Chapter 16 Tessa
Chapter sixteen
Tessa
The rideshare app spins in my palm like it has somewhere better to be.
Every little car icon on the map is grayed out or creeping in the wrong direction, and the estimated wait time keeps revising itself upward with the cheerful indifference of bad news.
I mutter something unflattering about half the city deciding to leave at once.
George glances at my screen without asking permission.
"My house is three blocks from here," he says. "I can drive you home."
I look up at him, trying to locate the angle. There's nothing in his expression that looks like strategy. He's just standing there with his hands in his jacket pockets, not leaning in, not performing patience. The app refreshes: forty-two minutes. I have approximately zero dignity left to protect.
"Fine," I say.
We fall into step together on the pavement without discussing it, which feels like a small and telling thing.
The rain is holding itself back leaving a cool and faintly electric feeling in the air and I'm aware, suddenly, that I dressed for the indoor temperature of a gala rather than the actual night.
George doesn't walk fast the way some men do. He walks next to me. We move at the same pace.
We walk in silence for a while.
The first block is unremarkable: brownstones, a wine bar still glowing amber through its windows, a couple sharing a cigarette on a stoop and not talking.
Normal city things. By the second block, I start to notice the buildings stretch taller, the gaps between them lengthen, and the streetlights start to look noticeably tasteful.
I notice a security camera mounted above a gate, discreet enough that most people wouldn't clock it. I file it away and say nothing.
"Are you cold?" George asks.
"No," I say, half a second before I've actually decided.
He doesn't offer his jacket, and I'm grateful, because that would have been awkward. But he shifts almost imperceptibly, positioning himself on my windward side, so his shoulder catches the worst of the breeze. He doesn't comment on it. Something small and inconvenient turns over in my chest.
I think about Gerald at the gala, tilting toward George: Any relation to the Maddox billionaires? George had gone briefly, strangely blank — a glitch I'd covered with the nimble desperation of someone who's done it before.
But the question has followed me onto this street, where the hedges are sculpted into art, and the intercoms on the gates.
I think of the plans for Eleanor's wedding. The flower arrangements that cost more than my rent. The string quartet scheduled to play for three hours without anyone blinking.
It hadn't raised any alarm bells because people go all out for weddings.
But add in Margaret's house, where the kitchen alone swallowed my apartment whole, and I think I missed something big.
Like George is wealthy. Possibly ultra wealthy.
"We're almost there." George says quietly, and I realize I've been silent long enough that he noticed.
"How long have you lived in this neighborhood?" I ask, keeping my voice easy and curious.
"A while," he says.
The townhouse in front of us has tall sash windows, historic brickwork, an iron railing worn smooth in a way that speaks to generations of hands rather than recent renovation.
George pulls a heavy, old fashioned key from his pocket and fits it into the lock like this is the most ordinary thing in the world.
My brain goes oh.
Then the door opens, and I hear a dog welcoming him from somewhere out of sight. Either that or a bomb. Hard to tell.
The dog hits the hallway like a joyful catastrophe. He's large and chaotic with his ears flying, and tail converting his entire back half into a blur.
He finds me immediately and begins circling at speed, and I take an automatic step backward just to avoid being taken out at the knees.
I laugh. A real one, the involuntary kind.
"Baxter," George says, "likes you."
I crouch down and let the dog press his enormous, warm skull into both my hands, and for a moment I forget completely that I am kneeling on the floor of a house that probably costs more than I will earn in the next decade.
Baxter makes a sound of pure satisfaction and leans his full weight against my shins.
"He's usually suspicious of new people," George adds. His tone is dry, but when I glance up from the floor, his eyes are doing something else entirely.
"And not me?" I ask.
He considers this for a beat. "Maybe you don't scare him," he says.
Baxter flops sideways against my legs with the boneless confidence of someone who has decided we are old friends.
George disappears and returns with a glass of water, which is so unheroic and so exactly right that I almost say something.
I stand up and take in the room properly. There are high ceilings, dark wood, and a painting on the far wall that I'm almost certain is not a reproduction. The bookshelves run floor to ceiling and the spines are cracked, the shelves slightly uneven with actual use.
Through the rear window, the city glitters with headlights threading between towers, the distant geometry of lit windows stacked against the dark.
My brain is doing an inventory with focused, slightly panicked attention. My body has gone somewhere considerably softer, which I find deeply inconvenient.
George throws a rope toy down the hallway and Baxter runs after it, skidding on the hardwood with magnificent disregard for physics. George actually smiles, and I have to look away.
This, I think, is dangerously easy.
No performance. No managing the impression I'm making or reading the one he's making. Just the two of us and a ridiculous dog in a house that smells like old wood and something warm I don't have a name for.
George catches me looking at him and raises an eyebrow.
"Your dog has no concept of personal space," I tell him.
"He comes by it honestly," George says, and something in his expression suggests this is a confession he's not going to explain.
I don't push on it.
He drives me home twenty minutes later, and Baxter installs himself in the back seat with the solemn gravity of a chaperone who takes his responsibilities seriously, chin resting on my shoulder from behind. The streets are quiet.
I watch the city slide past and think that this, the not-talking, the easy dark, might be the most honest twenty minutes we've had in three weeks of strategic conversation.
He pulls up outside my building and I get out, and I know without looking that he's waiting. I hear the car idle as I push through the front door. By the time I reach the stairs, he's pulled away.
He waited.
I drop my bag inside my flat. Kick off my heels. Open my laptop before I've made any conscious decision to do so, driven by something between professional instinct and a feeling I refuse to name. My fingers find the search bar and type his name.
George Maddox.
The results load in a cascade — financial press, tech coverage, a photograph from some industry event where he's wearing the same careful, composed expression I've now watched him put on and take off like a coat. The headlines stack up, one after another, each one quietly enormous.
I lean back in my chair.
The thought arrives without drama, flat and certain as a closing door: I am so out of my league.