4. Sutton
SUTTON
I’d said the thing I shouldn’t have said, and I was now going to have to live in the silence I’d created.
She didn’t move. The notebook sat closed on the arm of her chair where she’d set it ten minutes ago.
She hadn’t looked at it once, and now we’d both acknowledged that out loud.
I had no plan for what came next. The whole meeting had been a pretext I’d known was a pretext when I scheduled it, and my guess was that she’d known it was a pretext when she walked in.
She finally looked away from me. Down at the notebook. Then back up.
“I didn’t need it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I usually need it.”
“I know that too.”
She held my eyes another second. Then she stood up. She picked up the notebook and tucked it under her arm and smoothed the front of her blouse with the flat of her hand. I watched her do all of that with the kind of focus I should’ve been giving the spreadsheet open on my laptop.
“I should get back,” she said.
“You should.”
She didn’t move toward the door.
I didn’t tell her to.
Eventually, she crossed the office. I could’ve made a sound. I could’ve said her name. I didn’t do either of those things.
She opened the door. She glanced back at me from the threshold. Then she was gone.
I spent the rest of Monday afternoon being a CEO.
I ran two calls with our licensing team and approved a hiring requisition.
I sat through an hour of board prep that I retained approximately none of.
By 6:15, I was in the back of a car heading across town to Beckett’s place, where I’d been told to show up for dinner at seven, no excuses.
Beckett had texted me Sunday night with the kind of casual phrasing that wasn’t casual at all.
Dinner at mine, 7 PM Monday. Hadley’s cooking.
Don’t be a stranger. I’d read it twice and known exactly what it was.
He’d watched me cross that rooftop on Friday.
He’d watched me sit down across from Joss without being invited.
He’d come back with two drinks and registered the silence at the table, and he hadn’t said a word about any of it in the seventy-two hours since.
Then Sunday night, the text. Hadley’s cooking.
I’d accepted anyway. That was the part I should’ve examined harder at the time.
A man who knew he was being managed by his best friend and his best friend’s girlfriend was supposed to either decline the invitation or walk in with his eyes open.
I’d done neither. I’d typed back I’ll be there without asking any further questions.
The car pulled up in front of Reboot Condominiums. I got out. The summer evening air was thick and slow, the kind of June heat that rested on the city like a hand. I took the elevator up.
Beckett’s door was open. I could hear voices from down the hall—Beckett’s laugh, Hadley’s voice answering him, and a third voice I’d been hearing in my head all weekend.
I stopped in the entryway.
I stood there for what was probably three seconds but felt like ten. Then Beckett came around the corner from the kitchen holding two beers, took one look at my face, and grinned.
“There he is.”
He held out one of the beers. I took it.
“You knew,” I said.
“I knew.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Correct.”
“There’s a word for what you just did.”
“There are several. Pick your favorite.” He clapped me on the shoulder and started walking back toward the kitchen, leaving me to follow. “Hadley’s idea. I just provided the condo.”
I followed him.
Joss was at the kitchen island, helping Hadley plate something that looked like it involved tomatoes and burrata. Hadley saw me first. Her smile told me she’d planned this.
Then Joss looked up.
She’d had time to put her expression in order before I got here.
I could tell because I’d done the same thing in the entryway sixty seconds ago.
We both looked at each other for one second too long, and we both knew it, and then Hadley held out a plate to Joss and said something cheerful about basil, and Joss took the plate and turned away from me and walked it to the dining table.
“Sutton,” Hadley said. “I’m so glad you could come.”
“Are you?”
“Very.”
She smiled at me with a row of perfectly straight teeth that did nothing to soften her cool, professional demeanor. I lifted my beer to her in salute and crossed to the table.
The details of dinner mostly slipped past me.
Beckett carved a chicken and made a joke about the carving knife being the only piece of cutlery in his condo that had been there longer than Hadley.
Hadley asked Joss about a feature she’d shipped at her last internship and let her talk about it for ten minutes.
Joss talked about it well, with the same calm certainty she’d had on Friday morning in the conference room.
Beckett asked me about the licensing deal we were closing in Q3, and I gave him an answer that was at least sixty percent accurate.
I sat across from Joss. Every time she reached for her wineglass, I had to remember to take a drink of my own to give my hand something to do.
