5. Vera #2
He did something to me last night. He took years of carefully maintained distance and dissolved it in about four hours, and now he’s sitting here like I’m not supposed to notice.
I notice.
Sloane tops up her mimosa. “You just missed Vera’s news actually.”
“What news.”
Not a question. Just the shape of one.
“Nothing,” I say.
“She met someone,” Sloane says, at the same time.
A beat of silence.
Then his eyes find mine with a slowness that is intentional.
“Did she,” he says.
“She won’t tell me who. Very mysterious.” Sloane sounds delighted. “But look at her. She’s glowing.”
His eyes don’t leave my face. “When did this happen?”
Still not a question.
“Recently,” I say.
“How recently.”
“Does it matter?”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Not quite. “What does he look like?”
“Tall,” I say, before I’ve decided to say anything. “Sandy hair. Big, easy smile. Very relaxed. The kind of man who walks into a room and immediately makes everyone in it feel like there’s nowhere they’d rather be.”
A muscle in his jaw moves, and a small, petty part of me counts it as a win. I’m not proud of that.
“Relaxed,” he says.
“Extremely.”
“Creative type?”
“Very.”
“Spontaneous?”
“Refreshingly so.”
He picks up the menu. Studies it with the focused attention of a man who will not be ordering anything from it. “And you find that attractive. The lack of structure.”
“I find it restful.”
“You’d be bored inside a month.”
“You don’t know what I find boring.”
“You find boring things boring,” he says, without looking up from the menu. “You’ve never wanted something uncomplicated. You want things that push back.”
“Maybe I’m changing.”
“People don’t change their fundamentals.” He puts the menu down. “They get tired and call it growth.”
“That’s a bleak worldview.”
“It’s an accurate one.”
“From the man who critiques the structural integrity of restaurant seating.”
“Organization isn’t a worldview, it’s a system.”
“Right. Because the alternative is improvisation, and improvisation is —”
“Expensive,” he says. “Inefficient. And frequently embarrassing for everyone involved.”
Sloane glances between us. “Are we still talking about the mystery man?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I don’t know,” Kane says, at the same time.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
I should stop. I know I should stop. I’ve been here enough times to know that the Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown has a way of burning down whatever it touches, and right now there is a lot in the vicinity I cannot afford to lose.
But he’s sitting there being closed. Being controlled and unreadable and entirely too composed for a man who had his hands in my hair less than twelve hours ago.
“You know what your problem is?” I say pleasantly.
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“You think that because you can see the structure of something, you understand it.” I wrap both hands around my drink.
“You look at a thing — a building, a brief, a person — identify the load-bearing elements, and assume that’s the whole picture.
But some things don’t have a blueprint, Kane.
Some things you just have to—“ I pause, let the word land where I intend it to land— “feel.”
There’s a stillness that comes over him.
He knows exactly what I’m doing.
And he can’t say so.
His jaw tightens. His eyes hold mine with an intensity that makes the back of my neck warm, and for a moment, just a moment, the closed door opens a fraction and I see what’s behind it.
Last night. I see it in his eyes.
“Some things,” he says, “require both.”
The air between us is warm.
Sloane puts her mimosa glass down with a small, precise click.
“Kane.” Her voice is careful. Curious. “What are you doing?”
He pulls his gaze from mine with visible effort.
“Talking,” he says.
“That’s not talking.” She tilts her head and studies him. “You two are having the Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown.”
Neither of us says anything.
“Except—” She stops. Looks at me. Looks at him. Looks at the space between us that is doing something she doesn’t have a name for yet. Her brow furrows. “No. It’s not. Is it?”
“It’s a conversation,” Kane says.
“It’s — huh.” She shakes her head once, like she’s trying to reset. “It feels different.”
The word different drops into the silence and sits there.
“I should go,” Kane says. “I have drawings to finish.” He stands, picks up the takeout bag. His eyes find mine one last time. Flat. Careful. Giving me absolutely nothing. “Vera.”
