Elena #2
“You know what I mean.” She props a foot against the leg of my desk.
My real plan is to open the binder and stare at it until I fall asleep, but that's not something I can say out loud. “Popcorn. Wine. That documentary about the woman who scammed all the banks.”
“Elena. It's your dirty thirty.”
“Do adults still do birthdays after twenty-one?”
“Adults with joy in their lives do.”
“I have joy.”
“Do you though? You labeled lunch ‘desk availability’.”
“That's when I'm available. At my desk.” I turn back to my monitor, which does absolutely nothing to stop her.
“Look, I'm not doing the... the thing, where I tell you your life is empty, because it isn't, that's insane, you're the most high-functioning, accomplished person I've ever met, and I've met my mother.” She waves a hand at me.
“I'm saying thirty matters and you've got plenty to celebrate and you should let somebody buy you a drink.”
The comment lands a little somewhere near Daniel's photo memory and Greta's voicemail and just sits there. I open an email to avoid looking back at her. “It's another day.”
“It's your birthday.”
“Annually, yes.”
Her phone goes off before she can get going again. She stands, points at me, and answers on the way out. “This is paused. Hi, this is Maya — no, he's not, hang on—”
The office goes quiet and my throat's still doing something stupid from Cliff's card.
She's not wrong about what I've built, either.
I'm an executive at one of the best companies in this city, my name's the only one on the deed to my luxury condo, my money's mine, and my work carries my name because I earned the respect attached to it and not because anybody handed it over.
I'm proud of this but I'm also thirty and ready for it to be more than this.
The Chicago Cryo Clinic binder is on the corner of my desk where it's been for four days, riding back and forth in my bag like a hostage.
I keep telling myself I need more time. I've had the research since March. I stare at it, drumming my fingers rapidly on my desk while I try to think of every possible reason I shouldn’t choose this option.
Fine. Okay. Fuck it, fine.
I pull it into my lap and flip it open. Blue tabs are for questions, red are for concerns, and my handwriting crawling up every margin tells me I’m still far too undecided.
The first profile opens on medical history and genetic screening, then education, then physical characteristics, then family.
A whole entire man flattened into a spec sheet, which is the appeal, that's the actual point, he is never going to turn up at Thanksgiving with opinions about how I'm doing this or decide one day that he doesn’t want to do it at all.
I read his profile twice. I start a note on the comparison sheet, hoping that with enough comments and notes I’ll somehow be able to reduce this massive binder of options down to one single choice.
“She's right, you know.”
The second I hear his voice, I come up out of my chair about six inches. My pen skids, the binder goes off my lap and catches the edge of the desk and lands closed on the floor. I lunge forward in a panic and crack my knee on the drawer getting to it.
“Shit. I've got it.”
Dominic's two steps into my office with his hand already extended outward to help.
He stops when I get there first and come up with the binder mashed against my chest, and he looks at my face, then the cover, then my face.
Dominic misses approximately nothing, and my reaction has made it more than clear to him that this is personal.
I set it down near the edge of the desk with the title turned away, which is subtle, I'm sure.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yep.” I sit, forcing my face into a neutral mask while my knee throbs in protest. Weakness is not an option. Not in this office, and definitely not in front of him.
He doesn't buy it. There's a specific thing he does with his mouth when he's filing something away to bring up later and he's doing it right now, but he lets it go anyway.
“Happy birthday, Elena.”
“Thanks, Dominic.”
He goes still for about half a second when I say it.
It's nothing. I've watched him do it before, and I have a theory about why, and it is not a theory I'm allowed to have at work.
He smiles at me the way nobody in a conference room ever gets to see.
In a meeting Dominic can make a grown man reconsider his entire career with one eyebrow, and in here he mostly just looks like himself, relaxed and pleased about something.
Then he looks at the blouse. A second, maybe two. A slow, infuriating heat crawls up my neck. Long enough.
“Dangerously persuasive.” The words ring in my ears in that same low, sexy tenor. Perfect, this is just perfect.
My neck goes hot and I turn toward my monitor so I don't have to watch him watching me. “I have a call in nine minutes.”
“I know.”
Of course he knows. Dominic knows my calendar and my coffee order and the way I square up a stack of paper when I'm avoiding something and exactly which acquisition meetings require patience he does not naturally possess.
Four years in and we know each other's habits better than either of us probably realizes.
He doesn't leave. I click an email and wait for him to take the hint, but he wanders farther into my office instead with one hand going into his pocket, jacket pulling across his shoulders, and I follow that for about a second longer than a person should follow her boss's shoulders.
“Subtle,” he says, nodding toward the flowers.
“Maya denies responsibility for the size.”
“She thinks you've got a secret admirer.”
“I don't,” I say, a little too quickly.
“I know.”
Something about how flat he says it makes my stomach tighten. He isn't guessing; he knows. He's been paying attention. I turn my head. “How?”
He walks over to the credenza and runs a finger down the edge of one of the roses. I've watched those hands sign contracts and brace on a conference table while he took somebody's argument apart, and I've got no business at all wondering what that would feel like on me.
He looks up, catching my eyes on him.
Shit.
I grab Cliff's card so my hands and eyes have something to preoccupy them. “Are you monitoring my deliveries now?”
“I told Cliff to send them.”
“You... what?”