ONE NIGHT ONE BOSS

Chaptertwo

She considered denying it. Decided not to. “What gave it away?”

“You’ve checked your phone twice and put it back without answering anything. You’re not here to meet anyone. You ordered the cheapest drink on the menu without looking sorry about it.” A pause. “And you have the look of someone who left a conversation in the middle and came here to finish it in your head.”

Sophie stared at him for a moment. “That’s either very perceptive or very strange.”

“Possibly both.”

She almost smiled. “Sophie,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment before answering. “Aiden”

They talked for two hours.

She never fully understood, afterward, how that transpired, how two people who began as strangers in a bar could end up talking like they had agreed to be honest with each other. He didn’t ask what she did for work. She didn’t ask what he did either. They talked about other things. About the city and what it felt like to live in it, the particular loneliness of being surrounded by millions of people and still eating dinner alone. About families and the specific weight of being needed by people you love. About the gap between the life you planned and the one you

At some point, the surrounding bar had emptied. She hadn’t noticed.

“You should be somewhere,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Probably.” He didn’t move.

She looked at him. He looked at her, there was tension between them. Outside, the city continued to be huge and indifferent. Inside the air between them had become something. What followed was nothing as she expected. She had built a picture in her mind, urgent and unbiased, the particular transaction of two strangers, and it was nothing like that. He was slow, hanging with weight.

“I’m not looking for anything,” she said. Because it felt important to say.

“Neither am I.”

“Then we understand each other.”

“Yes,” he said. “I think we do.”

She would remember, later, that she made the decision. That wasn’t something that happened to her. She reached for her jacket, and he reached for his, and they walked out of the bar into the elevator that went down to the lobby, and she knew exactly what she was doing the whole time.

His hotel room was on the fourteenth floor. The city was a grid of light through the floor-to-ceiling window. She stood looking at it and felt his presence behind her not touching, not speaking, just there, and then he said her name, just the once, just Sophie, low and quiet, and she turned around. She blinked slowly and opened her eyes.

What followed was nothing like the desperate, clumsy thing she might have expected from a night with a stranger. She was naked on the bed and lying shakily slowly, holding the duvet to her chest. Deliberate, he touched her like he was paying attention, as every detail mattered, and she understood somewhere in the back of her mind that this was simply how he did everything with full, precise focus.

She felt tender between her legs. It was disarming in a way she hadn’t anticipated. She had put her walls up before she walked through the door and somehow, without making a production of it, he found the edges of them anyway.

She didn’t cry. She wasn’t the crying type. But there was a moment just one where he pulled back and looked at her in the dark, and she felt, for the first time in longer than she could remember, like someone was actually seeing her.

She didn’t know what to do with that. So she pulled him back down and stopped thinking about it.

She woke at five in the morning to gray light and the muffled sound of the city starting up again. He was gone. The other side of the bed was cool, which meant he had been gone a while. She lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling, taking inventory of herself.

On the pillow beside her was a note. A single card from the hotel notepad, the spare handwriting, and even:honesty.

Thank you for the

He didn't write a number, nothing, just a piece of a message, just that.

She dressed in the quiet. Rode the elevator down alone. Walked through the lobby and out into the morning cold and moved through streets still half-asleep, and told herself what she needed to tell herself: that it was one night, and it was finished, and she was fine, and people did this all the time.

She was fine.

She was absolutely fine.

She went home and made coffee and sent three job applications before her mother woke up, and she did not think about him at all.

Not even slightly.