30. Evan
Evan
The party thinned in stages, until the room had emptied to just us and a waiter pretending we weren't there.
Kira stood looking out the window at the city spread across the horizon. I stood a careful distance back. I had spent the evening checking to see how much distance she wanted, and I was not going to get it wrong now, not when giving her the space was the one thing I had left to give her.
"You can come stand by the window," she said, not turning around. "I won't bite. We won a mandate today. I can share a view with you for five minutes."
I came and stood beside her. Not close, beside.
For a while we only looked at the harbor, the ships stacked in close together and lit, a lot of the world's money parked there in the water. She was giving me something, just standing there together. It might be all I got, and I decided that if it was, I would take it and not ask for more.
Then she said, "Tell me the thing you never told me."
I could have asked which one, but I didn't insult her.
"His name was Adrian." I hadn't said it out loud in years and it came out rougher than I meant.
She didn't move. She let me tell it the way I could.
"My closest friend. I brought him into Sentris over Knox's objection because I trusted my own read over my partner's, and that was the first time I chose being certain over someone who loved me. It wasn't the last."
I kept my eyes on the water below.
"He built the client that made us a real company, then walked out the door with it, clean and legal, nothing anyone could touch. It nearly took the company down. Knox spent a year saving what I'd risked and never once made me watch."
I heard her breathe, but she left the silence for me to fill.
"The lesson I took wasn't to trust my partner. It was that the people I let close were the ones who could do the most damage. So, I built walls and called it discipline. It was fear in a good suit."
I turned to her.
"When the leak came and your name was on the short list because it had to be, I felt exactly what I felt with Adrian.
I'd seen how it ended once, and I wasn't going to be the fool who missed it twice.
" I made myself hold her eyes. "It felt like wisdom.
It was Adrian's voice in my head and I made it mine.
I trusted an old scar over two months of you telling me plainly who you were. "
She held my eyes and said nothing, which was scarier than anything she could have said.
"That's why I couldn't tell you before. The first time when I pulled back and called it appropriate caution, you asked why I'd gone cold and you wanted a reason, and I gave you a story about policy.
The real reason was that I was terrified, and I would rather you thought me cold than knew I was afraid I was making the old mistake again.
"The silence wasn't that I didn't care. It was that caring was the risk that could end everything.
I know how that sounds. I'm not asking you to take it as an excuse.
It isn't one, it's the truth I owed you long before any of this, and I was too much of a coward to say it until I had already lost you. "
Kira was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke she looked down at the water, not at me. "His name was Warren Dufresne."
The tone of the conversation shifted. She was giving it back, trade for trade, the part she had never told me either.
"Senior partner at Lennox. He pulled me up, told the firm I was the best young mind he'd seen in a decade. I trusted him completely. I've done that for exactly two people in my life.
"I found client money going where it shouldn't, and I brought it to him. I thought he'd want to know. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me, gently, to let it go. That it was above my pay grade. That I had a wonderful career ahead if I didn't make it complicated.
"I didn't let it go. I was right, and I had the paper to prove it, and it cost me the job, a reference, two years, and the last part of me that believed being right would keep me safe.
So, I made a rule. I work alone, I trust no institution, I keep my own copy of everything, and no one ever again gets to put a hand on my shoulder and tell me to be quiet. "
She looked at me then.
"And then I broke the rule for you. I let you all the way in, and you did what Warren did. You put your hand on my shoulder, you called it company procedure, and you chose the institution over me." Her voice stayed level. "Twice, Evan. You did it twice."
"I know," I said. There was nothing more I could say.
"I'm not telling you this to make you grovel. I'm telling you so you know what you did. It wasn't a business decision. You reached into the one place I'd kept safe and proved that the fear I'd carried for so long was real. That letting someone in is just handing them the knife."
"I'd take it back if I could take any of it back," I said.
"I can't. So, I'll do the only thing I have left.
I'll stand here and not defend myself, and let you be as angry as this deserves for as long as it needs, and I won't treat your anger like a problem I have to solve.
