Chapter 5
Sienna
I packed one good dress for this tournament because packing two felt like a declaration of intent I wasn't prepared to make.
It was a deep green silk-blend, fitted, with a low back that I'd bought two years ago for a sports journalism awards dinner in Edinburgh and had only worn twice since.
I put it on in my hotel room an hour before the gala and looked at myself in the mirror and told myself, with complete conviction, that the dress had nothing to do with anyone.
I believed about forty percent of this.
The FIFA charity gala was a tournament tradition — one evening, mid-group stage, when all the competing nations and accredited media were invited to the same rooftop ballroom and asked to be human beings for a few hours rather than opponents or observers.
It was held in a hotel in Midtown whose name I kept forgetting and which compensated for this by being spectacularly elevated, the kind of building that positions itself above the city's noise and offers the skyline as a substitute for personality.
The ballroom occupied the thirty-fourth floor and was entirely glass on two sides.
I arrived early enough to understand the room before it filled — the round tables, each with white cards and the small flags indicating which national delegation was seated where, the long bar along the far wall with two bartenders who already had the quiet efficiency of people who'd done this many times.
My table card said Table 12. I found it, and sat, and looked at the other names.
Danny Walsh. Three other England squad members. And at the far end, added it seemed at the last possible moment given the slightly uneven way the card sat in its holder —
R. Torres.
I straightened my napkin.
"Businesslike," I said, under my breath.
"Sorry?" The woman beside me — a PR coordinator from one of the tournament sponsors, as it turned out — looked up with polite confusion.
"Nothing. Long week."
He was the last of our table to arrive, which I had not expected and then had, immediately, expected completely.
Danny was there first, boisterous and good-natured as always, immediately making conversation with the player to his left about what they'd eaten at the afternoon break.
The other England players filtered in over the following ten minutes with varying degrees of enthusiasm for the evening's obligations.
Rafe came in at seven past the hour, when the room was full and the starters were being served, and sat down in the empty chair at the end of the table without apology for the lateness.
His jacket was dark, no tie, the top button of his shirt open.
He looked at the table as though taking inventory, and then he looked at me.
Something moved in his expression. Barely visible, just the slight adjustment of a face deciding something.
He sat down.
"Ms. Hart."
"Mr. Torres." I passed him the bread basket that was sitting between our two place settings with the calm professionalism of a woman who had done nothing for three days but remind herself of her professional obligations.
"Dinner is excellent, apparently. The FIFA catering is a step up from granola and optimism. "
Something close to warmth moved through his expression.
"So I'm told."
Three hours.
That's how long the dinner was, officially.
Courses that kept arriving, a speaker from FIFA that most of the room listened to with polite attention, a brief award presented to a goalkeeper from Cameroon who had, according to the citation, been involved in community work across East Africa for a decade, and who received his award with a quiet grace that made the room go genuinely still for a moment.
I would have written about him instead of everything else, if I'd had the choice.
But the thing about three hours at a round table with someone you have been carefully maintaining professional distance from is that professional distance requires constant maintenance, and constant maintenance is tiring, and eventually the tiredness wins.
He was different here than he was in the press conference rooms.
Not softer, exactly. More — present. Less performing the management of the room.
He talked to Danny with the easy fluency of two people who had been through things together, and talked to the younger players with attention, actual attention, the kind that makes people expand slightly in its direction because they're not used to it.
He remembered the name of one player's younger sister from a conversation they'd apparently had at training, and asked after her knee, and the player looked briefly startled and then answered at length.
He did not perform any of this. That was what I kept noticing. There was no performance of warmth. He was simply paying attention, and his attention, I was learning, was specific and complete and nothing like the absent courtesy most people offered.
The other players drifted toward the dance floor after the awards — Danny first, with the inevitability of a man who had been waiting for the music to start, then the others in twos over the following twenty minutes, until the table was down to glasses and the soft debris of dessert.
And the two of us.
"Why did you leave?" he said.
I didn't pretend not to understand. "I had a deadline. Forty minutes to file eight hundred words."
"Without getting my name."
"Without getting your name." I turned my wine glass by the stem. "I realised in the corridor that I'd missed it. I was going to go back, but —"
"You had a piece to file."
"I had a piece to file."
He looked at me steadily across the small space of the table. "Did you try to look me up. Afterward."
"No."
"Why not?"
I considered being careful here, and then decided not to be.
"Because you'd told me to write about the crowd instead of the match.
And I had. And it was the best thing I'd written all year.
And I think I was afraid that if I found out who you were, it would change the shape of it. Make it about something else."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Did you want to?"
I looked at him.
"Look you up," he said. "Did you want to know?"
I said nothing. Which was its own answer and we both knew it.
The music from the dance floor reached us in waves. The night pressed against the glass walls on either side, the city lit up below us in its extravagant indifference.
"I need air," I said.
He stood when I stood, which I hadn't expected.
"The terrace," he said. "Far door."
I don't know who reached the terrace door first. It doesn't matter, because we arrived there at the same time, which was its own kind of statement, and stepped out into the night together.
