Chapter Three #2
“Do you mean as the head of an internationally renowned private investigation firm?” he asks.
I roll my eyes and have the distinct impression that he is not used to seeing such insolence. So I do it again, and for longer, and I add a long-suffering sigh, for good measure. “I think you know that I do not.”
He stands at that and I watch him perform that same gesture that I’m certain is unconscious, a simple touch to his lapel, because when he sees me tracking it, he stops.
“You asked and I told you,” he says, and his tone does not match the intensity in his gaze. “I am an open book, Annagret. You may read it or not as you wish.”
And I read a great deal over the next few days, but most of it involves toggling between my active cases, the guest list for that masked ball, and a barrage of information on random women entering the country some thirty-five years ago.
My active cases begin to feel like a refuge.
“We are so lucky,” Tess sighs at me a handful of days into the firm’s occupation by an impostor.
She catches me racing in after a fruitless morning meeting spent with one of our more overwrought clients.
We are forever following her boyfriends around the city, looking for evidence that they are after her rather modest inheritance.
When mostly what they are is nothing more than the same low caliber of man—that is, barflies who I am never certain realize she has money to begin with, much less have any designs on it.
I tried my best to convince her, over crepes and coffee, that her latest boyfriend should be kicked to the curb.
Not because he’s cheating on her—though he is—or even because he’s out for her money—which he could be, but I doubt he’s bright enough to notice she has some—but because he resembles nothing so much as a rat.
Physically, I mean. And his attempts at musicianship in dive bars do not give him the patina of success that she seems to think.
But if she listened to me or my advice, she wouldn’t be a repeat customer.
I stop in the outer office and focus on Tess. “I have no idea what you mean,” I say. “What luck? I’d like some of it, if it’s available.”
“I’ve spent all my years here impressed with Mr. Garnier’s abilities,” she says, which I feel like a sharp betrayal.
As if she should know who the real Luc Garnier is, even though I’ve hidden it.
Deliberately. From her, specifically, as well as the world outside these walls.
“And then when he finally turns up, he exceeds every expectation I could possibly have of him. Isn’t it marvelous? ”
That is not the word I would use. But I can’t share the word I’d like to use with her. She’ll read things into it. She’ll make assumptions and build a narrative.
She’ll get too close to the truth, something in me whispers, and I don’t much care for being called out from within.
It feels like more of that unwelcome vulnerability.
“I’m glad that you’re enjoying his presence here,” I say, trying to be careful while also not sounding careful, and I don’t think I quite land it. “I don’t know how long we can depend on his being in the office. But yes, it’s just delightful while it happens.”
The phone rings, saving me from that look of speculation on her face, and I’m certain that I’ve saved myself from an interrogation as she goes to answer it.
I march back to my office, already coming up with devastating remarks that I can use to lay into him when I see him—
But his office is empty.
And once again, I find myself forced to contend with the fact that I am more invested in this man, this lie of mine brought to gloriously impossible life—than I ought to be.
A few more days pass, and things almost begin to feel like a routine.
Sometimes I see him in the office, always on that laptop of his.
Sometimes we pass in the hallway and he inclines his head as if he is made entirely of carefully cultivated manners.
There’s something about him that makes me want to respond in kind, though it would be completely ridiculous in a setting like this.
Not to mention… I don’t actually know who he is.
I don’t need to curtsy to this man.
I spent a lot of time interrogating myself about why I feel I should.
One night, I run into the office after a long night of surveillance, thinking that I can get a few hours of sleep on the couch in my office before a midmorning meeting without having to go all the way back home—where I am much more likely to sleep too long.
I’m surprised to find all the lights on when I arrive, and even more surprised that when I walk back toward the offices, the lights are coming from his office.
And more, he’s there.
Not simply tapping away at his laptop while dressed to impress, as usual.
Tonight not-Luc-Garnier is spread out on the sleek leather couch in the big office, wearing nothing but a pair of lounging trousers.
That’s the only thing I can think of to call them, because they are not the sweats a lesser man might don. They are the kind of gray that suggests cashmere and the trousers themselves seem to be involved in a complicated hagiography of their wearer.
Though as far as I can see, he is entirely proportional… and it occurs to me that the tailoring of his perfect suits is about minimizing his assets, not enhancing them.
This notion leaves me breathless.
Inside, everything in me urges me to turn and leave before he sees me. To get out of here, because it doesn’t matter what he’s doing. Or wearing. What matters is that I can’t seem to get a handle on what’s happening inside me.
In my head, I turn and move silently back down the hall, let myself out of the office, and grab a car to take me home.
The truth is, I don’t move.
At all.
