28. Erika
— ? —
Erika
Six months later, the sign outside reads HART PRESS in gold letters against weathered brick, and every time I walk through the door I have to remind myself that this is real, that I built this, that my name is on the building because I earned it and not because someone handed it to me.
The converted warehouse in Silver Lake has exposed beams and huge windows that flood the space with light, and my office is in the corner, glass walls frosted to shoulder height so I can see the whole operation over them without the whole operation seeing me, the desks where my small team works, the conference room where we meet with authors, the reading nook I insisted on because every publishing house should have a place where people can fall in love with books, and on my desk, under the window, the mint-green Olivetti, which nobody has ever asked me about and everybody has noticed.
We publish indie authors, the ones the big houses overlook, the dreamers who write before dawn like I used to, and in six months we’ve signed twelve of them and put out four books, and two of those have hit lists.
I’m sitting at my desk with a manuscript that came in this morning, a debut, three hundred pages by a woman who’s clearly never been told she’s allowed to stop explaining, and I’m forty pages in with a pencil, writing trust the reader in the margin for the fourth time and cut this, you already said it on page nine, and it’s good, under all the explaining it’s good, there’s a scene in a laundromat that made me put the pencil down, and I’m drafting the note in my head, the one that says yes and also says here’s what has to go, the note I’d have killed for four years ago from anyone at all, when my office door opens.
“You have a two o’clock,” Kai says, leaning against the doorframe.
He looks good, healthy, finally, the weight he lost during our separation slowly coming back, in jeans and a white shirt with the cuffs shoved back, his hair slightly mussed from running his hands through it, a habit he’s never been able to break.
“I’m aware. I made the schedule.”
“Just being a good finance manager.”
“Is that what you’re calling yourself now?”
“It’s what my business cards say.” He grins. “Very official.”
He applied for the job with a résumé that read Previous position: ran a company.
Reason for leaving: my wife. He submitted it through the website like everyone else, and it sat in the pile with the others for two days before my office manager found it and walked into my office and put it on my desk without a word and walked out again.
I hired him anyway, partly because he’s actually good with numbers, and partly because the look on his face when I handed him the offer letter was worth more than any salary.
He read it standing up. He read it twice.
Then he asked, very seriously, about the benefits package, and I told him I’d think about it.
“I also scheduled a meeting with you at three,” he says, stepping into my office and closing the door behind him.
“I don’t have a three o’clock meeting.”
“You do now.”
“Kai, I have work to do.”
“This is work.” He crosses to my desk and perches on the edge, near enough that I get his cologne. “Very important work. Company morale. Employee satisfaction.”
“And how exactly does this meeting improve company morale?”
“Let me show you.”
He pulls me up from my chair and kisses me, slow and deep, and takes my waist like it belongs to him, which, I suppose, it does.
“We’re at work,” I murmur against his lips.
“You’re the boss. You can do whatever you want.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“That’s exactly how it works.” He walks me backward until my thighs hit the desk. “Trust me. I used to run a company.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You love it.”
I do. God help me, I do.
He kisses down my neck while he works at the buttons of my blouse, and I tip my head back and get lost in the feel of him.
We’ve been doing this for six months, rediscovering each other, learning how to be partners instead of strangers, and it still feels new, still feels like a gift I don’t quite deserve.
“I have a thing to tell you,” I say, breathless, as he finds the place under my jaw that makes my brain short-circuit.
“Tell me later.”
“It’s important.”
“So is this.” He slides his hand up my thigh, under my skirt, and whatever I was going to say evaporates.
He gets my blouse open and pushes it off my shoulders and looks at me leaning against my own desk in a bra and a pencil skirt with the door locked and my staff twenty feet away behind frosted glass, and the look on his face is the one from the fitting room, the one that made him drop his phone, and I’ve never gotten tired of it and I don’t think I’m going to.
His fingers find the lace between my legs and press, and I’m already wet, and he makes a low pleased sound against my throat and pushes the fabric aside and slides two fingers into me right there, standing, and I have to grab his shoulder.
“Kai.” It comes out as a warning and lands as a plea.
“Sit down, boss.”
He turns me and puts me in my own chair, and drops to his knees, and I think for a second he’s going to go down on me, and instead he undoes his belt, slow, watching me watch him, and takes himself out, and I look, because I always look, and he lets me, and then he looks up at me and says, “Come here,” and I understand him, and I climb into his lap on the floor of my office in front of my chair, skirt shoved to my waist, and sink down on him with my hand over my own mouth because the walls are frosted, not soundproof.
It’s slow at first because it has to be quiet.
His hands on my hips, my knees on the carpet either side of him, rocking, his mouth on my breast through the lace and then under it, and I ride him the way I’ve learned to in six months of learning him again, and he lets me, watching me, and I watch him back, his head tipped against the seat of my chair and his throat working and his eyes gone dark and stupid with it, a man in a good shirt on the floor of his wife’s office doing exactly what he’s told, and I keep my knuckles between my teeth and my other hand fisted in his hair, and I come like that, silent, shaking, sitting on my finance manager on my office floor.
