Chapter 5
Callum
I was twelve minutes early because I had been raised by a mother who believed lateness was a character flaw, and because sitting in the back of the car for twelve minutes was preferable to sitting in my office for twelve more minutes pretending I was not thinking about Avery Hale.
The evening had turned clear after the rain, the city rinsed clean and shining under a bruised gray sky.
Her building stood on a narrow residential street lined with old brick walk-ups and trees just beginning to remember they were alive.
It was not a bad building, but it was tired in the way young people’s first apartments often were tired, with a front door that had been painted too many times and a buzzer panel scarred by weather, keys, and impatience.
I looked at it through the tinted window and felt a touch of heartache twist in my chest. Robert would have hated that his daughter was living in a place with a lock that looked like it had lost several arguments.
That was the first thing I had to manage.
The protective instinct.
It came easily. Too easily. Avery was Robert’s daughter.
She had lost too much too young. I had promised to look out for her.
I could sit in a car outside her apartment and tell myself the whole evening was an extension of that promise, a late fulfillment of an old obligation I had neglected out of respect for her independence and my own cowardice.
That story was almost true, which made it useful and dangerous in equal measure.
My phone buzzed.
Benjamin: I see you have blocked off your evening as Private.
I stared at the screen.
Me: Observant.
Benjamin: I am deciding whether to alert counsel, clergy, or catering.
Me: Go home, Ben.
Benjamin: Is this dinner with the variable?
Me: Her name is Avery.
Benjamin: I notice you avoided the question.
I set the phone down on the seat beside me, but it buzzed again.
Benjamin: I will interpret your silence as both confirmation and a cry for help.
I almost smiled despite myself, then did not, because he was not entirely wrong.
This was a bad idea.
I had known that when I sent the text. I had also known that if I let the first real conversation I had with Avery in years be a job interview, with my desk between us and Benjamin breathing fire outside the door, I would be doing exactly what Robert would have hated.
She deserved more than an onboarding packet and a probationary title.
She deserved a meal, at least, and a chance to be human.
She deserved to have a chance to be spoken to without being evaluated.
That was the second story I told myself.
That one was true too.
The driver glanced at me through the rearview mirror. “Would you like me to call up, sir?”
“No,” I said. “She knows I’m here.”
I got out of the car and a few minutes later, the front door opened. Avery stepped out of the building, and every story I had assembled with such care went up like paper to a struck match.
Her dress was navy. It was simple, at first glance.
It had long sleeves, soft waist, hem just below the knee.
It wasn’t obviously expensive or obviously seductive, which made it worse, because there was nothing to dismiss as performance.
It followed her in quiet lines, catching at her waist, moving against her thighs as she took the final step onto the pavement.
Her coat was open. Her hair was down, pinned back loosely on one side and falling around her shoulders in soft waves that looked different from the damp, hurried knot she had worn in my office that morning.
Her face was composed, but not perfectly.
I could see the nerves in how she held her purse, in the half-second pause beneath the building light before she saw me.
And then she saw me and she paused. It was brief enough to be denied and long enough to be noticed.
Her eyes found mine across the sidewalk, and the city narrowed with a violence that had no business in such a quiet moment.
She did not look like a girl playing dress-up for dinner with her father’s friend.
She looked like a woman who had been thinking about this, worrying about it, maybe wanting it, and had come downstairs anyway.
There were rules for these things. Simple rules.
Men like me survived by respecting simple rules when complicated desires tried to make themselves sound exceptional.
Do not stare. Do not touch without reason.
Do not say the first word that comes into your mouth if the first word is beautiful and your use of it will alter the conversation between the two of you.
Choose restraint early, because restraint chosen later was mostly damage control.
“Avery,” I said. “You look lovely.”
Lovely was safe. Lovely had manners. Lovely could be said by a godfather, a dinner host, a man with no ulterior motive beyond catching up with the daughter of his oldest friend.
It was also insufficient to the point of dishonesty.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was steady, barely. “You’re early.”
“I know.”
“Do you have a condition?”