I stand there for a long moment, aware of entirely too many things. Not simply Luc. He is not Luc, I correct myself, but the corrections don’t matter. He is like a portrait of the perfect man, and I have never imagined myself the kind of woman who would be rendered helpless at this sort of thing.
At the sight of all that male beauty, just there, on the other side of a wall of glass.
His head is propped up on the arm of the sofa, and he is holding his phone in his hand, frowning at it as he scrolls.
And everything else is just…hot.
I think that my head is spinning and I’m losing control, but in another moment I realize that actually, what I’m hearing is his music. It’s sweeping and classical, and something about that seems to grip me in a tight fist.
I tell myself, desperately, that it’s information. More information, that’s all. But I know better.
He doesn’t know I’m here and he can’t have expected me. I didn’t know I’d be here tonight either.
So this feels like a window into whoever he really is. At his ease, and this classic, wildly emotional piano music playing all around him.
I feel as if I’m seeing into his secrets.
As if this is his moment of vulnerability, yet instead of feeling powerful for seeing it, it makes me feel stripped bare too.
And all I can think is… I want more .
It’s as if I’m compelled by something outside myself.
I move closer, drifting down that hallway as if I’m in a dream. And I know the precise moment he lifts his gaze from his phone to me.
I feel it, like a touch.
Like a caress, something in me whispers, as the sensation washes over me, a sweet, scalding heat, marking me from the very top of my head down to the tip of my toes.
Then pulsing everywhere in between.
What I want to do is go and press my overheated face to the cool glass.
But I realize that’s a lie even as I think it. It’s not that I don’t want to do that, it’s that I don’t want to do only that.
Glass is not the only place I’d like to put my face.
I want, more than I can put into words, to move inside that room. To open that door, walk across that office, and press my body against his.
Of all the truths that his appearance here has brought to light, this one feels as if it might tear me to shreds. As if it might actually be the end of me.
Because I have never wanted anyone. Not like this.
Not at all, if I’m honest.
It has never been for lack of offers. But somehow, no matter how soulful the gaze or entertaining the conversation, I can never see my way through to what might be expected on the other side of such social niceties.
I can never understand how a person looks at another, comes to some agreement, and starts systematically removing clothes.
And then they go and press their bodies together, flailing about until pleasure is achieved.
It’s not that I think that there’s anything wrong with these things. It’s only that each step along the path seems so outside my comprehension. I can’t see the connection between the conversation and the desire to strip.
Or why I would ever allow someone to see me do such a thing, baring myself entirely before them.
Until now.
Because I realize that conversation is completely unnecessary. If he crooks his finger, I am terribly afraid, I would happily strip where I stand and then go to him without question.
I can feel my yearning for him as a physical thing. I don’t care who he is.
Or rather, my body doesn’t care who he is. It doesn’t care what he’s hiding, or what he’s doing here.
Everything inside me wants him, that’s all. That’s everything.
It is as if all those sensations and longings in me are a song, and he is the only one who can sing it, and all I want to do is sing along.
It’s as if everything in me is already his.
I watch as he sets his phone aside. There’s something stark in his expression, austere in a completely different way. There is a knowing there—
And everything in me wants it. Even as somewhere deep inside, something in me shivers, too.
I’m aware of so many things at once. That music, all around me. That look in that steeped-tea gaze of his, highly caffeinated tonight though it seems. Dark but with that gold swirled through it.
And there’s so much of his body on display. That perfect chiseled chest, all ridges and planes, and I have never felt softer, smaller, or more feminine.
When I have never thought of myself as any of those things.
It’s as if looking at him makes me want to be some version of femininity I never quite grasped before now.
As if he is a decoder ring, and now, finally, I understand the entirety of a secret language that was lost to me before.
I can’t tell if I’m holding my breath, or breathing too heavily, because it all seems to be part and parcel of the same thing.
He stares at me, this man of myth that I made up and yet is all too real. This version of Luc Garnier that exceeds anything I could have imagined on my own—and yet, at the same time, is everything I imagined.
I stand there, frozen in place in the hallway.
My hallway, but right now, that isn’t how it feels.
And even though I can feel the floor beneath my feet and I know that this is not a cliff, but an office, I feel as if I’m poised on a precipice. As if at any moment, I might look down to find nothing but a steep, endless drop into God only knows what.
As if I can feel the wind up here, shuddering on this edge.
It’s as if all it would take is a breath. His or mine, I do not know.
But in the end, there is no wind, no cliff.
The song he’s listening to ends and in the interval before the new one begins, reality asserts itself.
I feel as if I’ve been released from a tight fist.
I suck in a breath, and it hurts.
His gaze is locked to mine, and there’s something there. Something that almost looks…stricken?
But I’ll never know. Because I turn and duck into my office, and for good measure, I lock the door behind me.
And I don’t come out again until morning.