He stands with me on him and puts me down on the edge of the desk, on the manuscripts, and I lie back and pull him in by his collar and say “Now,” and he says “Bossy,” like he always does, and I say “It’s my company,” and he pushes back into me on a laugh that turns into a groan halfway through.
It’s fast, it has to be, my calves locked behind him and the desk creaking and his forehead against mine, both of us trying not to make noise and failing a little, and when he says “Look at me” I do, and that’s what tips me over, not the angle, not the pace, just his face, and he follows me a second later with my name in his teeth.
Afterward, while we’re both trying to make ourselves presentable before the two o’clock arrives, I remember what I wanted to tell him.
“Yes,” I say, buttoning my blouse.
He pauses with his shirt half-tucked. “Yes what?”
“Yes, I’ll marry you again. Properly.”
He stares at me. “You’re saying yes? Now? After we just…”
“It seemed like the right room for it.”
His face breaks into the biggest smile I’ve ever seen, and then he’s picking me up and spinning me around my own office like we’re in a movie, and I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe.
“Put me down,” I gasp. “I have a meeting.”
“Cancel it.”
“I can’t cancel it. It’s with the film people.”
“The film people can wait.”
“Kai.”
He sets me down, but he doesn’t let go, and he frames my face with his hands, and his eyes are bright with joy and disbelief.
“You’re sure?” he asks. “You’re really sure?”
“I’ve been sure for months. I just wanted to make you sweat a little.”
“That’s cruel.”
“You deserved it.”
“I did.” He kisses me again, soft and sweet. “I really did.”
The two o’clock meeting runs long because the film adaptation is moving forward and there are a thousand decisions to make about casting and locations and whether the movie should have a different ending than the book.
Dean sends his regards through his producing partner, along with a bottle of champagne and a note that says Told you so.
That evening there’s a publishers’ thing, drinks in a hotel bar, a room I used to trail Kai through and now get trailed through myself, and Isabella’s name surfaces one last time.
I don’t see her at first, I hear her, a laugh I’d know in the dark, and then a comment pitched to carry, to a woman I don’t know, about how she’d heard I wasn’t even on the guest list tonight, that they must have let anyone in.
I could ignore it. Six months ago I would have.
Instead I pick up my drink and cross the room.
“Isabella. How lovely to see you.” I smile at her the way she once smiled at me over a notebook.
“I hear you’re between projects these days.
Such a shame.” I take a sip. “If you ever need work, Hart Press is always looking for assistants. Though from what I hear, reliability isn’t really your strength. ”
She opens her mouth, and closes it, and I don’t wait to see what comes out. I walk away, and I don’t look back, and I don’t feel anything about it at all except a small, clean, finished feeling, like closing a book I never liked and putting it on a shelf where I won’t see the spine.
By the time I get home it’s nearly dark.
Home is the Hills house now, but it doesn’t feel like the empty box it used to.
We’ve made changes, new furniture in the bedroom, chosen together, a reading nook by the window where I write in the mornings, the guest room where my rejected gifts used to be stacked converted into an office for Kai, so he has a room that’s his when he works from home, and the Mustang, which I finally drove, once, up the coast with the top down, and came back and told him it was too much, and kept.
Kai is in the kitchen when I come in, stirring a pot on the stove with his sleeves pushed up, humming.
“Dora called,” he says without turning around. “She wants us for Sunday lunch. She says to bring the good news.”
“How does she know there’s good news?”
“She’s Dora. She always knows.”
I wrap my arms around him from behind, pressing my cheek against his back. “I said yes today.”
“I heard. I was there.” He turns off the stove and turns in my arms, pulling me close. “I’ve been walking around all afternoon like a man who found money in a coat.”
“It was a very good meeting.”
“It was the best meeting I have ever been in, and I used to sit in a lot of meetings.”
“I love you, Erika.”
“I love you too.”
We eat dinner at the reclaimed oak table, and we talk about the movie and the publishing house and whether we should get a dog, normal things, married things.
Later, in bed, he traces patterns on my stomach while I drift toward sleep.
“I was thinking,” he says. “About the vow renewal.”
“What about it?”
“I want to do it at Dora’s. In the garden. Where everything broke.”
I open my eyes. “There?”
“I want to reclaim it.” His hand stills. “I want to stand in that garden and make promises I’ll actually keep. I want to replace the worst memory of our marriage with the best one.”
I think about it, the garden with the string lights, the wrought-iron table under the oak tree, the side gate I walked out of without looking back, and the kitchen doorway he stood in months later on his way to give it all up, saying nothing.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I curl into him, pressing my nose against his chest. “But I’m wearing whatever I want. No input from you.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“And Tessa is my maid of honor.”
“Obviously.”
“And we’re not inviting anyone from your old company.”
“Also obviously.”
“And…” I hesitate.
“And what?”
“And I want to write my own vows. Real ones. That actually mean something.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and then he pulls me closer, and I can feel his heart beating against my cheek.
“I want that too,” he says. “I want to say the things I should have said the first time.”
“Then we’re agreed.”
“We are.”
He’s asleep in minutes, the way he never used to be, and I lie there with my head on his chest and think about Dora saying bring the good news, like she already knows what it is, like she knew before I did, and I don’t know what she thinks she knows, and I don’t sleep for a long time.