17. Kira
Kira
I knew Nico had news before he said a word because he was cooking like he had something to burn off.
He'd let himself in with the key he'd had for six years, set two bags on my counter, and started moving around my kitchen faster than the food needed.
Nico's hands only ran ahead of him when his mouth was about to catch up to something big.
I poured us both wine and got out of his way, which was my job in that kitchen. He got a pan of butter going and a shallot after it, and only when the condo smelled like my life was going better than it actually was did he speak.
"I got an offer. San Francisco. A group's opening a place and they want me to run it. Flagship, my menu, my kitchen, a real piece of the ownership."
I put the wine down. "Nico."
"I know."
"That's the thing. That's the whole thing you've wanted since you were nineteen."
I felt excitement for him and sadness for me. I loved him and wanted the best for him, but, damn, I needed him here. Selfishly, for me, now more than ever.
"I know." He turned the shallots and they went gold and quiet. "It's also Blaine, and Seattle, and the entire life I already have. So, it's the thing I've always wanted and it costs the thing I've already got, and I don't have a recipe for that one."
"Does Blaine know?"
"Blaine knows there's an offer. Blaine said congratulations, and then he asked whether I'd looked at what the commute would do to me." He plated as he talked, unbothered on the surface.
"He's not wrong to want to stay. He's got the firm, the projects, the life he built here. He's just not a reason to turn this down, and we both heard me not say that out loud, so." He shrugged, and the shrug carried six years in one motion.
I didn't say I was sorry. Nico hated sorry. I reached over and stole a piece of whatever he'd seared, and he let me, which was how we'd say it instead.
He described the place while he finished. He already knew the opening menu. He had opinions about the light over the sink and the salt in the pasta water of a kitchen he'd never stood in. He talked about a place four hundred miles away like he already worked there.
He'd said yes to it somewhere in himself already, and the rest of him just hadn't caught up.
"You should take it," I said. "You know you should take it."
"See, that's easy for you." He slid a plate in front of me and finally looked at me.
"You hand that advice out like it's free.
Bet on yourself, take the leap, the safe thing is the slow death.
You've built yourself out of telling other people to jump.
" He picked up his own fork. "You're giving me advice you can't seem to take yourself. "
"That's different."
"It's always different when it's you." He pointed the fork at me. "You want to talk about the deal guy, or are we still f'ing pretending I don't know your voice changes when your phone lights up."
"His name's Evan."
"I know his name. You said it last week on the phone, like you were holding something hot you didn't want to admit you'd picked up."
He wiped his hands. "You've got two billion reasons to keep him at arm's length and you're at, what, an inch.
That doesn't hold, Kira. Don't try to bullshit me.
You reduce a sauce too long trying to keep it safe, you don't get safe.
You get a scorched pan and nothing to serve.
" He made a gesture that looked like stirring a pan but I couldn't be sure.
"It's holding fine."
"You already know it's too late. You just want somebody to tell you it's allowed."
I ate for a while so I wouldn't have to answer, and he let me because he was Nico.
What I didn't say was that at Lennox, before I learned to work alone, there was a man I trusted more than anyone. A senior partner who'd pulled me up, who told the firm I was the best young mind he'd seen in a decade.
When I found what Warren Dufresne was doing with client trades, I didn't go to a hotline. I went to him because I trusted him. I thought the truth was safe with a person who'd earned it. He listened to all of it, and he was kind about it, and he told me to let it go.
Not because I was wrong. I was right, and being right about the wrong man was going to cost the firm more than I was worth to them.
He said it gently, the way you'd mention the weather. I understood, standing in his beautiful office, that the person I trusted most had just chosen the firm over me and hadn't once raised his voice to do it.
That was why I worked alone. Not the noble reason I sold to clients, the real one, where you never again handed a powerful person the truth and stood there waiting to see whether he protected you or what he'd built.
I'd gone and done it anyway. A week ago, I'd walked into that business center in Aspen and heard Ian ask Evan whether they should run a background check on me. I'd heard Evan not answer fast enough. I'd called it reasonable and stayed on the deal and let it keep getting personal.
I didn't tell Nico all of that. I told him the part I could say out loud.
"The last time I trusted a man who could decide my whole career," I said, "he didn't decide the same about me."
Nico didn't reach for a lesson, he topped off my wine. "Okay. But you know a bad reduction from a good one by now, you've had both in your mouth. At some point you trust your own palate or you stop cooking."
