3. Thea
THEA
I’m two glasses past sensible, and I know it, because I’ve started narrating my own approach.
Target acquired, says the narrator. Silver fox, terrace doors, still hasn’t touched his drink.
Past the quartet, around the shrimp cocktail ice boat display, through the gap by the dessert table.
You’ve crossed this floor a hundred times tonight.
Go handle the man, get him a drink or a cab, and then you can take your shoes off in a service corridor where no one can see you cry about it.
The fifth glass was a mistake. I stand by the first two.
I set off. Past the quartet, no incident.
Around the boat, where the senior VP tells his tale about a storm off Montauk.
I’m six steps from the dessert table gap when Sofiya materializes in front of me, walking backward, laughing over her shoulder, a champagne flute in each hand, and zero awareness that other humans exist on her flight path.
Or at all, apparently.
I turn hard to miss her, and the cabernet leaves my glass like a tiny red tidal wave.
There’s no stopping it as it lands exactly where the crowd’s parting has aimed it, onto the chest of my assignment, who has somehow crossed forty feet of the ballroom during my transit and now stands directly in the splash zone.
The stain blooms across his white shirt and up one lapel. Somehow, I feel it land on my chest even though it doesn’t.
My career makes a small whimper and lies down.
This is it. This is the end. No more Manhattan. Back to Pennsylvania. I always knew this day would come. Just didn’t know wine would be the reason.
The man does not jump back, does not swear, does not do any of the things a normal person would. He studies the wine as it soaks through probably two thousand dollars’ worth of shirt.
Then he raises his eyes to me. Glacier-water pale irises consume me.
Being looked at by them is a full-body experience, and I would like to be excused. Any escape will do.
“I’m so sorry.” My voice comes out at vendor-crisis pitch.
“There’s a seam in the floor. I flagged it, there’s an email thread about the trip hazard, not that that helps your shirt.
Club soda helps. Salt, maybe. Peroxide… the hotel keeps a valet with a steamer, I know because I stationed him there myself, and I’ll pay for the cleaning, or the shirt, or the suit. Whichever. All of them.”
He says nothing. The stain spreads another inch in the silence.
Is it possible to die from an internal wince? Bet I’ll find out tonight. “I’m going to stop offering things now and let you pick one.” Please, for the love of God, pick an easy one. A not-fired one.
“You are the real host running this party.” His voice is gravelly low and unhurried, and there’s a formality under the American in it. He looks at the stain again, then at me, and something shifts behind the pale eyes. “You can clean me up. In my room. Now.”
The party continues without us. The quartet is still playing, the fountain is still burbling, four hundred people are still grinding crumbs into marble, and this man has just said that and turned toward the terrace-side elevators.
He gestures once, two fingers, without checking whether or not I’ll follow.
I’m supposed to handle him. Those are my instructions from my boss, the CEO. And what this man wants, apparently, is stain removal.
I follow him. I mean, really, what choice do I have?
The elevator has mirrors on three sides, which means I ride twelve floors with extra copies of myself, and all of us are wearing the face of a woman making a decision she’s decided not to look at directly. He stands beside me, hands loose at his sides, watching the numbers climb.
Someone should say something. Statistically, that someone is me.
“So… Are you in town for business?”
A pause opens up, long enough to hold a federal holiday. “Yes.”
“That’s nice. Business.” The numbers climb.
Four. Five. “I’m local. Queens. Well, from Pennsylvania originally, but Queens now.
You know what they say, you’re not a real New Yorker until you’ve cried on three different subway lines.
” I’m usually better at small talk than this.
It’s a part of my job. But I’m in an elevator with a stranger, a super-hot silver fox I’ve embarrassed, and I cannot shut up.
“I don’t say things like that normally,” I add.
“The subway thing. That was the wine talking.”
He turns his head and considers me. Those blue eyes of his might as well be two frozen ponds.
His face gives me nothing. No smile, no frown, not even the polite dead-eyed nod that strangers deploy in elevators.
He examines me the way he examined the stain, patiently, and I cannot tell if he hates me or if he’s into me.
“The wine has been talking all evening, hasn’t it? ”
Seven. Eight.
I open my mouth to speak, but what is there to say? He’s not wrong. I just told him that. Also, the corner of his mouth has moved. Not a smile. A rumor of one, suppressed fast, and my stomach does something unprofessional. I didn’t know a granite face like his could smile or even hint at smiling.