The private terrace was a narrow ledge of stone running along the north face of the building, enclosed on the sides by low glass barriers and open above to the sky. It wasn't large — ten metres at most, with a single bench against the inner wall that neither of us sat on.
New York from the thirty-fourth floor, at ten o'clock on a June night, is staggering.
The skyline spread in every direction, lit up with the particular excess of a city that has never seen the need for restraint.
The sound came up filtered by height — not specific noise, not sirens and engines and voices, but the collective hum of something enormous and alive.
It made everything feel very private despite the exposure.
He stood beside me at the glass barrier and we both looked at it for a moment.
"Do you miss England?" I asked. It wasn't the question I was thinking about but it was a real question.
"Sometimes. When it matters." He considered. "Not the weather."
"No one misses the weather."
"My mother misses the weather. She says it keeps the character honest."
"That's a very specific theory."
"She's a very specific person."
I turned to look at him sideways, and found that he was already looking at me, and the distance between us was smaller than it had been a minute ago, which meant one of us had moved and I wasn't entirely certain which one.
"I should go back inside," I said.
"Probably," he said. Neither of us moved.
"This is a terrible idea."
"I know."
"I'm a journalist and you distrust journalists."
He looked at me for a moment. Long enough that I stopped breathing in a normal way. "I did," he said. "I'm less sure about that now."
The space between us was nothing. An inch. Maybe less.
I closed it.
I was the one who moved — I want to be clear about that, because it mattered to me that it was a decision I made.
I leaned up and I kissed him, and for a single suspended moment there was the question of whether this would be reciprocated, and then his hand found the curve of my jaw and tilted it, gently but with complete certainty, and the question answered itself.
He kissed me the way I'd forgotten people could kiss — slowly, fully, like he'd been considering the exact shape of this moment and had decided to take his time with it.
Then his other hand found my waist. And then — with a deliberateness that made something drop through my chest — it found the open back of the dress.
His palm flat against my bare skin.
I made a sound against his mouth that I wasn't expecting to make. He made one back, lower, rougher, and something about the exchange of them dissolved whatever was left of my professional composure.
I kissed him back with considerably more intent than I'd started with.
His hand moved at my back — slow and purposeful, tracing the line of my spine as though he was learning something he intended to remember — and my fingers found the lapels of his jacket and pulled.
He stepped into me, and I stepped back, and my spine found the glass barrier with the whole lit city beyond it and he was against me — all of him, no distance now, the warmth and the weight of him — and I let go of his lapel and put both hands in his hair.
He said my name. Not Ms. Hart. Just Sienna, very quietly, like he'd been keeping it somewhere careful and this was the first moment he'd let it out properly, and the way he said it undid something in me that I hadn't known was holding.
His mouth moved from mine to the line of my jaw, the curve of my throat.
I tipped my head back against the barrier and let him, because there was no version of this moment in which I was capable of rational arguments.
I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt and the city humming through the glass at my back and his hand still tracing the bare skin above the dress's low seam, and all of it together was too much and exactly enough.
"Sienna," he said again, against my throat. A question and an answer at the same time.
I answered by pulling him back up to kiss him properly, and he kissed me back with the full weight of everything he'd been deciding against for weeks, and I felt every part of it.
We stayed like that for a long time. The music bled through the glass from the ballroom behind us.
The city carried on being the city, completely indifferent, which was the correct response to two people who had been heading here for four years and eleven minutes and had finally run out of other options.
When I finally found the part of myself still capable of remembering the morning — the press briefing at nine, the clean professional lines I'd promised Vivienne — it cost me more than I expected to find it.
I pulled back.
He let me, though his hands were slow to leave. His thumb traced one final deliberate line across my spine before his palms came away, and the absence of them was immediate and specific.
We were both breathing harder than anything else tonight had warranted.
His forehead against mine. Both of us still.
"I'm going back inside," I said. My voice was not entirely steady.
"Yes," he said. Low and rough.
I stepped back. I was still wearing the dress, which felt remarkable, as though more should have visibly changed. The skyline was unchanged. The city noise was unchanged.
Nothing about New York had adjusted for any of this.
"Goodnight," I said.
He looked at me in the full way he had of looking at things, the way that didn't leave room for ambiguity. "Goodnight, Sienna."
I went back through the terrace door.
I walked through the ballroom without looking at anything. I retrieved my coat and took the lift to the lobby and walked the four blocks back to my hotel in the June night, with the city loud around me and the bare skin of my back still warm where his hands had been.
My hotel room. The lights off. My coat over the chair. Me, on the bed, in the green dress, staring at the ceiling.
What I had done was walk into the most significant professional assignment of my career, spent ten days being scrupulously correct about it, and then stood on a rooftop terrace and kissed the subject of the exclusive I was trying to land.
What I had done was make everything more complicated in a way that was almost certainly going to cost me something significant.
What I was, lying on the bed in my good dress with the city noise coming through the window and my heart still doing something unreasonable in my chest, was not sorry.
This was the terrifying part.
My phone lit up on the nightstand.
Vivienne.
Where's my exclusive, Hart?
I looked at the message for a long moment.
Then I put the phone face-down, very gently, on the nightstand, and lay there in the dark, and did not sleep for a very long time.