Chapter 13 #2
The reception on Wednesday was a send-off for the founder of one of the firms two streets over.
Thirty years in, and she was finally stepping down.
Cocktails in a top-floor room full of high windows, a crowd Cordelia half-knew and would go on half-knowing for the rest of her career.
It was the kind of evening she'd lost the taste for a long time ago, but she went anyway.
She stood off to one side with a drink she barely touched and did the rounds, the handshakes and the careful nothing you traded with people who were rivals on Monday and would be rivals again by Friday, and when a woman she knew a little from one of the banks leaned in to tell her the restructuring was the boldest thing anyone had done in the market all year, she thanked her and let her think she'd paid a compliment, and did not tell her that what she admired was the neat public face of Cordelia's own way out.
By half past seven she had given the evening everything it could fairly ask of her, and she left before the speeches, before anyone could stand up and say what thirty years had come to, and went down alone in the lift and out into a street gone blue and cool.
Her car was one message away and she would have been home no more than fifteen minutes later.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to send the message and let the whole thing be over, but she stood on the sidewalk with her coat draped over her arm and her phone in her hand and didn't send it.
She stayed there a moment longer than made any sense, watching the taxis go past with their lights on, and then she turned left, toward the office instead of home, and she was most of the way to the corner before she let herself admit she'd meant to all along.
It was four blocks, and she talked herself through them one at a time.
There was the Iverson set in her desk drawer, the full terms, which she honestly would sleep better for having read before the morning call.
She let herself use that as the surface-level excuse for a few minutes.
There was the plain fact that she had come back to the office at worse hours than this for smaller reasons, that coming back was the most ordinary thing she did, and she leaned on that for the second excuse.
By the third, the reasons had begun to wear through under her, thin as they always got when she needed them too badly, and she was walking faster now than she had been without realizing when she had picked up the pace.
Under the flat calm of the errand, there was something else moving, low and steady and entirely unwilling to be looked at, and she kept her eyes ahead and did not look at it.
Her building came up in front of her, dark from the street, every floor of it dark but the eighth, where one long band of light burned along the top.
She knew that light and what it was and what it meant.
The antechamber was lit and Wren was still up there at her desk because she was always the last one to leave.
For the length of half a block, the thing she had spent all evening not naming came up close to the surface, close enough to put words to if she let it, and something in her went cold and quick, and she understood exactly what she was doing and exactly what it would cost her to keep doing it. She kept doing it anyway.
She let herself in at the side door and crossed the empty lobby.
The guard glanced up and lifted her chin in acknowledgement and went back to her screen.
Cordelia stepped into the elevator and rode up alone, and somewhere between the ground floor and the eighth she stopped telling herself about the Iverson terms and other excuses she had come up with on her walk because she had never in her life been able to lie to herself all the way to the end.
The eighth floor was dark when the elevator opened, all of it but the antechamber, where the lamp on Wren's desk cast a low circle of light and she sat inside it with a folder open in front of her. She looked up before Cordelia had stepped out. She was always perceptive in that way.
Cordelia's office lay past her, through the open door, and the Iverson set was in the drawer where she'd left it.
That was the reason she had come. That was the reason she had given herself the whole way here.
She started across the antechamber toward it.
She got as far as Wren's desk, and she stopped.
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
Cordelia had the excuse ready and waiting in her mouth—the folder, the morning call, the whole reasonable errand.
She looked down at Wren looking up at her and could not make herself say a word of it.
The excuse had gotten her here and up eight floors, and it died the moment Wren's eyes found hers.
There was no version of it that survived being seen like this.
On Monday, she had stood in plain daylight, with the door open and the floor full of people, and told her exactly why this could not happen.
She had meant every word. All of it was still true: the firm, the deal, the people counting on it.
Every reason she had given was still a good reason.
She stood over Wren now with all the words inside her and reached for none of them.
She had said them once, and it had changed nothing.
There was nothing left that she was willing to say out loud, and tonight she was finished pretending there was.
Wren set the pen down. She did not stand, and she did not speak. She only waited and let Cordelia be the one to come the rest of the way.
"Wren," Cordelia said. Only that. Her name in the dark, with no reason in front of it and nothing after to make it safe.
Then she crossed the distance she had kept between them all week.
This time she said nothing at all. Cordelia kissed her, and it wasn’t careful.
Nothing like the way she had mentally rehearsed it in the elevator on the way up, which if anyone had asked her was not at all.
The mental version was where she set the briefcase down and said something measured, then Wren looked up and Cordelia touched her face, and the whole thing unfolded with the dignity of two adults who understood what they were choosing.
That version had her earrings catching the light and Wren's hand on her wrist and a kiss that communicated they were both knowingly, fully choosing this.
This was not that kiss. Not even close.
Cordelia's mouth found Wren's in the dark, and her right hand was already tangled in Wren's hair, her fingers closing into the loose dark weight of it at the nape.
The sound Wren made—not a gasp but also not a fully formed word, something lower and more certain than either—went through Cordelia like an electrified current.
Cordelia dropped her bag, and neither of them acknowledged it.
Wren's hands came up to Cordelia's hips, warm through the wool of her suit, and Cordelia thought she knew I was coming and then couldn't think anything because Wren pulled at her enough that Cordelia’s weight shifted forward and her knee met the edge of Wren’s chair.
She was close enough to feel the heat of Wren's body through two layers of clothing, close enough that when Wren tilted her head and deepened the kiss, Cordelia's mouth opened for it without any decision involved at all.
She had rebuilt this wall on Monday. She had toed the line through Tuesday, through Wednesday morning, through watching Wren sitting at this desk four feet from Cordelia's door, answering her phone, bringing her files. Yet she was here anyway.
Wren's mouth left hers and moved to her jaw, then to her temple where the scar was, and Cordelia felt her breath catch at the tenderness of it, the way Wren's lips found the old wound like she already knew it was there, like she had been paying attention long enough to know where her body kept its history.
"You came back," Wren said against her skin, no surprise or questioning in her tone.
Cordelia's hand tightened in Wren's hair because she could not answer that with words and have any of them be the truth she was willing to say aloud. Her body, though, knew that of course she came back, that she hadn’t really stopped coming back to it, and that even though her mind had closed the door, her body knew differently.
Wren shifted, and the chair rolled back and hit the wall. They now stood close enough that Cordelia could see the fine grain of the oxford shirt Wren was wearing, the top two buttons undone, and the hollow of her throat. Wren kissed her again.
Wren's hand was on the lapel of Cordelia's jacket, turning and redirecting her, and Cordelia felt herself guided backward until her hip met Wren's desk, and then Wren's hands were on the desk on either side of her. Cordelia was sitting on the edge of it, and Wren was standing between her knees.
"Tell me to stop," Wren said.
Cordelia looked at her. Wren's face was in the shadows except where the glow caught the edge of her jaw, the tip of her nose, and the wetness on her lower lip where Cordelia's mouth had just been.
"Tell me to stop and I will," Wren said. Both her voice and hands were steady, and the old watch had slid forward on her wrist. Cordelia saw her twist the watch face, the tell that meant Wren was holding herself still against something that made her want to move.
Cordelia reached up and put her hand over Wren's. Stilled the watch. Stilled the turning.
"No," Cordelia said.
Wren exhaled. Something in her shoulders released, and she kissed Cordelia again.
This time her hands found the buttons of Cordelia's blouse, the small shell buttons she kept precisely aligned, the ones she checked every morning in the mirror, the ones that were her armor and her order and her proof that she was in command of at least one small area of her life.