One night,his forever

Impossible

He walked past my desk four times that day. I counted, not because I was watching, I was working, but because every single time the air in the room changed a half second before he did.

He never once looked at me directly.

That was worse than if he had.

The third time he passed I dropped my pen. He didn’t slow down, didn’t glance over, just kept walking toward the conference room with his jacket sitting on his shoulders like it had been built there.

The woman at the desk beside me picked it up and handed it back. “First week nerves.”

“Something like that.”

At two his door opened and he came straight to my desk before I had a second to prepare for it.

“Clear my four o’clock.”

“Done.” I was already typing.

He didn’t leave.

I looked up. He was close enough that I caught his cologne again, the same one that had shut my brain off in the back of a car two nights ago, and I hated him a little for wearing it to work like a weapon.

“Is there something else, Mr. Solari.”

His eyes moved over my face, slow, searching for something specific. “How are you finding it.”

“Fine.” I held his stare. “Just a job.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Keep it that way.”

He walked back into his office and shut the door, and I sat there with my pulse loud in my ears, telling myself that had been a completely normal exchange between a boss and a new hire.

I almost believed it.

By five the floor had emptied out. I should have left with everyone else. I told myself I was finishing the call log. I was still finishing the call log an hour later when his light stayed on and the building went quiet around us like it was giving us privacy neither of us had asked for.

His door swung open.

He stopped when he saw me still there. “You’re still here.”

“Finishing up.”

He leaned against the doorframe and looked at me and said nothing, and the silence got loud enough that I wanted to scream into it just to break it.

“You walked past my desk four times today,” I said. “Didn’t look at me once.”

Nothing moved on his face. “You’re counting.”

“Hard not to.”

His mouth shifted, not quite a smile, the dangerous kind. He crossed the floor and stopped at my desk, no work reason this time, no calendar to clear, just him standing over me in the half empty office with the city burning gold behind him through the window.

“What do you want me to say, Rue.”

My name in his mouth. Same voice as the car, same voice as the dark, and I felt it everywhere and hated that I did.

“I want to know how you knew my name at the bar.” I stood so I wasn’t looking up at him anymore. “Before I said a word. You already knew it.”

He looked at me a long time. “Go home.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No.” His voice dropped. “It isn’t.”

He was close enough that I saw the exact second his eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up, and then he took one step back like it cost him something to do it.

“Go home,” he said again, quieter, almost like he was saying it to himself instead of me.

I grabbed my bag and walked to the elevator. Pressed the button. Stood there with my spine straight and my heart somewhere up in my throat.

“Rue.”

I didn’t turn around.

“Don’t google me tonight.”

The doors opened. I stepped in, turned, and found him standing in the middle of the empty floor watching me with that face that gave away nothing at all.

The doors closed.

I had my phone out before I hit the lobby. Typed his name into the search bar before I’d even reached the street.

Ronan Solari. CEO, Solari Holdings. Net worth estimated at 4.1 billion. Married to Noor Marchetti Solari in a private ceremony, five years ago.

I stopped dead on the sidewalk.

Married.

I’d seen the flash of a ring in that car. I’d told myself it was nothing and gotten in anyway. I knew, somewhere under the part of me that wanted to keep not knowing.

But seeing her name typed out in black and white hit different. A whole life that existed before I ever walked into that club, a wife with a name and a wedding date and a story I wasn’t in.

My stomach dropped.

I scrolled further before I could stop myself; wedding photos from some society page, Noor in white on the steps of a church, Ronan beside her looking exactly as unreadable as he did at his own desk. I almost closed the app. Almost.

Then my thumb froze over one photo.

Bridal party, five women in matching pale gold, arms linked, laughing at something off camera.

Second from the left.

Wren.

My best friend, standing at Noor Marchetti’s wedding in a bridesmaid’s dress, five years before she ever handed me a glass of wine on my worst night and told me to go somewhere loud.

I stood frozen on that sidewalk with the cold going straight through my jacket, staring at a photo that rearranged everything I thought I understood about my own life in about four seconds flat.

My phone buzzed in my hand. A text, already there, sitting in the thread from that morning.

Whatever happens today, don’t tell me about it until tonight. Please.

Except it was past ten now. Well into tonight.

And she still hadn’t called.