“Max,” he says.
“What?”
“You’ll want something to call me. Max is sufficient.”
“Thea.” The doors open on twelve.
The hallway is hushed and carpeted and expensive, and he leads me to the end of it. The penthouse, because, of course, it’s the penthouse. I priced this penthouse last spring for a visiting board member and was told to find something more reasonable.
The lock reads his card. He pushes one door open and holds it for me to walk through, and for a moment, the narrator in my head questions whether I’m sure about this.
We are not sure. We are going in anyway. Handle him. That’s the job.
Inside, the city fills a wall of glass, and the room is dim and enormous. Gold-flowered wallpaper line the opposite walls. A subtle pattern. Above us, a gold and pearl chandelier set to glow. The plush carpet isn’t white, like in a cheap hotel. It’s warm, a shade darker than ivory.
The room is inviting, but it appears he didn’t reply to the invitation.
One garment bag over a chair. A closed laptop on the desk, squared to the edge. A watch case. No suitcase in sight, no shoes by the door, none of the debris a normal person sheds into a room within an hour of holding a key. Either he lives off nothing, or the rest of his life arrives separately.
He doesn’t inhabit the space. He’s merely here.
“The bathroom is there.” He nods toward a door, already shrugging out of the ruined jacket. “There will be cloths.”
“Right.” I detour into a bathroom bigger than my kitchen, collect two washcloths, and grab the club soda off the minibar on my way back.
He has his back to the window, unbuttoning the shirt, matter-of-fact about it, a man dealing with damaged equipment. Then the shirt comes off, and I stop in the middle of the room and recalibrate.
I had registered that he was fit, distantly, the way you register that a bridge is load bearing. Up close is different. He’s broad and hard-built, silver dusting his chest, and there’s ink across his shoulder and down his ribs, dark work with a star in it, blurred at the edges by time.
Oh, and there are scars.
A pale seam along his side. A round, puckered mark below his collarbone that my brain identifies before I can veto the identification, because I grew up around my uncle’s hunting rifles, and I know what bullet holes look like.
Whatever this man does in business, I don’t think it’s consulting.
“You’re staring,” he says, folding the shirt over the chair.
“You have a lot going on. Topographically.” Oh my God, Thea, shut the hell up. “The scars, I mean. Not the muscles. Well, I mean, they’re there, too, huge—”
“Might I say something?”
I swallow. “I beg you to.”
Some strange low growl escapes his throat before he can stop it. For a flash, he is distracted. But then those eyes narrow on me again. “This will go faster if you focus on the task at hand.”
“Right. Right, sorry.”
The mouth-rumor again, there and gone. He sits on the arm of the sofa, which brings his eyes level with mine, and waits, and I realize the next move is mine, because I’m the one holding the washcloths, and this was, technically, on paper, my idea to accept.
The wine soaked through to his skin. There’s a faint red ghost of it across his chest. I wet a cloth with club soda, step in between his knees, and press it to his sternum. His skin is warm, which I did not expect for some reason, and the room is very quiet.
He watches my face while I work, not my hands. I give the stain a level of focus it doesn’t really require, because the alternative is the pale eyes at a distance of ten inches.
“Your party is very good. But the fountain is too much.”
I snort at that. “The fountain wasn’t mine. I fought the fountain and lost.” The laugh comes up through me before I can screen it. “You’ve been counting my ballroom all night. Exits or dollars?”
“Both.” No pause at all. “Habit. How did you know?”
“It’s my job to know these things.”
“You’re always so observant?”
I smile and shrug. “Sometimes, I’m too observant.” That’s the nice way of saying I have a near-photographic memory, a gift—or curse—for picking up languages and reading a scene before I choose a path, and right now I’m observing how his breath has slowed since I touched him.
I move the cloth along his collarbone, past the scar I’m not asking about. The no-asking is becoming a project of its own. I want to know about it. Curiosity killed the cat, but hey, I’ve got nine lives in that metaphor, so maybe it’d be okay to ask.
But there are the ink and the scars, and Klaus went pale for a reason. Lately, there have been some scary-looking men around the office, and they don’t make him go pale. In fact, he welcomes them with open arms.
So, why does this one freak him out?