Epilogue Daisy #3
"Lock still good."
He rights a toppled pen with mock solemnity, then ruins the solemnity by kissing the inside of my wrist where his tie had looped.
The skyline keeps witness. My coat hangs open like a confession we are not sorry for.
Somewhere a receptionist thinks we are discussing dinner reservations.
We are discussing nothing. We are recovering.
We are already hungry for the next locked hour.
"Still professional?" I tease.
"Extremely." He straightens his wrecked tie and fails. "Professionally ruined. Schedule me again next Tuesday."
He coaxes me out of the chair just long enough to sit, then settles me sideways into his lap, coat and all, like the throne finally has a correct use. We breathe. His heartbeat thuds against my shoulder blade. I count the windows across the river until the numbers stop mattering.
"I used to hate leaving this room," he says into my hair. "Now I spend the last hour looking forward to going home."
"Looking forward to home. I like that." I tip my head back for a lazy kiss. "Showing up is the brand."
"Rule one adjacent," he agrees. "Lock doors. Yank intercoms. Prefer wives to quarterly slides." His palm slides under the coat, not starting another round so much as reminding us both we can. "Next time you visit, bring the coat again. Leave the rest of the outfit optional."
"Executive demand noted." I bite his jaw lightly. "Now put me down before I decide the chair needs a second christening and we miss dinner while it's still warm."
"Down is temporary." He sets me on my feet anyway, eyes warm, ruined, mine. "Locked is not."
Outside the glass, traffic crawls like a rumor. Inside, there is only the smell of sex and whiskey and the faint paper-dust he tracks home from board packets. I smooth my coat shut. He fails to smooth his hair. We look like a scandal with excellent benefits.
We grin at each other like fools with a view of the skyline, a favorite bookstore, and a home to return to, and for a moment the office isn't a fortress at all. It's just a room where we showed up.
Later, much later, we're sitting on the floor of his office, my feet in his lap, the remnants of dinner spread around us. The city lights glitter through the windows, and somewhere far below, people are living their lives, oblivious to the two of us eating pasta on very expensive carpet.
"You know what I realized today?" Adam says, massaging the arch of my foot.
"That board meetings are boring?"
"They've always been boring. No, I realized—" He pauses, like he's choosing his words carefully. "We've done this every week for a year. The dinner thing. The showing-up thing."
"Is that surprising?"
"No. It's just—" He looks at me, his expression soft.
"I used to think love was about grand gestures.
The proposal, the wedding, the big moments.
But it's not, is it? It's this. Pasta on the floor.
Picking Annie up from Ingrid's. Reading her the same book sixteen times because she keeps pointing at the cover. "
"Very deep thoughts for a man who spent the day arguing about profit margins."
"I have layers."
I nudge him with my foot. "You really have changed."
"I hope so."
"No, I mean—" I sit up, pulling my feet from his lap so I can face him properly. "A year ago, you would've apologized for changing. Said something about trying to be better, made it about fixing yourself. Now you just... are."
"Is that good?"
"It's everything."
He reaches out, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. "You changed me."
"You changed yourself."
"With your help."
"With your effort." I catch his hand, pressing a kiss to his palm. "You're the one who shows up, Adam. Every time. For a whole year, every single time."
"That was the promise."
"Promises are easy to make. You kept it."
His eyes are bright in the low light. "I love you."
"I know."
"That's a very Han Solo response."
"I've been watching too many movies with Annie." I keep my face perfectly straight.
"She's one year old. She doesn't understand Star Wars."
"She will. I'm starting her early."
He laughs, pulling me into his lap, and I go willingly, settling against his chest. His heartbeat is steady under my cheek. Reliable. Present.
"Hey," I say.
"Mm?"
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For showing up." I tilt my head back to look at him. "For being here. For choosing this, us, over everything else you could have chosen."
"There was never really a choice."
"There's always a choice."
"Okay, fine." He kisses my forehead. "Then I choose you. Every day. For the rest of my life."
"Good answer."
"I've been practicing."
The city hums around us. Somewhere, Ingrid is singing Annie to sleep.
Somewhere, Ruth is reading her mystery novel and judging the forensic inaccuracies.
Somewhere, my mother's books sit on the shelf in our reading room, her blue annotations waiting for Annie to discover them when she's old enough.
Rule number one, I think. The only rule that ever mattered.
He shows up.
Every time.