She was wearing something dark green and sleeveless. Her hair was down. A small silver chain rested at her throat, something I hadn’t noticed at the rooftop on Friday.
At one point, when Beckett and Hadley had both gotten up to clear plates, the two of us were left alone at the table for forty-five seconds. Neither of us said a word. Neither of us looked away.
Beckett came back into the room and stopped just inside the doorway. He registered the silence. He registered our faces. He didn’t say anything. He sat back down and started talking about the wine.
It was almost ten when Joss said she should go. She didn’t live far. She thanked Hadley. She thanked Beckett. She picked up the small bag she’d brought with her, said goodnight, and turned toward the door.
I stood up. “I’ll see you home.”
I didn’t ask. I just said it.
Joss paused. Hadley, behind her, wore the small smile of a woman who’d been waiting all night for that exact sentence. Beckett raised his beer to me without looking up from the table.
“Sutton,” he said.
“Beckett.”
“Goodnight.”
I followed Joss out.
The hallway on Beckett’s floor was quiet.
Our footsteps were the only sound—Joss’s heels against the polished concrete, my dress shoes a half-step behind.
We took the elevator down to the lobby of Reboot without speaking.
The doorman called us a car. It was waiting at the curb by the time we reached the sidewalk, and I held the door for her and got in after her, and I told the driver, “Pixel Lofts.”
The ride was less than ten minutes. We didn’t fill the silence. The streetlights moved past the window and Joss watched them while I watched her. The silence between us was the same silence we’d built across the dinner table—not uncomfortable, not easy, just charged.
The car pulled up in front of Pixel Lofts. I got out and held the door for her.
Her building was familiar to me now. I’d been on the rooftop three days ago. I’d been in the lobby this morning. I followed her through the glass doors and across the lobby and into the elevator, and she pressed the button for the second floor without looking at me.
The doors opened. She stepped out first. I followed.
Her apartment was at the end of the hall. It was the longest hallway I’d ever walked.
She stopped in front of her door and turned around to face me. The hallway light overhead was warm and low. Her hand had already gone to the bag at her hip for her keys, but it stopped halfway there. She didn’t take them out.
I’d been standing two feet away. I closed the distance to one.
“Thank you for walking me down,” she said.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know. I’m doing it anyway.”
Something close to a smile tried to get out. I didn’t let it.
She looked up at me. She had to tilt her chin to do it, because I’m six two and she’s not, and the small movement of her head did something to me.
I lifted my hand.
I tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear.
It was an excuse—there was no hair in her face.
There was nothing wrong with it. I tucked it anyway because I needed to know what her skin felt like under my hand, and the only way I was going to find out without crossing every line at once was this small thing. This almost-nothing.
My thumb traced the line of her jaw on the way down. Once. Slowly. She didn’t move.
Her chin had come up another fraction. Her lips had parted. Her breath had changed, and so had mine, and I could feel the air between us getting smaller and smaller without either of us doing anything to move it.
I could’ve closed the distance.
I almost did.
I had my hand at her jaw and my body angled toward hers.
Her mouth was right there, and she was waiting for me.
She was waiting for me the way I’d been waiting for her since Friday morning at nine o’clock when she’d stood up in front of three executives in a charcoal blazer and held her ground against me with two words.
I let my hand drop.
I stepped back. One step. Two.
She didn’t say anything. Her chin was still up. Her hand was still hovering near her bag.
I made myself say the thing I’d been thinking for the last sixty seconds. “If I kiss you tonight, I won’t stop at a kiss.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t move. Her mouth closed. Then opened again. Then closed.
“Goodnight, Joss.”
She didn’t say goodnight back.
She turned and inserted her key in the lock and opened her door.
Then she stepped inside and didn’t look back at me until she’d already started to close the door.
When she did, it was one quick glance over her shoulder, half a second—the kind of look I’d think about later when I should’ve been sleeping.
The door closed. I waited until I heard the deadbolt turn, then I walked back to the elevator.
The car was empty. I got in. I pressed the button for the lobby. The doors closed and the elevator began to move down. I stood there alone with my hands in my pockets and my reflection in the polished steel of the doors, and I thought one thing very clearly.
I’d come back tomorrow.
I’d come back tomorrow, and I’d come back the day after, and I’d keep coming back until she stopped letting me leave at the door.