7. Hairline Fractures #2
“And then.” She said it like a promise they’d rehearsed, leaning in, her vanilla perfume filling the small office.
“You stop pretending. It’s you and me, a corner office, that apartment with the view we looked at.
” Her lips brushed his jaw. “You keep saying ‘and then’, Elliott. I’m starting to wonder if it ever turns into now. ”
“It’s not that simple. There’s timing.”
“There’s always timing.” She pulled back an inch, and the sweetness faded for a second, revealing the harder edge she mostly kept tucked away.
“You said after she was further along. She’s further along.
Then you said after the baby. Now there’s a partnership in the mix too.
Every time I look up, there’s one more hurdle you have to clear before you can do what you swore you’d do. ”
“Because the order matters.” He recognized the defensive edge in his tone and forced himself to dial it back.
“Bella. Listen. If I blow up the marriage now, before the partnership, I’m not a family man having a hard time.
I’m the guy who left his pregnant wife. You know what that does to a partnership vote?
It hands it to every smug married golfer ahead of me.
” He took her hands and made his voice warm and certain, the voice that closed clients.
“Six months. I make partner on the back of the perfect-marriage picture, and a man at my level can do whatever he wants. Quiet divorce, generous, civilized. Nobody blinks. Then it’s you, in the apartment, with the ring, and no one can touch us.
Do it in the wrong order, and there’s no apartment.
There’s just a scandal and a smaller paycheck. ”
She studied him, weighing the offer, calculating. It pleased him, perversely, that she was a woman who calculated. Maeve had never once done that. Maeve had just believed him.
“Six months.” Bella repeated the number, weighing it like a term in a contract. “Then it’s now.”
“You have my word.”
“I’ll hold you to it, Elliott. I’m not a patient person, and I’ve been very patient.” She let that harder edge show one more second, then dropped it and smiled, sliding her hands up his chest. “So you’d better make it worth the wait.”
“It will.” And here was what he wouldn’t have admitted to anyone, the impulse that made him pull her off the edge of the desk and into his lap right there with the blinds half open.
When Bella looked at him like this, the lingering panic from the meeting finally dissolved.
When Bella wanted him, he was the prize again.
Not a man whose discarded wife had been picked up by someone richer.
A man a beautiful girl locked the door for.
A man on his way up, with his pick of the field.
“Prove it,” she breathed against his mouth.
He kissed her hard, both hands greedy, the swivel chair creaking under them. The sheer momentum of the kiss was enough to block out Cogswell, Pemberton, and the image of Maeve humming on the stairs.
This he understood. This he was good at. A woman who wanted him. Who’d come up twenty-eight floors and locked the door. Who made him feel like the center of something instead of a man being lectured and left.
It didn’t occur to him that Bella’s ‘and then’ was a clock running down, that she was counting on a future he was assembling out of theater and nerve.
It didn’t occur to him to wonder who else might be walking the halls on a floor of glass offices.
Nothing occurred to him that didn’t flatter him. It never had.
It occurred to him only that he felt powerful again, and Elliott had never in his life questioned a feeling that stroked his ego.
Afterward, Bella fixed her lipstick in the black mirror of his monitor, leaning in, smudging nothing, expert at it. He stood knotting his tie and watching her silhouette in the glass.
“I found the listing again,” she said to the screen.
“The one on the eleventh floor, with the corner windows. It’s still up.
Two bedrooms.” She pressed her lips together, checking them.
“The second one would make a perfect dressing room. Or, you know.” She caught his eye in the monitor and smiled. “Whatever it turns into.”
“It’s a good building.” He gave her the easy concession, the one that cost nothing today.
“It’s the building, Elliott. The one we said.” She turned around to face him, hip against the desk. “I already know where the couch goes. I think about it more than I should.”
He should have felt something at that, at how she’d furnished a whole life out of six months of his promises. Mostly what he felt was the pleasant warmth of being adored by someone who’d fallen for the version of him he liked best.
He let her keep the fantasy of the apartment. It cost him nothing today, and today he needed the warmth more than he needed to be honest about timelines.
“Soon.” He kissed her temple and ignored the mental calendar where ‘soon’ kept quietly moving.
“You’d better mean it.” But she was smiling, pleased, taking the word as currency.
She gathered her bag. At the door she paused, her sweet tone dropping completely. “Don’t make me wait so long I get bored, Elliott. I’m not good at bored.” Then the smile returned, and she was gone, slipping out past the assistants like a woman who already owned the place.
He stood alone in the quiet office and told himself she was joking. Bella wasn’t going anywhere. Bella had picked out the couch. He exhaled slowly, allowing himself to believe he had it all perfectly under control. Underneath it, he didn’t examine the small, cold fact that she’d said it at all.
He’d bring Maeve to the firm events and smile for whoever needed to see it.
He’d play the ‘family man’ one more season and make partner.
And then the diamonds, the driver, whoever was buying them, all of it would stop mattering.
Elliott Gallagher would finally be the richest man in any room he walked into.
He believed it completely. He had never once in his life struggled to believe a thing that let him feel like a winner.
He sat back down and pulled the Coyle printout in front of him. Line nineteen, still wrong, waiting. He fixed it in under a minute, the way he fixed everything, and told himself it had never really been a problem at all.