9. Kira
Kira
I woke up first, which felt like winning something, until I remembered there was nothing here to win.
The light came gray through a gap in the curtains.
Evan was asleep on his back with one arm flung up over the pillow, and his face unguarded.
I lay there for a while in the warmth and the wreckage and let myself have precisely what was there, a hotel room with Evan, who slept like the dead once you got past the part where he'd let you in.
Then I did the math; I always did.
In four hours, we had a debrief with the Authority's staff.
In eight days, we had Aspen. I had a percentage of a two-billion-dollar deal riding on the investment structure that my name was on, and the man attached to that deal was currently taking up two-thirds of the bed.
Nothing about the next eight weeks was going to be made easier by what happened last night.
I got up before he woke because leaving first was a kind of control and I wanted some.
I was dressed and making the terrible in-room coffee when he woke up. I heard him still behind me, deciding how to play the morning. I decided to save us both the trouble.
"Don't," I said, without turning around.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to do the decent thing. The 'last night was' thing.
" I handed him a cup he hadn't asked for.
"We don't need the speech, I was there. It was mutual and it was good and it can't happen again while the deal is live.
We both know all of that, so let's not spend twenty minutes trying to say a conversation we've already had in our heads. "
He took the coffee. He had gotten up and was wearing last night's trousers and nothing else. It was deeply unfair that a man could look like that holding a paper cup. I noted the unfairness and stashed it away to where it belonged.
"You've thought about this," he said.
"I woke up an hour ago, I've thought about everything.
" I sat on the arm of the chair. "Here's where I am.
I'm the best thing that's happened to this pitch and you know it.
If this," I moved a finger between us, "turns into a thing that makes either of us stupid in the pitch, it costs us the deal, and the deal is mine too.
My name, my stake, my reputation. I am not losing Tariq Al Rashid because I couldn't keep my hands to myself in a hotel. "
"So, we don't."
"So, we don't," I said firmly, trying to make it real by saying it. "Not while the deal's alive. After, if there's an after, that's a different conversation. But not while I've got two billion dollars depending on both of us being able to think."
He looked at me over the coffee, and something changed in his face. For a second I thought he was going to argue.
"Okay," he said instead.
"Okay?"
"You're right, it's the correct call." He set the cup down. "I don't like it, and I want to be clear that I don't like it, and I'm agreeing anyway because you're right and I've spent a long time being the person in the room who does the correct thing when he doesn't like it."
"That's the most attractive thing you've ever said and I need you to never say anything like it again."
He almost smiled. "Noted."
We didn't touch. We got ready in the choreography of two people who'd agreed on a border and were both being scrupulous about it. It was harder than the night before because last night was want and this morning was want plus discipline, and discipline was what actually complicated all of it.
The debrief went well, which was its own problem.
We were better than we'd been the day before.
Whatever had happened in that room had knocked something loose between us professionally, and now we finished each other's points, caught each other's gaps, and moved through the Authority's questions like two people who'd been working together for years instead of a week and a half.
One of the staff, a sharp woman named Farah who ran the committee's diligence evaluation process, watched us do it with a small assessing look I didn't love. I read people for a living and I knew exactly what she was seeing.
She was seeing a unit, and she was recording it. I couldn't tell yet whether a committee weighing who to trust with a family's money would read a unit as a strength or a risk.
I made a note to think about that later, and then I didn't. Evan was across the table being quietly brilliant with his sleeves pushed up. My discipline had a range and he was standing just outside the edge of it.
We flew home that afternoon.
The jet felt different going the other way, which was ridiculous, it was the same eight seats and the same cream leather and the same Ian moving quietly through the logistics.
Now the space between the facing seats held something that hadn't been there on the way out, and we both worked around it with the same exaggerated care of people trying not to look at a stain on the carpet.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, he fell asleep again. I looked at him again, his shoulders coming down, his face letting go.
I understood the tell now. I'd cracked the code on it in a hotel room the night before, watching him wake up from sleep and put the guard back on piece by piece as he got up, like a man getting dressed.
Asleep, he was the terrace. Awake, he was Straits Capital.
The whole problem, the entire unbudgeted problem, was that I'd started wanting the terrace to stay.
He woke over Greenland and caught me looking. This time, I didn't look away. We were past the point where looking away meant anything.
"We agreed," he said quietly. Not a question, a reminder, maybe to himself.
"We did."
"I'm holding to it."
"So am I."
He nodded, and went back to his document, and I went back to mine. We held to it for the rest of the flight with a discipline I was proud of and that felt, hour by hour, less like strength and more like holding my breath.
We landed in Seattle in the long May evening, and the light was what came in the spring, gold and endless.
Ian had cars arranged for us. Evan's was going to go across the bridge and mine was headed to Fremont.
At the curb he stood for a second like he had something to say, but he stayed quiet. I was glad… mostly.
"Aspen in a week," he said.
"Aspen in a week."
"Kira." My name, just my name, in the voice he used on the terrace and never in a conference room. "Thank you, for London."
"Which part?"
"Yes," he said, and got in the car.
I stood on the curb and watched his car turn toward the bridge, toward the house across the water I hadn't seen and was already, stupidly, curious about.
We'd agreed. Not again, not while the deal was alive.
I believed him. He was a disciplined man and he'd given me his word and he'd hold to it. I had no doubt at all that he'd hold to it. I hated it, but I didn't doubt it.
It was myself I wasn't sure about, and that was the one variable I'd never once managed to fully manage.