22. Maren
Maren
The Crowns Foundation gala is the biggest night on my calendar, four hundred donors in a hotel ballroom, and I run it like a general, which is how I end up making the worst decision of my life in a coat room while a string quartet plays Gershwin forty feet away.
I built this night. Every place card, every camera angle, the silent auction, the speaking order, the lighting that makes everyone look like money.
An event like this, done right, is invisible, nobody notices the machine, they just feel like the evening loves them.
I’m very good at making evenings love people.
I’m in a long dark green dress with my hair up and a comms earpiece in and a clipboard energy even though I ditched the actual clipboard, and I am, by every external measure, completely in control of this room.
There’s a version of me, the one I was in September, who would have been thrilled by tonight, four hundred of the most powerful people in the city in a room I designed down to the fork placement, the biggest stage I’ve ever built.
That version didn’t know there was a folder. That version got to enjoy things.
Then Rhett comes down the stairs in a tux, and I lose about forty percent of my higher brain function on the spot.
It isn’t fair. A man should not be allowed to look like that at fifty-three.
The silver and the black and the shoulders, and the way he wears formalwear like he's mildly annoyed by it.
He finds me across the ballroom the second he hits the floor, the way he always finds me.
His eyes do the slow thing, the reading-the-tape thing, the thing that's ruined me since a press room in September.
And I have to physically turn to a donor and ask about her golf game to keep from walking across a charity gala and climbing him in front of four hundred people.
We’re good in public. We’ve practiced. He works the room like the legend he is and I run the night like the professional I am and we orbit, careful, a planet and a moon keeping regulation distance, and the not-touching has a charge to it now that’s almost worse than touching, because I know exactly what I’m not having.
Brunner’s here too, of course, holding court near the auction tables, and I watch him watch Rhett work the room, and there’s a thing in his face I’ve started to be able to read.
The donors love Rhett. They cluster, they laugh, an old season-ticket couple actually tears up shaking his hand, and Brunner stands at the edge of it with a flute of something he isn’t drinking and watches the most beloved man in the building be beloved.
His expression has the look of a man auditing an asset he resents.
I promise myself I won't be alone in a hallway while that look is in the building.
I'll break that promise within the hour, of course.
That's the whole problem with me tonight.
Camila is here, in burgundy, working her own room, and she keeps finding her way into my eyeline.
Once she appears beside me while I’m watching Rhett charm a table, and she follows my gaze and says, light as anything, “He cleans up, doesn’t he?
Your coach.” Your coach. She lets it sit.
“You’ve done such a good job with him this year.
Really turned the whole story around. People are noticing how hands-on you’ve been.
” And she smiles and floats off before I can answer, leaving the words hanging there like a price tag, and I stand in my beautiful evening with my heart going and think: she knows.
She doesn’t have it yet, but she knows, and she’s letting me know she knows, because that’s how Camila enjoys things.
I should be more careful after that. That’s the part I can’t explain, even to myself.
I get told, in so many words, by a woman building a case, that I’m being watched, and twenty minutes later I let Rhett follow me into the coat room anyway.
I’d love to say it was a lapse. It wasn’t a lapse.
It was a decision I made with the part of me that has spent four months starving on inches and just saw the man I love be loved by a whole room and could not, for one night, stand to keep him at regulation distance.
Call it what it is. I wanted him more than I wanted to be safe, and for the first time in my life I let the wanting win, in the worst possible place, on the worst possible night.
***
It’s not planned. Nothing about it is smart.
I duck in to grab a donor’s forgotten wrap, and he’s three steps behind me, and the door swings shut, and the gala drops to a muffle on the other side of it.
Gershwin and four hundred voices reduced to a hum, and it’s just us and a thousand coats and the dark.
“You can’t be in here,” I whisper, which is what I always say, and never mean.
“Then send me out.” He doesn’t move toward me.
He never makes me. He just stands there in his tux in the dark with his hands at his sides, letting me decide, and the letting-me-decide is the thing I have never once been able to resist, because nobody in my life has ever handed me the choice instead of taking it.
