11. Grayson
— ? —
Grayson
The idea sounds reasonable when I pitch it.
“You should be seen with someone else.” I say it casually, over coffee in her apartment, like I’m suggesting she try a new restaurant. “Muddy the waters. Keep the city guessing.”
Heather looks at me over the rim of her cup. “You want me to go on a date.”
“I want us to control the narrative.” The words taste like ash in my mouth, but I keep going. “If they think we’re exclusive, they’ll start asking questions. How long have we really been together? Was it an affair before Kirk left? We need to keep them off-balance.”
“And watching me date someone else does that how?”
“It introduces doubt.” I hate this. I hate every word coming out of my mouth. “Makes them question whether we’re actually together or just friends who attend events together. Protects both of us from the more damaging speculation.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Something flickers across her face - hurt, maybe, or disappointment - but it’s gone before I can name it.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“If you think it’s a good idea.” She sets down her cup, her expression carefully neutral. “I trust your judgment.”
The words land like stones in my chest.
I trust your judgment.
My judgment is telling her to go on a date with someone else when every instinct I have is screaming to keep her close, to mark my territory, to make sure everyone in this city knows she’s mine.
But she’s not mine. That’s the point. That’s what we agreed to.
So why does the agreement feel like a betrayal?
Here’s what I tell myself: I’m not following her. I just happen to be at the same restaurant, two tables back, on the wrong side of a half-wall, nursing a drink I haven’t touched.
It’s a lie. I followed her.
“-and that’s when I knew I had to leave the firm,” the man is saying. David, or Daniel, something clean and forgettable. He’s handsome in the way that doesn’t threaten anyone. “Best decision I ever made.”
“That’s brave.” Heather’s voice. Warm, polite, the one she uses on donors. “Most people stay where it’s safe.”
“Not you, though. From what I hear.” He leans in. “You blew up your whole life and walked away with your head high. That takes nerve.”
She laughs - not the real one, I notice, not the one that catches at the end - but he doesn’t know the difference. He couldn’t. He’s known her for forty minutes.
I’ve known her for six years, and I’m sitting here counting every time he touches her wrist.
“It wasn’t nerve,” she says. “It was just - there was nothing left to be afraid of. Once the worst thing happens, the rest is easy.”
“And now?”
“Now?” A pause. I lean forward without meaning to. “Now I’m having dinner with a nice man who hasn’t checked his phone once. So that’s a start.”
He smiles like he’s won something. He hasn’t. He has no idea what’s actually on offer at this table, and the fact that he’s happy with the scraps makes me want to put my fist through the wall.
This was my idea.
I suggested this. I sat in her kitchen and told her to do exactly this, with my own mouth, in my own reasonable voice, and now I’m watching it happen and learning what it’s like to choke on your own brilliant plan.
I told her to smile at someone else. To let someone else hold her hand across a dinner table. To pretend, for one evening, that I don’t exist.
I’m an idiot.
I watch her leave the restaurant on another man’s arm.
He’s handsome - of course he is, she wouldn’t accept a pity date - and he makes her laugh as they walk to his car. I’m standing on the sidewalk across the street like some kind of stalker, my jaw aching from how hard I’m clenching it, cataloging every time his hand brushes her lower back.
My phone buzzes.
Catherine Walsh: Great seeing you last week! Dinner this Friday?
I stare at the message until the screen dims. Catherine, the foundation donor Heather got jealous about at the cocktail party, the one she pretended not to be jealous about, which was worse. The woman I’ve known for years and never once thought of as anything but a name on a board roster.
Across the restaurant, the man - David, Daniel - says something, and Heather tips her head back and almost laughs for real.
Something ugly and small wakes up in my chest.
Two can play this game.
It’s a stupid thought. It’s the thought of a man who knows better and is going to do it anyway, because the alternative is sitting here learning how to lose her one wrist-touch at a time.
I reply before I can talk myself out of it: Sounds great. Text me the details.
There. Now we’re even. Now I get to find out if she hates it as much as I do.
