27. Harper
HARPER
Between the amazing times with Asher and Killian, and missing Maddox, work is always a nice breather for me to shift focus.
Mallory left Thursday for a family function in Lyon and handed me her clipboard with the specific expression of a woman who trusts the person she’s leaving it with and is still slightly concerned about leaving it.
I told her to go, I had it covered, enjoy the weekend. She went. I have the clipboard.
This morning that means the great hall walkthrough for the midsummer event setup falls to me, Odette Girard from venue operations, and Raphael, who is the in-house contracted DJ for the estate’s special events and has been in a very good mood all week for reasons he hasn’t explained and that I haven’t pushed on because I have my own reasons I’m not explaining to anyone.
I’ve worked with Odette a handful of times since I started and she’s excellent at her job.
Twenty-eight, French, the kind of efficient that makes you feel behind just standing near her, never a hair out of place.
Professional in the way of someone who decided early that competence was the armor that fit her best and has worn it so long it’s become natural.
She is currently, unmistakably, flustered.
Raphael walked in twenty minutes ago with his equipment case and a coffee and said “Bon matin” to the room, which is about the extent of his French, and Odette’s clipboard shifted from her left hand to her right and back again in the span of about four seconds.
She recovered immediately and has been perfectly professional since but I clocked it and I have been quietly charmed by it ever since.
She likes him.
She likes him and she’s been trying very hard not to show it and Raphael, bless him, is completely oblivious, moving around the great hall with the easy energy of a man who has no idea he has this effect and is just here to do his job and probably make everyone in the room laugh at least once.
It is so cute I could die.
We’re halfway through the setup review when I look at the playlist Odette has drafted from the estate’s standard rotation and feel something professionally itch.
“This is good,” I say. “But I think we’re missing something.”
Odette looks at the list. “The client approved this selection.”
“The client approved it as a baseline. For Rosé’s launch, I want something that feels like an event rather than a dinner party.
Something people will still be talking about the next day.
” I look at Raph, who is perched on the edge of one of the hall’s long tables with his coffee.
“What if we do a live band and DJ combination?”
Odette frowns at her clipboard. “A combination? How would that work? They would have to take turns, non?”
“Not if the DJ is good enough to work with them in real time.” I nod at Raphael. “Raph has a very talented ear. Think of it like live remixes. The band plays, he layers and shapes it, the whole thing becomes something you can’t hear anywhere else.”
Odette looks uncertain. “It’s a little difficult to visualize.”
I smile. “Trust me.” I turn to Raph. “Show us what you’ve got.”
Raphael sets down his coffee. He looks at me with the specific expression of a man who has been given permission to do exactly what he was hoping to be asked to do. “How can I turn down the chance at peacocking,” he says, and pushes off the table.
His skeleton setup is already in the corner of the hall where he staged it when he arrived. He crosses to it, plugs in his phone, pulls his headphones up around his neck. He selects something, nods once to himself, and then puts the headphones on fully.
The room is quiet. He hasn’t set up the output yet so we can’t hear anything he’s playing, but he’s at the board now, head moving slightly, hands moving over the equipment with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing this since before it was a career for him.
There’s something absorbing about watching it, the way his whole focus narrows down, the version of Raphael that isn’t performing for anyone because he’s just in the work.
Odette is also watching him.
She is watching him in the specific way of a woman who has given herself thirty seconds to just watch before she remembers she’s supposed to be professional about it.
I lean slightly toward her.
“So does he know?” I ask, keeping my voice low.
She startles. “Does he know what?”
“That you like him.”
She draws herself up. “I don’t know what you— of course I don’t—”
“Odette. I have been on this estate for how long? Today is the first time I have ever seen you switch your clipboard between hands.”
The blush that crosses her face is quick and betraying. She clears her throat and looks at her paperwork with enormous focus. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Fine,” I say pleasantly. “Don’t tell me.”
A pause. She keeps looking at her clipboard.
“Fine, yes,” she says, very quietly. “But it’s nothing.
It’s completely nothing.” She glances over at Raph, who still has his headphones on and is nowhere near this conversation.
“And anyway he obviously…” She clears her throat again.
