28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aspen
I sign the screen, pick up my bag, and turn around.
Stanley Ermington is standing in the middle of the lobby.
My body gets there before my brain does.
That’s the first fact of it, and it’s a humiliating one.
Before I have a single thought, there’s a lurch low in my chest and a wash of heat up my throat and the last five days comes up at once — the kiss, both kisses, the cold, what I said to him, every hour I’ve spent reaching for him and not letting myself — and for one moment, the lobby drops all the way away to nothing, and it’s only him.
Duffel on his shoulder. Looking at me like I’m the last thing he ever expected to find in the world.
And then my brain catches up, and it does the only thing it has ever known how to do.
It reads the room.
He’s here. I’m here. I got an assignment this week out of nowhere.
A good one. The kind of trip an analyst assistant doesn’t get handed without a reason, to a city I had no business being sent to, the same week he flew somewhere on his own life’s business — and now here he is, in the same hotel, twenty feet away, looking surprised in a way I decide, instantly, he is performing.
Because I know what this is. I know what this looks like.
On Thanksgiving, my father stood up at a table and told the room he was proud of me, and it was for the wrong reason, and I have spent every day since bracing for the next thing to land in my lap that I didn’t earn.
And here it is again. Four hundred miles from home.
The lie has reached out and rearranged my life again — somebody made a call, his father or the club or him, somebody decided to be nice to the owner’s son’s girlfriend, and my boss handed me the good trip the way everyone hands me things now, and I am standing on a marble floor holding the receipt for a thing that was never mine.
He crosses the lobby, and my breath falters. He has never once in his life allowed twenty feet of distance and an ugly silence to coexist when he could walk straight into the middle of both.
“Linwood.” He pulls up a few feet short, and there’s no grin, just open confusion spread all over his face. “What — what are you doing here?”
And it’s good. I’ll give him that much. The bafflement is first-rate work — the eyebrows, the open tilt of the head — and it makes me colder than anything else he could have done, because he knows what I’m doing here and watching him decide to play dumb about it in a hotel lobby is somehow worse than if he’d simply owned it.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say. The armor comes down over me. “You can drop the face. I know why I’m here.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Of course you don’t.”
He can’t fathom why I’ve gone arctic on him. I can’t believe he’s standing there pretending the floor under his feet isn’t a thing he laid himself.
And the trip will not let us retreat to separate corners and cool down, because the universe has a sense of humor about all this.
There’s one bank of elevators, so we end up at it together.
He reaches past me and hits eleven. My floor.
Of course it’s my floor. When the doors slide open, we both walk.
“Just say it,” I tell him at my door, key card in my fist, because I cannot carry this one more inch. “You don’t have to keep up the coincidence. I know how I got this assignment, Stanley. I’m not stupid.”
“How you got—” He stops dead. “Aspen. I don’t know what you think is happening right now.”
“I think,” I say, and my voice is doing the lethal thing it does in the last seconds before it stops being level at all, “that an analyst assistant does not get sent four hundred miles to a league summit in her second year. I think my boss does not hand me the good trip out of clear blue sky unless somebody upstairs has decided they like me. And I think the reason somebody upstairs likes me, all of a sudden, is that the entire building is under the impression I’m dating the owner’s son. ”
He goes very still.
“My work was the one thing.” It cracks straight down the center, the level gone out of it all at once.
“Do you understand that? My whole life I have been Bart Linwood’s daughter, and the one thing I worked so hard for was this job.
It was the only clean thing I had. And now I know I haven’t even earned it because the lie we cooked up doesn’t just have my father in it anymore, it has my career, it has reached all the way into this — and you knew.
You let it happen. That’s the part I can’t—”
“Stop.”
It comes out of him hard. Not loud — hard. And there is no confusion left on his face now. What’s there instead is closer to anger.
“You think I did that.”
“I think you knew—”
“I flew here for a meeting, Linwood. A meeting with the team that drafted me. I got on a plane this morning happy to catch a break from Camden U. Then I walk into the lobby, and you’re here, and I have spent ten straight minutes losing my mind trying to work out how, because there is no reason on earth for you to be in my hotel.
” He takes a step. “You think I’d do that.
You think I’d reach into the one thing you’ve got that’s actually yours and use it to—” His jaw works.
