17. Killian
KILLIAN
It’s late afternoon and I’ve had to stop myself from blowing up her damn phone.
This is, for me, genuinely difficult.
I’ve been at my desk since seven this morning and I’ve returned fourteen emails, approved two vendor contracts, sat through a forty-minute call with legal about the east wing proposal that Evelyn has been sitting on for reasons that have everything to do with leverage and nothing to do with the actual building, and I have not once picked up my phone to text Harper Brooks, which is a more active exercise in self-control than any of the other things I’ve done today combined.
I want her.
That’s not a new development but it’s sharper this morning than it’s been since the night she climbed out of my pool in that dress and my brain went offline for two full seconds.
Last night didn’t dull it. Last night made it significantly worse in the way that having something you’ve wanted for a long time tends to make the wanting of it worse, not better, because now I know exactly what I’m not contacting her about.
If I were twenty years younger I’d have gone to her suite at six in the morning, put her over my shoulder, and brought her back to my bed until she understood the situation fully.
Which is an unhinged thing to do and I was twenty years younger once and I understand the instinct and I’m also fifty-one years old and I know better.
She works for me, technically. She is Sophia’s best friend.
She slipped out before sunrise because she needed space to breathe and the appropriate response to that is to give her space to breathe and not to go find her.
I am a patient man.
I’ve been a patient man all day.
It’s the hardest I’ve worked at anything in recent memory.
My phone buzzes. Maddox.
Maddox: Where are you? We’re already at Vine.
I save the document I’m working on, close my laptop, and go.
Asher and Maddox are at the corner table when I arrive, the one that sits back from the main floor enough to have a conversation without the room involved.
They’re mid-discussion about something, Asher with his arms on the table and Maddox leaning back in his chair the way he sits when he’s thinking harder than he wants to look.
A bottle of the 2021 Pomerol is already open on the table and my glass is poured.
I sit. I lift the glass and swirl it once, watching the legs run slow down the inside, which tells me everything I already knew about the vintage.
I hold it to the light briefly, check the color at the rim, dark ruby bleeding to garnet at the edge, the kind of depth that takes years.
I bring it to my nose first. Dark fruit, a little earth, something mineral underneath.
I take the first sip and let it sit for a moment before I swallow.
Good. Better than good. Asher ordered well.
“How was Harper when we left this morning?” Asher asks.
I set the glass down. “She was gone before I woke up.”
Silence.
Maddox sits forward. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to her today?”
“No.” I look at him. “Have you?”
He shakes his head. Asher shakes his.
Asher’s jaw is doing the thing it does when something is bothering him and he hasn’t decided how to say it yet. “Do you think she’s okay?”
“I think she needed some space,” I say.
“Space.” He says it the way he says things he’s turning over. “What kind of space? Everything seemed—” he pauses. “It was going well. Wasn’t it.”
“I believe so.”
Maddox is looking at his glass. “Do you think she regrets it?”
I consider that for a moment. “I don’t think so,” I say. “She’d already been with the two of you before last night. She knew what she was stepping into when she stayed. I just think she woke up and needed to think.”
“That’s fair,” Asher says, though he still looks like it’s costing him something.
“Think about it from her side,” I say. “A threesome is not a common experience for most people. A quad is considerably less so. Most people don’t navigate that once let alone…
” I gesture loosely at the table. “This.” I look at Maddox.
“Other than this particular individual, who has apparently been practicing.”
Maddox points at me. “The Berlin thing doesn’t count.”
Asher turns to look at him. “How does a twenty-person party not count?”
“Because I didn’t know a single person’s name.”
“Rochelle,” I say.
Maddox opens his mouth. Closes it. “Okay. I knew Rochelle.”
“Twenty people and you knew Rochelle,” Asher says.
“She had a very memorable name.” He picks up his glass. “And it wasn’t a completely sober experience on my part, which I feel is relevant context.” He takes a sip. Sets the glass down. He’s looking at the table now rather than either of us. “Harper’s different.”
He says it simply. Not as a declaration, just as a fact he’s arrived at and sees no reason to qualify.
Neither Asher nor I respond because there’s nothing to add to it. We both know it. Maddox knows we know it. It’s why we’re sitting at this table at six in the evening instead of wherever else we’d otherwise be.
Asher refills his glass. “So we give her time.”
“We give her time,” I confirm.
Maddox nods slowly. “And we don’t crowd her.”
“And we don’t crowd her.”
We drink. The Pomerol is as good as it smelled and the table is quiet in the comfortable way of three men who have known each other long enough to sit in silence without it meaning anything other than that they’re thinking.
The right call. All three of us are sure of it.
I take the long way back through the south terrace.
I tell myself it’s because the evening air is good after a full day indoors and that’s true as far as it goes.
They’re at the far end of the terrace, arm in arm, Harper and Sophia, Sophia holding her phone out toward Harper with the full-body enthusiasm she gets when she’s found something that requires immediate external validation.
Harper tips toward the screen and then she laughs, the real one, the full version, the one that takes over her whole face before she decides whether to let it.
Sophia says something else. Harper shakes her head, still laughing, and they keep moving, easy together in the way they always are, the particular shorthand of two people who have been each other’s reference point for years.
I stop walking.
I watch them cross toward the south entrance, arm in arm, until they go through the door and the terrace is empty.
The right call.
We’re sure of it.
I turn back toward the main house and carry that certainty all the way to my suite, where I pour a second glass of something and sit by the window and think about her laughing until I run out of evening to do it in.