“He was clearly interested in you when you first arrived. You two were always together.”
I blink. “Raph and I are friends.”
“Of course,” she says, with the polite tone of someone who doesn’t entirely believe that.
“We have been just friends from the beginning,” I say. “Our friendship was basically inevitable given that my best friend is dating his brother. And we are still just friends. A handsome friend, obviously, but only a friend.”
Odette tilts her head. “I just assumed from the way he talked about you that perhaps you’d been together and things had ended and that’s why there was distance.”
I shake my head. “Nope. Never dated. And if we had been dating I think I’d have considerably more free time than I currently have.”
She frowns slightly. “What kind of relationship doesn’t allow for free time?”
I open my mouth.
“One with a lot of hands,” I say.
There is a brief pause in which Odette begins to formulate what is clearly going to be a very reasonable follow-up question and I make a very direct internal request to the universe that Raphael choose this exact moment to resurface.
The universe, for once, cooperates.
“Okay,” Raph says, pulling his headphones down to his neck with a grin that means he’s pleased with whatever he just did. “This is rough, keep that in mind, but…”
He hits the output.
The great hall fills with something that starts as a waltz, formal and sweeping, the kind of thing you’d hear at a black tie event, and then Raph’s hand moves and it shifts, layering underneath it something modern and rhythmic, and the two sounds find each other and lock and the result is genuinely, embarrassingly good.
You could waltz to it. You could also absolutely not waltz to it.
You could do something entirely more interesting to it.
Odette’s clipboard lowers three inches.
Raph watches her face while the mix runs with the careful attention of a man checking his work against the right metric, and when he’s satisfied he cuts it and grins.
Odette stares at him.
“That was a rough edit,” he says.
“That was…” she starts, and then seems to realize she’s been staring and corrects to professional. “Very effective.”
Raph’s grin does not dim. He steps away from the setup, crosses the hall floor, and stops in front of Odette with the fluid confidence of a man who has just determined exactly what note to play next. He dips into a small, theatrical bow and extends his hand.
“May I?”
Odette looks at his hand. Looks at him. Looks at his hand again.
She takes it.
I watch him lead her across the great hall floor, the mix still drifting from the speakers, and think: oh.
So he does know she likes him. He absolutely knows.
He’s been knowing this whole time and has been waiting for the right moment to do something about it and that moment was apparently right now in the middle of a midsummer event planning session.
My god he’s adorable.
Warmth comes up behind me. A familiar presence at my shoulder.
“Oh my god,” Sophia breathes. “They are so cute.”
“Right?”
We stand side by side watching Raph say something that makes Odette laugh, real and unguarded, the version she’s been carefully keeping behind the professional composure all morning, and Sophia makes a soft delighted sound.
“We should all do dinner tonight,” she says. “Some dancing. We can be the reason they officially happen.”
“I love this plan.”
“Vine,” Sophia says decisively. “So you don’t feel like a fifth wheel.”
I freeze.
I do a very fast and specific calculation about the current composition of my social circle and what it means in terms of fifth wheels and who would need to attend to address that problem, and I look at Sophia.
She’s smiling at me. Fully. The smile of a woman who knows exactly what she just said.
“Um,” I say. “Why would that fix the fifth wheel problem?”
“Fine,” Sophia says, with great and deliberate casualness, “I figured Uncle Asher would be overseeing Vine, as usual, and since you two are seeing one another, it’d give you a nice cushion having him there.”
I choke on a breath.
Sophia’s face does the thing where she’s trying very hard not to laugh and failing and then giving up on not failing entirely, and she puts both arms around me from the side and squeezes while laughing in my ear. “I really hope you’re swallowing better than that, bestie,” she says.
“Sophia, I’m sor—”
“Don’t be sorry.” She squeezes again. “You’re a beautiful, amazing woman and like I said before, you’re all adults.” She pulls back and cups my face with a smirk on her lips. “But we are not ever, ever, sharing straws ever again.”
I can’t help it. I laugh and she joins in, hugging me again. I hug her back while across the great hall Raphael has spun Odette once and she’s come back to him with pink cheeks and the smile of a woman who has stopped trying to be professional about it.
I love my job.