You are not a deal I have to win. You're the person I love, I broke us, I know it, and I am not going to make you try to take care of my feelings about having done it. "
She looked at me a long time. "That may be the most real and honest thing you have ever said to me."
Something in her let go. It wasn't the anger, it was the protection she was holding under it, the defense against being hurt again that she'd had since Dubai.
She let it go, and I watched her do it. It was incredibly brave; she knew exactly what it had done to her the last time and she chose to risk it anyway.
"I'm not going to say I forgive you," she said. "I won't give it to you in words. Words are cheap, and I'd have let you off with something you hadn't earned."
She took a step, closing the careful distance I'd kept all night.
"I'll just do it instead. It will happen quietly, and it will take time. You'll know it's happening because I'll still be here. That's the only forgiveness I trust, the kind where I stay in it."
She was close to me now, the distance from dinner was gone. I could feel her warmth, and every part of me that had been mourning what I did in Dubai woke up at once. I held still. She had decided to close the gap and whatever came next was up to her.
"We keep our eyes open," she said. "Whatever this is now, no more hiding, no more walls, no more deciding what I can handle. If we do this, you look at me the whole time."
"Yes," I said.
She kissed me first. Slow and open, unlike any kiss we'd had. This was a decision that was made. She took her time, drawing out each stoke of her tongue and the way our lips molded together.
We walked to the elevator in silence. I could feel everything around me as if it were all brighter than normal, my awareness turned all the way up. We rode down to my room, just waiting in the quiet, and when we got there, I opened the door.
I got us to the bed, or she did, it didn't matter.
I undressed her like she was something I'd lost and then finally found, one button at a time, looking directly at her.
She watched me and didn't help and didn't hurry me.
When the dress was off along with everything else, she reached for my shirt and did the same to me, until we were skin to skin with nothing left to hide and nowhere to look but at each other.
I laid her back and took my time, my mouth at her throat, her breast, the flat of her stomach.
She let me, her fingers in my hair, not pulling, just holding.
When I settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her, she moaned gently.
She said my name softly, and that nearly finished me before we'd begun.
I worked her clit slowly with my tongue, following her the way I'd learned to over the two months but hadn't let myself think about since Dubai. She went wet and open, her thighs starting to shake, and she said, "Look at me."
I looked up the length of her and kept going with my eyes on hers. Watching her come that way, watching her let me see it, was the closest I had ever been to another person.
When I came up she pulled me down and kissed herself off my mouth and took my cock in her hand. I was already aching. She guided me, and I pushed into her slowly, all of it, both of us watching it on each other's faces.
We held still for a moment at the fullness the way we had in the pool, nothing between us. She said, "There," soft, the same word she said in Dubai, and it overwhelmed me that she'd say it just like that, again.
We moved together, slowly, eyes open, and it was different from every other time we'd been together. We had nothing to prove and nowhere to be. Just this, her hands on my back, mine under her and in her hair, holding her where I could see her face.
It wasn't graceful. My arm went dead beneath her and I had to shift us, and we laughed, foreheads together, and then we got serious again.
She got close and I felt her orgasm start. I said, "Stay with me."
Kira opened her eyes and stayed, and we went over close together, her first and me a few strokes after. She held onto me like she'd decided she wasn't going to let go.
Afterward, we lay against each other and stayed quiet, her head on my chest, my hand moving through her hair. I felt my shoulders come down, all the way, further than they had in a long time. She felt it and put her palm flat over them and left it there.
"You settled," she said into my chest.
"You noticed."
"I notice everything, always have. It's why you'll have to be brave from here on. I see all of it, there's no part of you I don't see."
"I'm counting on it."
She was here. That was what mattered, the only thing that came out better than I deserved.
She hadn't forgiven me because I asked, she'd made that plain.
She was going to do it slowly, on purpose, by staying.
That was harder to earn and worth more than the two billion we'd won that afternoon, worth more than anything I had ever built or bought or walled myself inside of.
She had decided to be here. I lay in the dark and did not let myself sleep. I didn't want to miss a minute of what we had, now that I'd finally learned it was worth staying awake for.