Just my name. Acknowledgement and dismissal wrapped in two syllables.
The same way he always uses it.
Except now I know what his voice sounds like when it isn’t doing that.
“Sinclair,” I say.
The café recalibrates around his absence.
Sloane watches him go. Her eyes stay on the door. Hold there, and then she turns back to me.
“Huh,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
She picks up her mimosa and takes a long, thoughtful sip. “I was going to say he’s never that interested in your dating life.” A pause. “Or anyone’s, really.”
“He was being Kane.”
“He was,” she agrees. “Just a different frequency of it.”
She lets it settle there, then her phone explodes. A cascade of notifications, then a call, then another. She glances at the screen and shifts entirely, crisis mode engaging like a switch being thrown.
“Shit — the Carrington campaign—” She stands. “I have to—”
“Go. Do your thing.”
“Rain check.” She asks with the phone to her ear, moving. “No. Twenty minutes—”
Gone.
The booth feels enormous without her.
I wrap both hands around my drink, and sit with a heavy silence, the kind that comes from doing something you knew was a mistake while you were doing it anyway
Some things you just have to feel.
I said it to get a reaction. To crack the composure. To find the Kane who was in Suite 7 underneath the Kane who sat across from me being unreadable, because I couldn’t stand not being able to read him.
And I found him. For about four seconds, I found him.
That’s not self-protection.
That’s something considerably more dangerous.
My phone rings.
LUMA BEAUTY. CEO.
The work ringtone, the one I’ve assigned to clients who call on weekends, the one that bypasses Do Not Disturb because some crises don’t respect Sunday brunch. I’m already sliding out of the booth.
“Vivienne,” I answer, and my voice settles into the register I use for clients, smooth and three steps ahead. “I’m listening.”
“You haven’t seen it yet.”
“Tell me while I look.”
I’m already outside, phone to one ear, free hand opening Instagram, TikTok, Twitter in three rapid taps.
Cold breath, the Sunday street quiet enough to make my voice sound too loud. Something in my body recognizes this: the instant narrowing, everything non-essential falling away.
“Luminos,” Vivienne says. “The new concealer line.”
“I was at the launch.”
“There’s a hashtag.”
I find it. #LuminosFail. Over sixty videos, most posted in the last twelve hours. The pattern resolves immediately.
Celine Park, 2.1 million followers, holding the Luminos #3 compact next to her forearm. Side-by-side with the campaign imagery. The difference is obvious enough that no one needs her to say anything.
She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at the camera.
It’s worse than angry. Angry burns out. This is the look of someone who expected better and is no longer surprised that she didn’t get it.
“The shade range,” I say.
“The shade range.” Vivienne’s voice goes flat. “The campaign imagery said something the product didn’t back up.”
“I need you not to say anything in the next ten minutes. Nothing attributed to LUMA. Can you do that?”
“My social team wants to —”
“No.” The word comes out the same way Kane said kneel: not loud, not aggressive, just completely without room for negotiation. “A wrong response now is worse than silence. I need your creative director on a call at noon. I need to understand the decision trail before I can shape anything.”
She exhales. “Noon.”
“Noon.” I hang up.
I stand on the sidewalk while the city hums around me, indifferent and ongoing.
The LUMA problem is containable. I know exactly what to do, in what order, with what words.
In the space the crisis vacated, the Kane-shaped thing fills immediately.
I go back inside. Order coffee, and spend the next hour prepping the noon call, focused and methodical, three steps ahead of the problem. I handle it. I always handle it. But underneath, he is there.
The LUMA problem I know how to fix.
The other one will require me to venture somewhere I’ve never permitted myself. And I lack time for that.
I pay the bill. Pick up my bag, and walk out into the Sunday street and start my car.
I’ll deal with it later. After the call. After I’ve established what this is, or isn’t, or was, or won’t be.
The sequencing argument is already getting harder to maintain, and I know it, and I drive anyway.