5. Joss
JOSS
Istood with my back against my own front door, listening to Sutton walk away.
The deadbolt was still in my hand. I’d turned it when I heard him say goodnight, and I’d left my fingers on the brass after. Now I was leaning against the door I’d just locked, listening to the sound of dress shoes on the hallway carpet.
I could hear when he reached the elevator. I could hear when the doors slid open. I couldn’t hear when they slid closed, but I felt the silence after. That was when I let my head rest against the painted wood of the door.
If I kiss you tonight, I won’t stop at a kiss.
I closed my eyes.
I tried to find a single thought in my head that wasn’t that sentence.
I couldn’t. The sentence had taken up residence behind my eyes and was now in the process of removing every other piece of furniture in there—including the parts of me that were supposed to be paying my rent and answering my messages and remembering whether or not I had any clean blouses for work tomorrow.
Eventually, I pushed off the door, moving through the entryway and into the dim living room without turning on a light. After dropping my clutch on the console table, I sank onto the couch with my eyes closed.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough that my breathing had almost gone back to normal. Long enough that I’d stopped feeling his thumb on my jaw and started feeling the absence of it instead.
The front door opened.
I’d forgotten about Hadley. The entire time Sutton was at my door, I hadn’t given a single thought to the possibility that my roommate would walk in behind me.
She stopped just inside the entryway. I opened my eyes.
She was holding her shoes in one hand. Her hair had come loose at the temples. Her lipstick was mostly gone. She took one look at me on the arm of the couch and her whole face changed.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t.”
She set her shoes down and came over to the couch. She didn’t sit. She stood in front of me with her arms folded and waited me out.
I gave up after about ten seconds. “He walked me to the door.”
“I assumed.”
“He almost kissed me.”
Her eyebrows went up half an inch. “Almost?”
“Almost.”
“And then what?”
“And then he didn’t.”
I pressed my lips together. I could still feel his thumb on my jaw.
I could still feel the exact line he’d traced from the corner of my eye to the underside of my chin.
I hadn’t had a man’s hand on my face in long enough that I’d forgotten what it felt like.
Sutton Randall had touched my face for two seconds in a hallway and rewritten my entire understanding of the concept.
“What did he say?” Hadley asked.
I didn’t want to tell her. The line was mine. The line was the only thing I had from tonight that nobody else had, and saying it out loud would mean letting other people into it.
I told her anyway.
“He said if he kissed me tonight he wouldn’t stop at a kiss.”
Hadley exhaled slowly. “Yeah. He looked at you tonight like Beckett looks at me.”
I turned my head and stared at her.
She was staring at me. Her face was completely calm. There was no joke in it. No teasing. None of the matchmaking glee I’d half expected from her. Just a flat, steady observation from a woman who knew what she was talking about.
I looked away “He’s the CEO of the company I work at.”
“I know.”
“He’s literally the person who signs off on my promotion.”
“I know that too.”
“So what am I supposed to do with this?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Finally, she said, “I don’t think it’s a what-are-you-supposed-to-do situation. I think it’s already happening.”
I closed my eyes again.
She was right. I knew she was right. The thing that was happening had been happening since nine o’clock Friday morning, and every choice I’d made since then—going to the rooftop, going to dinner tonight, leaving my feet tucked under me on that couch, walking out of his office today without saying anything about the notebook—had been a choice to let it keep happening.
But Hadley had said it out loud. And once a thing has been said out loud by a person who isn’t you, you can no longer pretend you haven’t noticed.
I pushed myself to my feet. “I’m going to bed.”
“Okay.”
“I have work tomorrow.”
“I know.”
I didn’t make it to bed for another hour and a half.
I sat on the edge of my mattress with my dress still on and my makeup still on and Hadley’s sentence repeating behind my eyes like a song I couldn’t unstick.
I eventually changed. I eventually washed my face.
I eventually slid under my sheet and lay there in the dark with my window open and the city humming outside it, and I didn’t sleep until almost two.
When my alarm went off Tuesday morning, I felt like I’d been hit by a small truck.
