12. Noah
Chapter twelve
Noah
The answer she gave me last night was yes.
The restaurant is quiet. Corner table. No one who knows me.
I tell myself I didn't plan it that way.
She orders without looking at the menu twice. No performance of indecision, no asking what I recommend. She already knows what she wants and she gets it.
I notice that about her constantly. It's inconvenient.
We talk through dinner the way we didn't talk at the Calloway, or at the kitchen tasting, or in any room with other people in it.
She asks about the fund. Not the size of it, not the headline number, but the mechanics.
How I structure a position when the thesis is right, but the timing is uncertain.
Most people ask about the money. She asks about the problem.
I answer honestly. More than I intend to.
"You like the part where no one else can see it yet," she says.
"What part?"
"The trade. Before it works. You like being the only one in the room who knows."
She's eating when she says it. Completely unbothered. Like she just described the weather.
I don't answer right away.
"That's not wrong," I say finally.
She nods. Like she already knew.
We're outside when she asks the question that I don't have an answer for.
The restaurant sits on a side street in the West Village, narrow and quiet, the kind of block where the buildings lean toward each other and the light doesn't reach the middle. She's walking and I'm half a step behind her, and she slows when we hit the corner, not quite stopping.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"You don't usually ask first."
She ignores that. "The elevator. When you talked about Claire." A beat. "Do you ever talk about her? To anyone?"
The name lands the way it always does. A specific, located pressure.
"No."
"Why me?"
It's not an aggressive question. She's not pressing the wound. She just wants to understand, and that's the part I don't have an answer for.
"I don't know," I say.
She turns to look at me. "That's an honest answer. I'll take it."
"I say honest things."
"You say accurate things. It's different."
I look at her.
She holds the look without flinching. This is what she does. She doesn't soften the observation or walk it back. She just lets it sit there between us and waits to see what I do with it.
"What's the difference," I say. Not a question.
"Accurate things protect you. Honest things don't."
The street is still enough that I can hear a cab two blocks over. The light is orange from the bodega on the corner. She's watching me and she's not afraid of the silence, not performing patience. She just genuinely doesn't need to fill it.
It's the single most disarming quality she has, and I have thought about it more than I should.
"You get under my skin," I say.
"I know."
"That's not a compliment."
"I know that too."
She's not smiling. Not performing. She's just standing in the orange light looking at me like she can see every wall I built and is not particularly impressed by the architecture.
"It started in the bakery," I say. "You threw me out of your office."
"My office was also my prep kitchen."
"You were annoyed I was in the way."
"You were in the way."
"No one's annoyed with me."
"That sounds like a problem."
I take one step toward her. She doesn't move back.
"Karissa."
"Noah."
And then I close the distance.
She kisses back immediately.
That's the thing I'll come back to later, alone, staring at the ceiling. She doesn't hesitate. Her hand comes up to my chest, not to push, just to land, and she's there, completely, the way she is in every room she walks into.
Her mouth takes me straight back to the tasting kitchen. Salt and espresso. The ganache cup she slid across the steel counter while I pretended I was still evaluating a vendor. I wanted her then. Her fingers press once against my jacket.
I meant it to be brief. Measured. The kind of thing I could categorize and set aside.
It doesn't stay brief.
Her other hand finds the lapel of my jacket and I back her one step against the building behind her and the sound she makes is barely a breath, but I hear it.
I pull back enough to see her face.
Her eyes open. Her breathing isn't steady.
Mine isn't either.
"That was—" she starts.
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't rationalize it."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then her hand is back on my jacket and I'm kissing her again and it's worse the second time, more specific, more deliberate.
I have one hand against the brick beside her head and the other at her jaw, and she's making small adjustments, tilting into me, fingers tightening, like she's finding the best version of this by feel.
She's good at everything. Of course she's good at this.
Her hands slide under my coat. Flat against my shirt, then gripping the fabric, pulling me in like the space between us is a problem she intends to close herself. I feel the heat of her palms through the cotton. I feel her breathe.
I move my free hand inside her coat, to the small of her back, and she arches into it, up onto the balls of her feet, and the sound she makes against my mouth is one I'll still be hearing next week.
Every measured thing I've built comes apart at once. The block, the camera-ready city, the arrangement with my name on it. Gone. There's her mouth and her hands and the wall at her back, and nothing else that gets a vote.
I want to take her home. No contract. No audience. No version of this that has to survive the morning.
And here's the part I don't get to until later, alone, staring at the ceiling: I wasn't going to stop. I was already past being the one who stopped it.
Then the flash hits.
Across the street. Thirty feet away. A man with a camera, and from the angle and the lens, he's had it on us for longer than the last thirty seconds.
Karissa sees it the same moment I do. I feel her go still.
"How long," she says quietly.
"Long enough."
I don't move my hand from the wall beside her head. Neither of us looks away from the photographer.
He lowers the camera, unhurried, turns, and walks toward the avenue.
I straighten. Karissa steps sideways, one step back into the middle of the sidewalk, and pulls her coat straight with both hands.
She doesn't look at me right away.
"So," she says.
"So."
"That'll be on every tabloid by morning."
"Yes."
She finally looks up. Her expression is unreadable in the low light; not angry, not panicked. Something more complicated.
"Was that the arrangement," she says, "or was that you?"
I hold her gaze.
"That was me," I say.
She nods slowly, like she's filing it somewhere.
Neither of us says anything else.
I get her a cab. I watch it pull away down the block. I stand on the sidewalk for a while after it disappears.
The photographer got the second kiss too. The one I meant.
I'm not sorry about it.