3. Skye
— ? —
Skye
Five Months Before the Wedding
The private elevator needs a code, and I’m one of ten people alive who have it. The takeout bag swings against my hip while the numbers climb to sixty, and I’m already smiling.
Four midnights in a row have earned my fiancé a surprise.
Cheeseburgers from the diner we shut down on our third date, extra pickles, no tomato, a far cry from his usual chef-cooked meals.
But this is his guilty pleasure. The wedding binder ate my Saturday.
The Hollis gala at work ate my Sunday. All I want is one hour with him that doesn’t involve a seating chart or a donor list.
The sixtieth floor is his. All of it. Glass offices for his deal team, a boardroom with a table cut from a single slab of walnut, and at the far end, behind double doors tall enough for a cathedral, the office where he keeps the skyline like a pet.
Tonight everything is dark except that far end, gold light spilling across the marble.
Ten steps from the doors, I stop walking.
Leslie is perched on the edge of his desk. Shoes off, one heel dangling from her fingers, head tipped back on a laugh that carries down the whole hallway. Her other hand rests on his forearm.
Jaime leans away from her, eyes on his monitor, one hand still on the keyboard. He isn’t touching her. He isn’t moving her hand off his arm, either.
She sees me first. And she takes her time about it, sliding off the desk in one smooth motion, stepping back into her heels, smoothing her skirt while I stand in the doorway holding a paper bag going translucent at the bottom.
“Skye!” My name comes out of her all sparkle. “He’s all yours, I promise. We were celebrating. The deal closed tonight.”
“Congratulations.”
“Oh, you brought dinner.” Her gaze lands on the bag and goes soft with pity. “That is so sweet. We ordered in at seven, the whole team, but he’ll pretend to be starving for you. Won’t you, Jaime?”
“Skye.” He’s on his feet too fast, knee cracking the desk drawer. “Hey. You didn’t say you were coming.”
“That’s generally how surprises work.”
Two champagne flutes sit on the bar cart behind him, next to a bottle. One flute has lipstick on the rim.
“The team was here until nine,” he says, following my eyes. “My father sent up a case of the ‘96. You just missed everyone.”
“Everyone except Leslie.”
“Someone has to file the closing documents.” Leslie collects a folder off his desk and hugs it to her chest. “Oh, and Skye, I saw the venue on the shared calendar. Gorgeous choice. If he ever gets cold feet, don’t worry. I’ll chase him back down the aisle for you myself.”
“Ha,” I say, because the alternative is a felony.
She passes me in the doorway, and her hand curls around my arm and squeezes, warm, conspiratorial. “You are so lucky. Everyone in this building is half in love with him.”
Then she’s gone, heels ticking away into the dark, and I’m left wondering what kind of person says that to a man’s fiancée.
The burgers go cold on the credenza while Jaime walks me through the deal, wired and bright-eyed, sketching numbers in the air with both hands.
This is the version of him I fell for four years ago.
The boy who gets so excited about a win he talks with his whole body.
The one who kissed me for the first time mid-sentence because, he claimed afterward, he’d run out of ways to stall.
So I hold it together. Through his victory lap. Down sixty floors of private elevator. Into the Aston, where the seats know my body.
Then I can’t anymore.
“She was sitting on your desk.”
His hands flex on the wheel. “Here we go.”
“Her shoes were off, Jaime.”
“She’s an employee. Do you hear yourself right now?”
“I hear myself fine. Do you hear her? ‘Everyone’s half in love with him.’ Who says that to a fiancée? Who takes her shoes off in her boss’s office and stays two hours after the team goes home?”
“Someone comfortable at her job. Someone friendly.” The light ahead turns red, and he looks over at me with an expression I will spend months trying to unremember. “Is this about the wedding?”
“Don’t.”
“Because Dr. Amin said stress does this. It takes small things and blows them up until they fill the whole room.”
“Don’t quote my own therapist at me.”
“Then don’t make me choose between defending my assistant and defending my fiancée’s imagination.”
Imagination.
The word marches me back through my evidence under a harsher light, and my evidence is nothing.
A hand on an arm, a dangling shoe, lipstick on a glass that half the office touched.
There’s no exhibit A. There’s a feeling in my gut, and a gut can’t testify, and I already did this dance two months ago over a midnight text he answered from behind a locked bathroom door.
He said it was Tokyo and their time zones. I apologized before breakfast.
“Say it,” he says quietly. “Whatever’s in your head right now, say it to my face.”
“Two months ago I asked you about the texts.”
“And I told you what they were.”
“You took your phone into the bathroom, Jaime.”
“Because you were asleep and the call was going to be long.” His voice stays level, which somehow makes mine sound worse. “So this is a pattern now. That’s what you’re telling me. First the texts, now a shoe. What’s next, you smell her on my jacket? You follow me to lunch?”
“That’s not fair.”
“You showed up at my office at ten at night, baby.”
“With dinner!” The word cracks in half. “I came because I missed you. I didn’t know I’d be walking into date night at your desk.”