I already know the answer. I’m hoping she doesn’t.
***
The next event, I turn it around.
Catherine is on my arm - a last-minute addition, explained away as foundation business - and I angle us toward the bar where I know Heather will see.
I lean close when Catherine talks. I laugh at things that aren’t funny.
I let my hand rest on her waist the way I’ve been resting it on Heather’s for weeks.
It feels wrong. Like wearing someone else’s clothes.
But I’m watching Heather from the corner of my eye, and I see it happen.
Her grip tightens on her glass. Her smile freezes. She sets the drink down with too much care.
And she walks out.
I’m three steps behind her.
“What are you doing?” Her voice echoes off the concrete walls of the parking garage.
“I don’t know. I should be asking you the same thing,” I shoot back, closing the distance between us. “You went on a date-”
“You told me to.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually-”
“Actually what, Grayson?” She’s backed up against her car now, her eyes bright with anger, her chest rising and falling fast. “Follow your instructions? Do exactly what you suggested?”
“I didn’t think you’d enjoy it.”
“I didn’t.” She throws up her hands. “Is that what you want to hear? That I sat there for two hours being charming at a perfectly nice man and felt nothing? Fine. I felt nothing. Happy?”
“No.” The word comes out flat. “Because you brought Catherine tonight to make me watch.”
“I brought Catherine because-” I stop. Because there’s no honest end to that sentence that doesn’t give me away. “Because you were on a date, Heather. Because I sat in your kitchen and handed you to someone else, and then I had to stand at that bar and pretend it didn’t gut me.”
“Then why did you do it?” Her voice cracks down the middle. “Why suggest it at all? If it bothered you this much, why hand me to him in the first place?”
“You know why.”
“I don’t. That’s the whole problem - I never know with you. You say one thing and do the opposite and leave me to figure out which one is real-”
“Because it was safer than the truth.” I’m almost shouting now, and I never shout. “Because if you’re dating other people, then this is still fake. And if it’s fake, I don’t have to admit what it’s actually doing to me.”
“I didn’t think you’d look at him the way you look at me.”
The words are out before I can stop them.
She freezes.
“I didn’t.”
“I saw you-”
“I didn’t.” Her voice is fierce. “I sat across from him all night trying to remember why I was there, and all I could think about was that you were somewhere in this city, probably with someone else, probably not thinking about me at all.” She laughs, but it sounds broken. “That’s the problem.”
I’m close now. Too close. My hands find the car on either side of her head, caging her in. She could duck under my arm if she wanted to. She doesn’t move.
“I was thinking about you.” My voice comes out rough, scraped raw. “The entire dinner. Catherine was talking about foundation budgets and donor relations, and all I could think about was whether he was making you laugh. Whether you were leaning toward him the way you lean toward me.”
“This is insane.” But she says it quietly, and her hands are still at her sides, fisted like she’s holding herself in place.
“I know.”
“We had rules-”
“I know.”
“We said no feelings-”
“I know, Heather.” I drop my head until I’m close enough to see the pulse jumping in her throat, fast and frantic, giving her away. “I know everything we said. And I’m telling you none of it matters anymore.”
“It has to matter.” She presses back against the car like she’s trying to put distance between us, except there’s nowhere left to go.
“Why?”
“Because if it doesn’t-” Her voice breaks clean in half, and the sound of it does something to me. “If it doesn’t, then this is real. And real means it can hurt me. And I’ve been hurt enough.”
Something cracks open in my chest, slow and painful, like a bone that healed wrong finally being set.
“I would never hurt you.”
“You can’t promise that.” Her eyes are wet now, bright in the ugly fluorescent light. “Everyone promises that.”
“I can try.” It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But it’s the truest thing I’ve got, so I give it to her anyway.
Her eyes search my face, looking for something, truth, maybe, or proof that this won’t destroy her the way her marriage did. I hold still and let her look. Let her find whatever she needs.
