7. Joss
JOSS
Ispent the next hour performing the role of a product manager.
He’d told me we’d leave separately, which I’d taken to mean me first. So I went first.
The ride home was eight minutes long, and I couldn’t have named a single thing I passed on the way.
My fingers stayed pressed against the underside of my jaw where his thumb had been.
The windows were down. Warm wind moved my hair around my face, and the memory of his mouth on mine lingered the entire way.
At Pixel Lofts, I paid the driver, crossed the lobby, and stepped into the elevator. The button for the second floor lit up under my finger. I leaned against the back wall of the car with my eyes closed and my pulse loud in my ears.
The apartment was dark.
Hadley had left a note on the kitchen counter. Staying at Beckett’s. Eat something. She’d drawn a small heart next to my name. I stood at the counter, read the note twice, set it down, and did not eat anything.
I went to my room. I closed the door behind me, even though there was nobody else in the apartment to keep out. I sat on the edge of my bed in my dark blue dress with my heels still on, and I stared at the wall.
The kiss was still on my mouth.
It was the strangest sensation I’d ever had.
Not the kiss itself, which had been four seconds long, and which I’d relived every six seconds since it ended.
The strange thing was the afterness of it.
The fact that something that had taken a handful of seconds to happen had rearranged my entire understanding of what my body could do.
I unzipped my dress. I let it fall. I stepped out of my heels and out of the dress at the same time and crossed barefoot to my dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts I’d bought because Hadley had told me they looked good on me.
I put them on. I sat back down on the edge of the bed.
My phone was face-down on my nightstand.
I picked it up.
I opened our text thread, which up until tonight had contained exactly zero messages, because I’d never had a reason to text the CEO of my company before tonight. But now, I had several. I stared at the empty thread for what was probably forty seconds.
I typed, For the record.
I stopped.
I deleted it.
I typed, I’m home.
I stared at it. Two words. Plain and factual and exactly the message I wanted to send and also the message that gave him too much credit for understanding why I was sending it. I deleted it.
I typed, You said tomorrow, we’d be at the same office.
I read it. I read it again. It was the truest thing I could send him, and the bravest, and the one most likely to make me throw my phone across the room if he didn’t answer it the way I needed him to.
I sent it.
I dropped the phone face-down on the bed and put both hands over my face.
It buzzed within ten seconds. I picked it up so fast I nearly dropped it. I turned it over.
Yes.
That was all he wrote. Yes. Three letters. No punctuation beyond what autocorrect had given him.
I stared at the screen. I waited.
The bubble appeared. He was typing.
The bubble disappeared.
The bubble appeared again.
It disappeared again.
I’d never in my life wanted so badly to be on the other end of a phone call. Whatever he was deciding not to send me was the thing I wanted to know.
The bubble appeared a third time.
Where are you right now?
I typed, In bed.
The bubble appeared. Sleepy?
No.
What are you wearing?
I exhaled out loud in the empty apartment.
The question was less a question than an opening—he’d asked it in a tone of voice I could hear off the screen, even though we were on text, even though I’d never heard him say a sentence like that in my life.
I knew what tone he’d asked it in. I knew it the way you know the weather is changing before you’ve looked at the sky.
I considered the answer.
I considered lying. I considered telling him I was in a robe. I considered being demure and saying pajamas, which would’ve been accurate and also useless.
I typed, A T-shirt. Sleep shorts.
I sent it.
The bubble appeared. It stayed for a long time.
His message finally came through. Come to the office.
I read it.
I read it again.
I sat on the edge of my bed in a T-shirt and sleep shorts at almost eleven o’clock at night, and I read the message a third time. I felt my body make a decision before my brain had finished processing the question.
I typed, Now?
Yes.
The office is closed.
I’m there.
I sat very still.
He was there. He’d left the reception ahead of me, or after me, and he hadn’t gone to his condo. He’d gone to the office. He’d gone to the building where I worked—the building where we both worked—and he was waiting for me there now.
I knew what going there meant. I also knew what it meant for the video on the building security footage that would stick around long after.
I’d told myself, in the car on the way home, that I was going to do this slowly.
Carefully. Not all at once. Going to the office tonight was none of those things.
I typed, I’m on my way.
I sent it. I stood up. I changed faster than I’d ever changed in my life.
I put on jeans. I put on a soft cotton tank top I’d worn three times that week because the heat had been miserable.
I put on sandals. I twisted my hair up off my neck and pinned it with a clip I found on my dresser without looking at which clip.
Finally, I grabbed my keys, my wallet, my phone, and the small black bag I’d carried to the reception.
I stopped at my bedroom door, turned around, came back, picked up the silver chain necklace I’d worn to dinner Monday night and the reception tonight, and fastened it around my throat with hands that weren’t quite steady.
Then I walked out of the apartment.
The rideshare took twelve minutes. I sat in the back seat the same way I had on the way home, except this time I was awake to every block.
I counted streetlights. I watched the traffic thin as we moved through the financial district.
I felt my phone buzz once in my bag and didn’t check it.
I felt it buzz again three minutes later and didn’t check it.
I checked it on the third buzz.
It was him.
I’m at the front entrance.
The car turned the last corner. The Myrror building came into view at the end of the block. Twenty-seven floors of glass and steel, mostly dark at this hour, the lobby lit from inside like an aquarium. I could see him through the glass before the car had finished pulling up to the curb.
He was standing just inside the doors.
His suit jacket was off. He’d rolled his sleeves up. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was watching the curb. His eyes found the car the second it stopped.
I thanked the driver without looking at him and got out. The June night air hit me again—warm and slow and thick with the smell of the river two blocks over—and I crossed the sidewalk to the front doors. Sutton pushed the door open for me.
I stepped inside.
The lobby was quiet. The night security guard was at her desk on the far side of the space, head down over a screen.
She glanced up as we crossed to the elevator bank, registered Sutton, registered me, and looked back down at her screen without comment.
She’d been trained well, or paid well, or both.
I followed him to the executive elevator.
Sutton tapped his keycard against the reader. The doors opened. He gestured me in. I stepped inside.
He stepped in after me. The doors slid closed.
We were alone.
He didn’t touch me.
I didn’t touch him.
He pressed the button for the eighteenth floor.
The executive floor. The floor I’d been on exactly four times in fourteen months at Myrror—twice chaperoned past closed corner-office doors I’d never been on the other side of, once a week ago to stand in front of him and four executives and defend the best idea I’d ever had, and once on Monday to sit across his desk and not open the notebook in my lap.
The car began to move. I could feel him breathing.
I could feel the heat coming off his body in the small space between us, and the way the elevator hummed faintly as it climbed, and the soft mechanical click each time the floor counter changed.
Two. Three. Four. I watched the numbers light up one at a time above the doors.
He didn’t speak.
I didn’t either.
His hand moved. Not toward me. Just to his side, where his fingers brushed the back of my hand once and then settled there, the side of his hand against the side of mine. Not holding. Just touching.
I let it happen.
I didn’t move my hand away. I didn’t move my hand toward him. I stood there with the side of his hand against the side of mine and the elevator climbing through the dark middle floors of the Myrror building, and I felt his pulse through the back of his hand.
Or I felt mine. I couldn’t tell which.
The counter above the doors lit up the number eighteen.