I cross the room.
I kiss him and it’s instantly past careful, two weeks of regulation distance and a gala’s worth of watching him in that tux igniting all at once, and his hands are in my hair and then at the slit of my dress and mine are shoving his jacket off his shoulders, and we’re quiet, we have to be quiet, there are four hundred people and a string quartet forty feet away and a woman in burgundy who’s looking for exactly this, but the quiet makes it worse, hotter, the swallowed sounds and the held breath.
“Tell me to stop,” he breathes against my neck, walking me back into the coats, the wall of wool and fur and cashmere swallowing us.
“Don’t you dare.”
He gets my dress up and his hand between my legs and he groans low against my shoulder at what he finds, how ready I already am, how ready I’ve been since he hit the bottom of those stairs, and his fingers work me fast and certain while I fumble his belt with hands that won’t cooperate, and it’s reckless and graceless and the single most alive I have felt in my entire carefully managed life.
I get him free and he lifts me, my back against the coats, my legs around him, and he pushes into me in one stroke with his forehead dropped to mine and we both bite down on the sounds, his hand coming up to half-cover my mouth, mine fisting in his shirt, and he fucks me against four hundred strangers’ coats with the whole organization a door away, slow and deep and devastating because we can’t go fast, fast makes noise, and the having to be silent and still and contained while coming apart is its own filthy torture.
“Look at me,” he breathes, the way he always does, and I do, in the dark, his eyes the only thing I can see, and I come around him with his hand pressed to my mouth catching the sound I can’t hold, shaking apart against the coats, and he follows me a few strokes later, pulling me down hard onto him, burying his own sound in my hair.
For a second we just hang there, joined, breathing, wrecked, the Gershwin still playing, nobody the wiser, and it’s the most reckless thing I have ever done and I’m grinning into his shoulder like an idiot, high on it, the thrill of the almost, the having-gotten-away-with-it.
Then the coat room door handle turns.
We come apart faster than physics should allow, and I’m yanking my dress down and he’s turning to the rack like a man browsing and I’ve got a stranger’s wrap in my hands like that’s why I’m here.
The door opens, and it’s a hotel banquet kid looking for the AV cart, “sorry, wrong room,” gone in two seconds, and it was nothing, it was a teenager who saw nothing, and my heart is going so hard I think I might actually pass out in a coat room at my own gala.
“That,” I whisper, “was the stupidest thing we have ever done.”
“Yeah.” He’s already fixing his jacket, the legend reassembling, but his hands aren’t quite steady either, and that undoes me almost more than the rest of it, that I can still rattle him. “Worth it.”
“Don’t say worth it. We almost —”
“I know what we almost.” He cups my face for one second, gentle in the dark, the gentleness that’s going to be the death of me. “Go run your gala. You’re shaking. Take the back hall, fix your hair, give it five minutes. I’ll go out the front.”
I fix my hair in a service bathroom with my hands trembling and my whole body still humming, and I look at myself in the mirror, flushed and wrecked and grinning and terrified, and I make myself look at it.
Because here’s what I know, coming down off it, the thrill curdling into the thing under the thrill.
We are getting reckless. We crossed a line tonight we swore we’d never cross, in a building full of cameras, with Camila three rooms away assembling whatever she’s assembling, and a deadline clock ticking down to the day Rhett walks into his son’s office, and a folder sitting where it sits with both our names in it.
The recklessness isn’t separate from the danger.
The recklessness is what happens when two people can only have each other in stolen pieces, you start taking bigger pieces, dumber pieces, pieces with witnesses, because the stolen kind is all you’re allowed and it’s never enough.
The walls are getting thin. I can feel them getting thin.
I built this whole night to be invisible and I just did the one thing in it that could end everything, and the worst part, the part I take back out into the ballroom with my professional face bolted on, is that I would do it again.
Right now. That’s not love being smart. That’s love running out of room, and I know the difference, but I walk back into my beautiful evening anyway, smiling, in control, a woman holding two live secrets and a wineglass, with maybe eleven days left on a clock only I can hear.