“You think I’m that guy. After Thanksgiving.
After every single thing I said to you on Friday. You still think I’m using you?”
And the floor tilts under me because he isn’t lying.
I know what his performance looks like. I have watched him for days. I could pick it out of a lineup. This isn’t it. This is the undefended thing from the street, the mask all the way off, and he is offended, all the way through, that I would think this of him.
“Then how,” I say, much less confident.
He doesn’t say anything else to me. He pulls his phone out of his jacket, and for a second I think he’s going to show me something, and then he taps a name and lifts it to his ear, and then, watching me the whole time, he brings it back down and puts it on speaker, holds it flat between us in the middle of the hallway, so I can hear every word that comes out of it.
It rings once.
“Cup!” Robert Ermington’s voice fills the hall, big and warm and delighted, the voice of a man who has never once in his life been anything but glad to hear from his son. “There he is. You land okay? You ready for tomorrow?”
“Landed fine, Dad.” His eyes stay on the phone. “Hey, quick question. Did you do something with Aspen’s work this week?”
Robert laughs, pleased with himself, not a scrap of guilt anywhere in it.
“She made it, then? Good. Good.” A warm, easy pause.
“Yeah, I know a couple of people. I made a call. They had a spot at the summit, and I figured, you’re both going to be in the same city, the two of you never get a minute, you’re always running off in opposite directions.
Thought she’d have a nice time. Thought you’d have a nice time, God knows you both work too hard.
” He says it like he knows our work schedules.
“Did I overstep? Carolyn said I might be overstepping. Tell me if I overstepped, son, I can—”
“No,” Stanley says. “You didn’t overstep.”
And I watch it land on his face. The whole of it, all at once. I watch him understand, in real time, that there was no scheme, no plan — just his father, who thinks the two of us are real and in love and run ragged, deciding to do a kind thing for the girl his son brought home.
His jaw comes unclenched. Something heavy goes out of his shoulders.
“You sure?” Robert says. “Because I can—”
“Dad. You didn’t overstep,” he says again politely.
And then he looks at me. The questions sitting right there on his face, plain as anything. Do you hear my dad? Do you hear that there’s nothing under it?
And I do. I hear it.
There is nothing under it. There’s only a man who loves his son so much that it runs over the sides and onto every person the son loves, and somewhere it started to include me. And unfortunately for me, I’ve twisted it, since betrayal is a language I happen to know better.
My chest goes light. The whole weight since I’ve seen him just lifts clean off me, because it turns out it was never the wrong reason at all. The reason was love. Innocent, oblivious, overstepping love, from a man who would be wrecked to learn this was all built on a lie.
“Everything all right over there, son?” Robert asks. “You’ve gone awful quiet on me.”
Stanley clears his throat. His eyes stay on mine.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was just — quite the surprise, Dad. That’s all.”
“Ha. The good kind, I hope.”
“Yes, the good kind.”
Stanley tells him he’ll call after the meeting. Robert tells him to sleep, to eat something, and to be sharp tomorrow. Then the call ends, and the phone goes back in his jacket, and the hallway goes quiet around us.
But just like on Friday, when everything faded away, what’s left is fear.
It has its teeth in me. I can’t do this again. I swore I’d never hand anyone that kind of power over me twice.
And God, it’s obvious he isn’t Gavin. Gavin couldn’t cross a bathroom door, and Stanley put his own father on speaker rather than let me believe one more second that he’d do this to me.
But knowing he isn’t Gavin doesn’t kill it. Because the fear was never about whether Stanley’s good. It’s about choosing this with my eyes open — walking in on purpose, no lie to hide behind — and ending up second to the sport anyway, in some other room, a year from now.
“Linwood,” he whispers, and my heart twists. “Don’t look at me like that.”
I swallow. “Like what?”
“Like you want nothing to do with me.”
I keep my eyes on him. I haven’t moved. I’m standing at my own door with the key card in my palm. The fear is screaming at me to go in and leave this all behind. But I haven’t moved an inch, because the part of me that wants him is louder than all of it, and I can’t think straight over the noise.
“That’s not true,” I say, looking at my hands. And I inhale because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I hate what’s swimming in my chest. “Do you want to go to dinner with me?”