“Date night.” One dry laugh. “A closing celebration with my team is date night now.”
“She bought you a watch band for your birthday. Hand-stitched Italian leather, sized to your wrist, for the Patek your grandfather gave you. I found the receipt in the gift bag.”
“The whole office chipped in for that.”
“The card was signed L.”
“The card was signed by the team, and you remember an L because you need there to be an L.” His jaw ticks. “Do you have any idea what this feels like from my seat? Four years of coming home to you every single night, and one ambitious girl laughs at my jokes, and suddenly I’m on trial.”
“Nobody said trial.”
“You didn’t have to say it. You brought the whole courtroom in your eyes.”
Silence. The light goes green and he drives.
Three blocks of nothing. Then his hand leaves the wheel, finds the radio, and tunes it to my station, the one he calls audio wallpaper, and turns it up two notches. A peace offering in FM. Such a small thing. I stare out the window and let it work on me anyway.
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” I say, and it comes out small, and I hate it.
“I am your side. There is no other side.” He reaches across the console and takes my hand, thumb sweeping my knuckles, tender enough to sting my eyes.
“There’s you, and there’s a woman who works for me, and there’s whatever story your brain is writing at two hundred miles an hour.
I need you to hear this. Nothing is happening.
Nothing is ever going to happen. I want my employees to be comfortable around me.
That’s how I stay a billionaire and give the universe to you. ”
“Then why do I feel like this?”
“Honey. You’ve been planning a wedding, running the gala, and managing my mother. Anyone would be running on fumes.” He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to it, eyes still on the road. “It kills me that this is how tonight went. You brought me a cheeseburger.”
By the time the gate lifts on the private garage beneath the penthouse, the fight has turned itself inside out, and somehow I’m the one who ruined the evening.
He makes tea while I sit on the couch hating myself.
The kitchen is bigger than the apartment I gave up to move in here, marble and brass and a stove with more burners than we have ever used at once, and he still only reaches for the fancy kettle and one mug of everything.
Chamomile, too much honey, the way I take it when I’ve been crying.
That’s the whole problem. How am I supposed to stay suspicious of a man who soothes me with tea after he’s worked sixteen hours today?
While the kettle heats, I text Shelby under a throw pillow.
Me: I did it again. The Leslie thing.
Shelby: did something happen or did you SEE a thing
Me: shoes off. sitting on his desk. 10 p.m.
Shelby: and his explanation?
Me: wedding stress. my imagination. Dr. Amin got quoted.
Shelby: hm.
Me: what does hm mean
Shelby: it means I’m friends with your gut. tell your gut she can call me anytime.
He comes back with the mugs.
“Come here.” He settles beside me and pulls my feet into his lap. “Talk to me.”
“I’m embarrassed.”
“Don’t be.”
“I keep doing this. I don’t want to be the girl who checks pockets. I’ve never been her. You know I’ve never been her.”
“Hey. Look at me.” He waits until I do. His eyes are warm and absolutely certain, and I would have bet my life on them. “Do you remember the rooftop? The party?”
“Jaime.”
“You were the only person there who didn’t laugh at my jokes. A whole room working the party, and one woman by the railing telling me my pitch had a hole in it.” His thumb traces my ankle. “I went home and told my friend I met the person I’m going to marry, and she thinks I’m an idiot.”
“You were an idiot. The pitch had two holes.”
“One hole.”
“The revenue model and the churn math. Two.”
“See, this. This is what I picked.” He’s grinning now, soft, victorious.
“Out of everyone on earth. And in five months I’m going to stand up in front of every person we know and pick you again.
Leslie could show up to work on fire and I would not look twice.
A lot of women dream of marrying a person with wealth so these things happen.
But I promise, you’re the only one I choose. ”
A laugh betrays me. He tugs me in until my head finds the spot below his collarbone.
“I just need you to trust me,” he murmurs into my hair. “Can you do that? Can you give me that one thing?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
And whatever alarm has been ringing in my chest for two months goes quiet.
It shouldn’t have.
Later, I’m brushing my teeth when his phone buzzes in the bedroom.
Through the gap in the bathroom door I watch him carry it to the wall of glass, forty stories of city burning under his face, thumb moving fast. And just before he pockets it, I catch the motion. Swipe. Delete. Swipe. Delete.
“Work?” I ask, stepping out.
“Work.” He sets the phone face down on the nightstand and smiles at me across the dark bedroom, folding back the covers on my side of the bed. “These people never sleep.”
I climb in. His arm comes around my waist, and within minutes his breathing slows into the rhythm I could pick out of a crowd of thousands.
The phone sits six inches from my head.
It buzzes again in the dark.
He doesn’t stir. And I lie there under the arm of the man I’m going to marry, staring at the ceiling, practicing my trust.
Tomorrow he’ll bring me coffee in bed and kiss my shoulder and be so exactly the man I said yes to that tonight will feel invented by lunch. That’s the trick of it. Every morning, the proof runs in his favor.
One more buzz. Then the screen glows through the dark, patient, waiting to be read.
I close my eyes and keep them closed.