2. Sutton
SUTTON
The elevator opened on the Pixel Lofts rooftop, and the first thing I clocked was that Beckett wasn’t there yet.
That was fine. Beckett ran on Beckett time.
He’d show up when he showed up, which was usually fifteen minutes after he’d told me he would, with some half-explanation about a contractor or a permit or one of the other things he’d gotten himself wrapped up in since he’d decided to start buying real estate like a man with too much money and not enough hobbies.
I shrugged out of my suit jacket and draped it over the back of the chair where I usually sat. Then I crossed to the bar at the far end of the roof, nodded at the kid working it, and ordered the same thing I always ordered.
While he poured, I turned to face the rooftop and let myself breathe.
I’d been holding something in all day. I hadn’t labeled it.
I didn’t need to. Whatever it was, it had been there from the moment I’d walked out of that conference room this morning, and it had stayed there through six meetings, two calls with our licensing lead, a lunch I barely ate, and an afternoon I’d spent answering emails I couldn’t remember the contents of.
I lifted the drink the kid handed me. I took a sip. I turned to scan the rooftop the way I scanned every room I walked into, because old habits die hard and a man in my position learns early to know who’s where.
And then I saw her.
She was on one of the lounge couches across the rooftop. Her shoes were off. Her feet were tucked up under her. Her hair was down—a sight I hadn’t seen before because I’d only ever seen her in one room of one building. In that room, this morning, her hair had been pulled back.
She was laughing.
She was laughing at something the woman next to her said. Her head was tipped back, and even from across the rooftop, I could see the line of her throat.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t move for what was probably four seconds and felt like four minutes. I just stood there with my drink in my hand, registering the fact that the universe had apparently decided to escalate the situation it had started this morning by a factor I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t reverse.
Fuck.
That was the word that came to me. One word. No softening it.
The woman next to her was Hadley. I knew Hadley—barely.
Beckett had brought her around exactly once, about three weeks ago, which was two days after he’d come over to my place at 11:30, slightly drunk, and told me he was going to marry a woman he’d met six days earlier.
I’d told him he’d lost his mind. He hadn’t married her yet. He would. We both knew he would.
What I had not known, until this exact moment, was that Hadley knew her.
The her in question—the woman currently laughing on a couch in Beckett’s building with her shoes off—was the PM who’d stood in front of me this morning in a charcoal blazer with her hair pulled back.
She’d answered the only question I’d asked her with two words that I hadn’t been able to get out of my head since.
That’s fair.
She’d looked at me when she said it. Held my eyes. Not the way people held my eyes when they were trying to impress me. The way people held my eyes when they were telling me the truth.
I took another sip of my drink. I made a decision. I crossed the rooftop.
I crossed it slowly enough that I had time to watch Hadley clock me first. She saw me coming when I was about ten feet out, and the smile she gave me was the smile of a woman who’d figured something out about three seconds before I had.
Joss didn’t see me until I was almost on top of her. Then she looked up.
I watched her face do the recognition in real time.
The laugh died first. Her mouth opened a fraction.
Her eyes went wide. She made a small, almost involuntary motion, like she’d started to sit up straighter and then realized her feet were tucked under her and there was nothing graceful she could do about that on short notice.
I waited.
I had no intention of helping her.
She got there fast. Faster than I would have given most people credit for. The wide eyes settled, the mouth closed, and something I hadn’t been expecting moved across her face—not panic, not deference, but the kind of expression a person wears when they’ve decided to brazen it out.
“If this is about Outfit Builder, I stand by everything I said.” She paused. “If it’s not, hi.”
I almost smiled.
I didn’t actually smile, because I don’t smile in public on principle. But the muscle in my cheek that would have done the smiling registered the impulse and I physically overrode it.
“It’s not about Outfit Builder,” I said.
Hadley was looking between us like a woman watching a tennis match. I ignored her.
I sat down next to her on the couch—in the spot Hadley had just left—without being asked. I set my drink on the low table in front of us. I leaned back, one ankle on the opposite knee, and looked at her for another beat before I said the next thing.
“Though for what it’s worth,” I said, “you were right about the moat.”
I watched what that did to her face. She was good at managing her face—I’d seen that this morning.
But she wasn’t good enough to manage it now.
Something passed across it that she hadn’t meant to show me.
Relief, maybe. Or vindication. Or the recognition that the CEO of her company had spent the day thinking about her work the way she’d spent the day hoping someone would.
She recovered. No surprise.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You don’t have to thank me. You were right.”
Hadley stood up. “I’m going to get another drink.” Her tone was carefully neutral. “Joss, do you want anything?”
“I’m good.”
“I’ll be back,” Hadley said.
She looked at me as she said it, and I returned the look without giving her anything. She crossed the rooftop without looking back. She took her time.
When she was out of earshot, Joss exhaled.
I watched her gather herself. She picked up her drink, took a sip, set it down. She glanced at where her shoes had ended up next to the couch and let her feet stay tucked.
“So,” she said.
“So.”
She tilted her head a fraction. “You come here often?”
“I do, actually.”
“That was supposed to be a joke.”
“I know. But I do come here often.”
She made a small noise that was almost a laugh. Then she looked at me over the rim of her glass.
“Beckett’s a friend,” I said. “He bought this building a few weeks ago. We’ve been coming up here on Fridays since.”
“Beckett.”
“My business partner.”
I watched her consider that. She didn’t ask which Beckett. She didn’t need to. Beckett Welch was the other half of Myrror, and his name was on as many press releases as mine. She’d known who he was the second I’d said it.
“Hadley’s my roommate,” she said.
“I gathered.”
“I’ve lived here for fourteen months.”
“And you’ve never seen me up here.”
“I have not.”
“I’m usually here on Fridays.”
“I’m usually not.”
I nodded.
There was a beat between us where the conversation could have ended. She could have said something polite. I could have stood up. Neither of us did.
“How did you end up at Myrror?” I asked.
She looked surprised. After that, she looked like she was deciding how honest she wanted to be. Then she landed somewhere in the middle.
“State school,” she said. “Public PM internship pipeline. No connections. I sent in two hundred and eleven applications the year I graduated and got three callbacks. Myrror was one of them.”
“Two hundred and eleven.”
“I kept a spreadsheet.”
“Of course you did.”
She bristled, just slightly. “What does that mean?”
“It means I would have done the same thing.” I paused. “I did do the same thing, actually. Different year. Different number of applications. Same spreadsheet.”
She looked at me.
“Beckett and I lived in the same frat house in college,” I said. “He was the only guy in that house who let me work in his room while everyone else partied. They all thought we were a joke. We were not, in fact, a joke.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I know you weren’t.”
It was the “I know” that did it. Not the words around it.
I was about to say something else—I didn’t know what yet—when I heard Beckett’s footsteps behind me.
He stopped at the edge of the couch. He looked at me. He looked at Joss. He looked at Joss’s roommate, who had reappeared with two new drinks and the air of a woman watching the slowest train wreck of her life with significant interest. He looked back at me.
His expression did not change.
“Sutton,” Hadley said. “You’re in my seat.”
I held Beckett’s eyes for a beat. He held mine.
Then I stood up.
I picked up my drink. I straightened my cuffs. I looked down at Joss, who was looking up at me with an expression I had no business committing to memory and was going to anyway.
“I’ll see you Monday,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
I crossed back to the bar with Beckett falling into step beside me. I didn’t look back, because I knew exactly what I would have done if I had.