“Several. Punctuality is the least concerning.”
She laughed, and I had to look away toward the driver for a second because I liked making her laugh too much.
That was new or maybe it was not new, and I had simply failed, before now, to understand the nature of the pleasure.
There had always been a satisfaction in Avery’s laugh, even when she was younger, because it came honestly and often after resistance, but this was not that.
This felt like being rewarded by a woman whose guard had lowered one cautious inch.
The driver opened the door. I let Avery enter first and kept my hand to myself.
That, too, felt like an accomplishment.
Inside the car, she sat beside me with her knees angled slightly away, purse in her lap, her coat folding around her like dark petals. The scent of her reached me in the closed space, soft and faintly floral. It wasn’t heavy, but intimate enough that I wished I had not noticed it.
“How was the rest of your day?” I asked as the car pulled away from the curb.
She gave me a look. “Do you want the honest answer or the answer I would give in a job interview?”
“The honest one. I think we exhausted the interview version this morning.”
“I panicked for six hours, ate fries and drank wine with my best friend Jules, read Benjamin’s onboarding packet, panicked again, borrowed this dress, and was told not to decide the entire moral geometry of the evening before appetizers.”
I looked at her. “Moral geometry?”
“Jules was having a metaphor day.”
“I see.”
“She also called Benjamin a tiny corporate falcon at one point.”
That startled a laugh out of me. “He’ll be flattered.”
“He won’t.”
“He absolutely will. He’ll pretend not to be for six to eight business… months.”
Avery smiled out the window, and I watched the reflection of it in the glass. That was safer than looking directly at her mouth, but only slightly.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Marcel’s.”
Her head turned. “That sounds expensive.”
“It is.”
“Callum.”
There it was. Just my name. Two syllables, soft in her mouth, familiar by right and dangerous by effect. I had invited it, even if I had not said so aloud. I could hardly resent the consequence.
“It’s dinner,” I said. “Let me buy you dinner.”
“I have a job now. Probationary, but still. I can buy food.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“I don’t want you to think I expect—”
“Avery.”
She stopped.
I had not meant it to come out quite so firmly, but I saw the immediate effect, the little stillness along with the quick, attentive shift in her face. It pulled at something in me I had no intention of feeding.
I gentled my voice intentionally. “Tonight is not a test. It is not an extension of the interview, and it is not onboarding. Tomorrow, if you still want the job after Benjamin’s welcome packet tries to break your spirit, we can worry about the boss and employee stuff.
Tonight, this is just dinner between you and me. ”
She looked at me carefully.
I added, because I needed to put the proper label on it before my mind chose a worse one, “Between your godfather and his goddaughter, if we need a category. Or between two people who have known each other a long time and have not done a good enough job staying current with each other.”
Her expression softened at that, though something else moved beneath it too. Disappointment, maybe. Relief. Both? Neither? I wasn’t sure.
“Okay,” she replied. “Dinner.”
“Dinner.”
“We’re just catching up.”
“Yes.”
“No performance review with the entrées.”
“Not unless you order badly.”
Her smile returned, reluctant and lovely. “What counts as ordering badly?”
“Anything deconstructed.”
“That seems fair.”
Marcel’s was the sort of restaurant that had survived long enough to stop caring about trends.
Dark wood, white tablecloths, low brass light, a bar polished to a deep amber shine.
The owner knew me well enough to give me a table in the back that was private without being secluded.
I had chosen it with more care than I wanted to admit.
It was a restaurant where Robert and I had eaten several times after long meetings years ago, back when we both still believed most problems could be solved by steak, Scotch, and enough time to decompress properly.
Avery noticed the room immediately. Her eyes moved over everything, taking in the old, framed photographs, the waiters in white jackets, the heavy silver, the people speaking in low voices.
She did not look impressed exactly. She looked alert and a little amused, maybe even a little out of her depth and furious with herself for it.
“This place feels like someone here owns a horse named after a legal doctrine,” she said as we sat.
“I believe two of them do.”
“I knew it.”