Then he told me a long, stupid story about a sous chef who couldn't be taught to taste at the right times, and let me sit with the rest of it, which was the kindest thing he did.
I didn't tell him because it was his night and not mine, that if he took the job in San Francisco, I'd lose the one kitchen in the world I could fall apart in. Nico leaving meant the balcony calls got longer and the voice on the other end got farther away.
For years, I'd told myself I worked alone because it was smart, and I'd never once counted Nico against that.
He'd always just been there the way the ground was there.
Now the ground was talking about San Francisco, and I was on a deal handing a piece of myself to a man whose people ran background checks.
For the first time the alone I'd chosen looked less like armor and more like a room I'd locked from the inside.
That week, Evan and I were supposed to be building the Dubai pitch.
What we were actually doing was finding reasons to be in the same room.
The reasons were always real, there was always a slide or a number or a session to rebuild, and somewhere in every one of those working dinners the work would quietly end and neither of us would say so.
We kept the laptops open like chaperones. We talked about Knox, about Nico with his decision to make about San Francisco, about nothing with a dollar figure attached. The deal stayed on the table and stopped being the reason we were at it.
He came to Fremont on a Thursday because the files were on my laptop and working in the conference room was a hassle, which was an excuse, and we both used it. It was the first time he'd been in my place.
He took it in, the wall of books I'd never organized, the coffee setup that made the best coffee but cost a fortune, the balcony where I took my calls, the warm mess of a home that belonged to someone who did all her organizing at work.
He had told me that his place in Medina was a beautiful cold thing, glass and lake and counters you could do surgery on. He stood in the middle of my chaos like a man who'd come into a comfy kitchen out of the rain.
He made coffee without asking. He made it wrong, too strong, and we drank it anyway. We worked for an hour and it went well. I'd start a thought and put it out to him. He'd take it and finish it a half-step better than I would have, then give it back like it had been mine all along.
He argued the Tariq pitch opening with me and lost, and he took losing to me like it cost him nothing, which from Evan was practically flirting. I'd watched him fight a room full of his company's best people to the last word. In my living room he gave it away and looked lighter for it.
I caught a soft spot in the opening, a promise we were making that we couldn't keep past year three, and I said so.
He didn't argue, he just pulled the sentence, and the pitch was better for it. He wrote a note in the margin of the notepad in his small square hand, kill anything that sounds like a promise, and slid the pen across to me without being asked, which was its own language.
"Your coffee is a war crime," I told him.
"You own a machine that costs way too much and have no idea how to use it."
"I know exactly how to use it. I make it drinkable. You make it a dare."
He smiled, the one that lit up his face, and went back to the notes, and I lost my place in my own sentence.
Then we got to the part where I told him what I'd been stewing about. The Nyx problem hadn't gone away in my head. Gabriella knowing our change of approach in Aspen wasn't something I could write off as coincidence, and if she knew that, there was a how, and the how was a person.
His guard came back up. Not all the way, just a degree, so smoothly I'd have missed it if I hadn't spent so many weeks learning the difference between Evan relaxed and Evan managing.
"I'm handling how information moves on this deal," he said. "Going forward we tighten it. Access, documents, who sees what and when. It's overdue."
"Tighten it how?"
"Carefully," he said lightly, and it was a door closing lightly. "You don't have to worry about it. I'll deal with the plumbing."
There it was, the same beat I'd heard through a business center doorway in Aspen, a man deciding quietly who got to see what, except this time I was inside the warm room instead of the cold corridor.
I wanted to stay in the warm room so badly that I didn't push. I called it prudence and it probably was. I set it aside with the other things I'd decided not to pay attention to, then I refilled his terrible coffee.
Later, he was on my chair with my laptop on his lap, sleeves pushed up, the lamp on, and I stood in my kitchen with a dish towel in my hands. I watched him not notice me watching.
The word that came to me was fits. He fit here, in the mess of my actual life, in a chair I'd never pictured anyone in, and instead of the fear I'd have bet money on, I felt relief, which scared me worse than the fear would have.
That was the most dangerous thing I'd learned about him. Not that I wanted him, that he fit.
I was so busy being happy about it that I let the door he'd closed so lightly stay shut. I didn't ask what it meant. A man who fit here had gone quiet about one thing, and I decided, sitting there in my own warm kitchen, that I didn't want to be the one who made it cold.