“Grayson-”
Don’t do this, I tell myself. She’s upset. She’s jealous. You manufactured this entire situation - you have no right to-
But she’s looking at me like I’m the answer to a question she’s been afraid to ask out loud. She’s pressed against the car, her chest rising and falling fast, her lips parted, and the last of my reasonable, careful, decades-long restraint goes quietly up in smoke.
And I’ve been wanting this for so long.
Not weeks. Not since the terrace.
Years.
Six years of watching her across ballrooms, six years of noticing things I had no right to notice, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, the exact shade of her laugh, the grace in the line of her neck when she turned.
Six years of telling myself it was observation. Professional awareness. The idle appreciation anyone might feel for something beautiful.
I’m done lying to myself.
I kiss her.
Hard. Desperate. Nothing held back.
Her hands fist in my jacket, pulling me closer instead of pushing me away. My knee presses between hers, pinning her against the car, and she makes a sound that goes straight to my spine, low and wrecked, like she’s been holding it in as long as I have.
“Tell me to stop.” My mouth is at her throat now, and I can feel her swallow against my lips. “Tell me this is a mistake.”
“It probably is.” Her fingers tighten in my hair, dragging me closer, doing the exact opposite of what her words say.
“Then tell me you don’t want this.”
Her hands find my tie, yanking it loose with a sharp pull.
“I’m done lying to you.”
The concrete wall is cold against her back and my mouth is hot against her throat and someone could walk in any second. I hear a car door slam two levels down, an engine turning over, the whole ordinary world carrying on a hundred feet away.
Neither of us stops.
Her nails rake down my back through my shirt, and I groan against her skin.
My hands find the zipper at the back of her dress, tugging it down just far enough to bare her shoulder.
I press my lips to the skin there, tasting her, marking her, claiming something I have no right to claim and have wanted longer than I’ve let myself admit.
“Grayson-” My name on her lips sounds like a prayer, like a plea, like surrender. “We can’t - not here-”
“I know.” But I’m kissing her jaw, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, unable to make myself stop. “I know we can’t.”
“Someone will see-”
“I don’t care.” And I mean it. That’s the terrifying part. I have spent eight years caring about exactly this kind of thing, and right now I’d let the whole building watch.
“You should-”
“I can’t.”
Her back arches against the car. My thigh presses between hers, and she gasps, her head falling back to bare the long line of her throat, and I’m so far past reason that I can barely remember why we were fighting in the first place.
“This wasn’t fake.” I drag in a breath, my forehead dropping against hers, both of us breathing like we’ve run somewhere. “Whatever we told ourselves, whatever rules we made - this was never fake.”
“No.” She’s trembling against me, her fingers still knotted in my ruined tie. “It wasn’t.”
My thumb traces her lower lip, swollen from my kisses, and I want to keep going. Want to lose myself in her right here in this garage, against this car, in full view of anyone who might walk through.
But she deserves better than that. She’s spent ten years getting less than she deserved, and I’m not about to be one more man who took the easy version.
“Come with me.”
“What?” Her eyes blink open, hazy, struggling to focus.
“I want you to come with me.” I pull back just far enough to meet her eyes, even though every cell in my body is fighting the retreat. “Not here. Somewhere I can take my time with you. I’ll get us a room - somewhere with a door I can lock and a bed I can keep you in until morning.”
Her breath catches. “Grayson-”
“I don’t want our first time to be in a parking garage because I couldn’t keep my hands to myself.” My hand cups her face, my thumb stroking the flush along her cheekbone. “I want to do this right.”
“What if right doesn’t exist for us?” There’s a fear under the question, an old one, the kind that’s been proven correct too many times to dismiss.
“Then we’ll figure it out.” I press my lips to her forehead and hold them there. “But not here. Not like this.”
She searches my face for a long moment, and I let her, because I’d stand in this garage all night if it meant she got there on her own.
“Okay.”
The word is barely a whisper.
“Okay?”
She nods, her hand still clutching my ruined tie like she’s not ready to let go of me yet.
“Take me somewhere, then.”