Chapter Fourteen
Cait
She had been thinking about the kiss since Monday evening.
Not constantly. She was not the kind of person who gave something like that so much of her attention that it crowded out everything else.
But it was there, in the background of the pension variant work and the email to Petrov and the call with Diane and the three hours of sleep she had managed on Tuesday night.
There, the way something was there when it had altered the shape of the room and you kept orienting yourself to it even when you were looking at something else.
She had told Diane nothing. Diane was her supervisor and her closest colleague at CWA and one of the most perceptive people she had worked with in six years, and she had said nothing because there was nothing to say that was safe to say yet.
A kiss in a plant at shift change did not resolve anything.
It complicated an already complicated situation in a direction she had not planned for, and she was still working out whether the complication changed the case or was separate from it.
She had decided, provisionally, that it was separate.
That she could hold both things at once: the negotiation and the personal, the professional objective and the thing that was happening between them, and that the first was not compromised by the second as long as she was honest about what she was doing.
The honest thing was: she wanted both. She wanted the three hundred and forty jobs and she wanted to know what happened after Wednesday.
She had not had both things simultaneously in some time. She was not sure she ever had, in the specific combination of: a case she cared about and a person she could not stop thinking about. Usually one or the other. Usually she chose the first.
When his text came she was in the small office going through the capacity projection for the third time, looking for the stress point in the model, the number that would wobble under pressure. She found it and she had a note ready before she walked to the conference room.
He was standing at the window when she came in, his back to her, looking at the floor below.
He turned when she entered. He looked the way he always looked: contained, focused, not performing anything.
But his eyes moved to her face and stayed there for a moment before he said anything, and in that moment something passed between them that had nothing to do with Victor Hale or pension recovery schedules.
"Three conditions," he said.
She sat down. She opened her notepad. "Tell me."
He laid them out cleanly, in order, with the alternative positions he had already negotiated on year-one contribution and the cure period. She listened without interrupting. She wrote three things down.
When he finished she looked at her notes.
"The ten percent in year one is manageable," she said. "It's above what we proposed but the grant disbursement offsets it in Q1. The members can absorb it."
"That's my read as well."
"The capacity trigger." She tapped her pen on the notepad. "Seventy percent of our own projection at eighteen months with a forty-five-day cure. That's reasonable. We built the projection conservatively. If the Q2 contract comes through, we clear it with room."
"And if it doesn't."
"Then we need a fallback contract by month twelve. I have two prospects. Neither is signed." She met his eyes. "I'll have one signed before month twelve. That's a commitment."
He looked at her for a moment. "I'll hold you to it."
"I know." She moved to the third point on her notepad. "The on-site liaison."
"Yes."
"From Ashford Meridian. Six months. Quarterly reporting to Hale."
"Yes."
She looked at the notepad. She looked at him. He was watching her with the particular stillness that meant he had already worked through the implications and was waiting to see if she had too.
"It's you," she said.
"Yes."
She held that for a moment. Six months. The same building, the same floor, the same corridor that smelled of something she could not identify. The same conference room and the same wobbling desk in the small office and the same plant sounds coming up through the floor.
"That changes things," she said.
"Some things."
"The case is not one of them."
"No," he said. "The case is not one of them."
She wrote six months on the notepad and drew a line under it. "I'll take the conditions to Petrov and the steering committee this afternoon. I'll have a formal response by end of day."
"The package is all three. Victor won't separate them."
"I know." She closed the notepad. She stood. He was still at the window, closer to her now by the length of the table, and the room had the quality it had had on Monday, the particular density of two people deciding something without saying so.
"The plant floor," she said. "Monday evening."
"Yes."
"We should talk about it."
"We should," he agreed. He did not move toward her. He did not move away. "After the committee response. When the conditions are either accepted or not."
"You want to wait until the case is closed."
"I want to talk about it when neither of us has to be somewhere in forty-five minutes." He looked at her. "That's not the same thing."
She thought this was correct. She also thought forty-five minutes was not nothing, and that the way he was looking at her was making the forty-five minutes feel considerably more theoretical than it had five minutes ago.
"End of day," she said. "The committee response."
"End of day," he confirmed.
She picked up her bag and left.