Chapter 3 #2
We walk out into the parking lot. The fluorescent lighting gives way to late-afternoon sun and the smell of asphalt and, faintly, a Dumpster behind the kitchen exit.
I do not let go of Callum's hand until we are between the cars.
When I do, my own hand feels suddenly cold, which is the kind of detail I am going to ignore.
"Ms. Abb— Noor."
"Mr. Brennan."
"That was —"
"I know."
"That was —"
"I know, Mr. Brennan."
"It worked."
"You're surprised?"
"I'm pleased. There's a difference."
He looks at me. He really looks at me, in the parking lot, with the late sun cutting across his face and his hair lit up red at the edges like a struck match — the same image I had on Tuesday, the first time I saw him, only different now because I have spent four meetings looking at him and the image is less of a picture and more of a person.
"You smile when you're pleased," he says. "You don't smile when you're surprised."
I open my mouth. I close it.
I have known this man, in the capacity of working alongside him, for less than two weeks.
"How do you know that?" I ask.
He shrugs. The shrug is small. The shrug is, somehow, the most disarming thing he has done all day.
"I pay attention," he says.
I look at him. I look at the man who has, for the last two hours, stood at my elbow without saying more than fourteen words and whose silence I now understand has been a form of attention that I did not budget for, and I feel, very distinctly, a tile shift in the foundation I have built.
Patience is a strategy. It says so on my dashboard. I have written it there to remind myself.
I do not feel patient right now. I feel, quite suddenly, like I am standing in a parking lot with a man who has just paid attention to me in a way that no one in a long time has paid attention to me, and I do not know what to do with my hands, and I do not know what to do with the air in my lungs, and I do not know what to do with the fact that the contract I have just successfully tested is already starting to feel insufficient to the actual situation it is governing.
I clear my throat. I shift my tablet to my other arm. I say, "Mr. Brennan."
"Callum is fine."
"Callum."
The first time I have used his name. It does something to his face that I am not going to describe, because I have spent two hours managing my own face and I am not going to give anyone else's face the credit for being more interesting than mine.
"Yes?" he says.
"I have a client dinner tonight. It's not a rally event.
It's a private corporate booking I'm finalizing for next month.
The client is in town, and he's the kind of man who" — I search for the word — "interprets professional courtesy as a personal invitation.
He's been emailing me about it for a week.
I have been politely declining. He has not been politely accepting the decline. "
Callum's face does the thing it does when he is paying attention. The shrug muscles disappear. The grin goes flat. His shoulders, which had been loose, square up by about half an inch.
"What do you need?" he asks.
"I need a person to be at the bar of the restaurant, eating a steak, in a leather cut, who I can wave at if the situation becomes unmanageable. The person does not need to interact with the client. The person just needs to be visible."
"I can be a person at a bar. I can do a person at a bar very well."
"You wouldn't be on the clock."
"Noor. I am volunteering."
"This is not in the contract."
"I am volunteering off-contract. It is, what's the legal term, pro bono. "
"Pro bono presence at a dinner."
"Yes."
"Mr. Brennan."
"Callum."
"Callum."
There is a moment. There is a moment in the parking lot that I will, later, mark on the timeline I am building of this whole arrangement, because I will need to know when the line started to shift.
The moment is small. The moment is just him standing across from me, in the late-summer sun, with his hand still warm where mine had been, and saying my name. Callum. Just that.
I turn toward my car. I say, over my shoulder, "Seven o'clock. The Antler. Bar seat by the front window. Don't break anything."
"Noor."
"Yes?"
"I will try my hardest."
I get in the car. I close the door. I sit for a moment with my hands on the wheel and my heart doing something I have not, technically, written into Appendix C, and I think, very clearly, this is going to be a problem.
Then I start the car. I drive home. I open the spreadsheet — EFR-2026 — and I add a new tab.
I label it unbudgeted.
I do not, yet, fill it in.
But I save the file, and I close the laptop, and I get dressed for dinner, and at seven p.m. I walk into the Antler and there he is, at the bar, in his cut, with a steak in front of him and a glass of water, looking, for all the world, like a man who belongs exactly where he is sitting.
He does not wave. He does not look at me.
He glances up once, very briefly, when I walk past with the client toward our table, and the look says, I see you. I am here. Do whatever you need to do.
The client is exactly the man I expected.
The dinner is exactly the dinner I expected.
I do not, in the end, need to wave. I close the contract.
I shake the client's hand. I walk out, and on my way past the bar I drop a folded napkin beside Callum's plate on which I have written, in pencil, thank you, and he picks it up after I'm gone and reads it and tucks it into the inside pocket of his cut, where I imagine it will live for several days, and then on Sunday at our six-p.m. check-in he will pull it out and slide it back across the table to me and say, for the file.
But that is later. Right now I am walking out of a restaurant and the night is warm and my chest is loud, and I have just decided two things at the same time, both of them in violation of contracts I have personally drafted.
The first is that I am going to keep this man.
The second is that I have not yet figured out how to tell him.