my mother’s brand.”
“Of course you did.”
I kissed her, briefly, a kiss that was almost chaste, on the corner of her mouth.
“Ninety seconds,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I let her out first.
She walked down the corridor toward the ballroom in her mother’s dress and her mother’s earrings, with her hair re-tucked and her chin up, and she did not look back at me. She knew not to.
I waited a count of twenty. Then I followed.
I had spent every Hartwell of my adult life on the periphery of this corridor.
I had taken phone calls in this corridor.
I had stood and listened to my best friend take a call from his daughter at Yale in this corridor in 2019.
I had once held a champagne flute against my forehead at the corner of this corridor while I tried to make myself stop thinking about the senator’s eldest daughter in a red dress, six tables away.
This was the first year that thinking about her was no longer a thing I had to stop.
The corridor had not changed.
I came out of the salon door.
I turned to the right toward the back stairs Hawk had told me to take.
I did not get to the back stairs.
I walked straight into Marcus Ellery.
He was standing in the middle of the corridor. The camera was still around his neck. The credential was still pinned to his lapel. The credential had a name on it that was not his name and the photograph on it was not his photograph.
He had been waiting for me.
He smiled.
The smile was small. The smile was a smile he had been preparing in the corridor for twenty minutes.
I had no jacket buttoned. My collar was not perfect. Eden was eight feet away from me down the corridor walking in the other direction with her bare back to a man with a camera around his neck.
I stepped between him and her without looking like I was stepping between him and her.
I did not say anything.
He waited.
I waited longer.
The corridor was very quiet.
The ballroom doors were two turns away. The orchestra was beginning the next song. Somewhere down the corridor a woman laughed. The cloakroom attendant somewhere out of sight asked someone if they had a coat ticket.
Marcus Ellery and I stood three feet apart in the dim red corridor of the Pierre Hotel and looked at each other.
He was the first one to speak.
He said: “Mr. Cain.”
He did not finish the sentence.
He did not need to.
I already knew what he was going to say.
I was going to make sure he never got the chance to say it to anyone else.