I drank water. I drank coffee. I drank more coffee.
I picked out a blouse that didn’t require ironing and a skirt that didn’t require thinking about, and I left my apartment at the same time I always left my apartment.
I rode the elevator down to the lobby with two other tenants whose faces I didn’t register, and I walked to Myrror with my sunglasses on because the June morning sun was already aggressive, and I needed something between me and the world.
I made it to my desk at eight ten.
I was at my desk for exactly forty-seven minutes before he showed up.
I knew it was him before I looked up. The pod went a little quieter—not all the way, just a fractional lowering of background chatter, the kind of small acoustic dip that meant somebody senior had entered the area.
I kept my eyes on my screen for two more seconds because my heart had started pounding wildly, and then I made myself look up.
Sutton was standing at my desk.
He was in another suit. Dark gray today. He was holding a thin folder. He looked like a CEO stopping by a junior PM’s desk in the middle of an open-plan floor to discuss something a perfectly ordinary CEO would discuss with a perfectly ordinary junior PM.
“Joss.”
“Sutton.”
I’d never called him Sutton out loud before. I’d been calling him Sutton in my head since Friday night. The name came out of my mouth a little flatter than I’d intended, and I felt the room around us shift another fraction.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He didn’t sit down. There wasn’t a chair for him to sit down in. He stood at the corner of my desk with the folder in his hand and one hand resting on the partition above my monitor. The distance between us was professional in inches but not professional by any other measure.
“The engineering estimate came in,” he said. “It’s tighter than I expected. I’d like you to walk through it with the head of engineering and get back to me by end of week.”
“Sure.”
That was all the work content. The whole conversation had taken eleven seconds.
He could’ve sent it as an email. He could’ve had his assistant tell my boss to tell me.
Neither of those things would’ve required him to be standing at the corner of my desk on a Tuesday morning with one hand on my partition and his eyes on my face.
I knew it. He knew it. Every PM within line of sight of my pod knew it.
He didn’t leave.
He stood there another two seconds. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me last night when I’d been waiting for him to kiss me.
Except now there were eleven other people in line of sight, and one of them was the senior PM, who sat two desks over and had been pretending to type for the last thirty seconds.
He pushed off the partition. “Try not to work too late, Joss.”
The same line. The same exact line. Two days in a row.
He walked away.
I held still until he was out of the pod. Then I let myself exhale. Then I made the mistake of looking up.
Mira was standing in the doorway of her office on the far side of the floor. Her arms were crossed. Her glasses were pushed up on top of her head, and from across the floor, I could see the exact line of her mouth.
She’d watched the whole thing.
She didn’t look away when our eyes met. She held my gaze for one beat. Two. Three. Then she gave me the smallest nod I’d ever received from another human being—the kind of nod that didn’t mean good job or carry on or any of the polite things a senior leader nods at. It meant I see you.
She turned and walked back into her office.
She closed the door behind her.
I sat at my desk with the cursor blinking on my screen and my hands flat on either side of my keyboard.
I felt something I hadn’t felt in any of the previous four days settle in alongside the want that had been living there since Friday morning.
It was heavier than the want. It was older than the want.
It was something my mother had taught me to feel before I’d known the word for it, and it had a name now, and the name was seen.
Mira had seen me.
Mira, who had given me my first real shot. Mira, who’d let me present to Sutton on Friday morning because she’d decided I was ready for the room. Mira, whose office door had just closed.
I looked down at my keyboard.
The cursor was still blinking.
I had eleven hundred more messages, and a meeting in twenty minutes, and a job to do. I also had a CEO who’d walked away from my desk forty seconds ago with his folder still in his hand and his line about working late hanging in the air over the pod.
I started typing.
I had no idea what I was typing. But I typed for the next twenty minutes without stopping, because if I stopped typing, I’d start thinking.
And if I started thinking, I’d have to figure out what I was going to do about a grand-boss who’d just decided I was worth her concern, and a CEO whose hand had been on my jaw ten hours ago, and a heart that didn’t know how to be in two places at once.