Three
877 Words
The elevator doors slid open and I walked straight into the most expensive suit I'd ever seen.
The Hartley gala was on Friday.
I had four days to pretend I was fine with it.
I wasn't fine with it.
Standing in the back of a town car beside Ethan Blackwell at nine PM on a Friday night was not what I had signed up for when I accepted the Director of Operations title. Neither was the dress midnight blue, borrowed from my friend Cass, a full inch shorter than anything I'd normally wear to a work event.
But Ethan had said presence matters in the briefing notes his assistant sent Thursday morning, so here I was. Presence and all.
He was on his phone when the car pulled up to the venue. He hadn't looked at me once since I'd slid in beside him on the leather seat. Hadn't acknowledged the dress, the heels, the fact that I'd spent forty minutes on my hair. Not that I wanted him to. Not that it mattered.
"The Hartleys will want reassurance," I said, breaking the silence. "Gerald in particular. He built that company from scratch, same as I did. He's going to be watching how you treat me tonight like it's a preview of how you'll treat him."
Ethan's eyes stayed on his phone. "I know."
"So you'll need to be less" I searched for the word.
He looked up then. The city lights slid across his face through the window.
"Less what?"
"Glacial," I said.
A beat.
"Glacial," he repeated.
"You have a resting expression that communicates active contempt for everyone in the room. It works in a boardroom. It will not work tonight."
He stared at me for a long moment. Something moved in his jaw not anger, I thought. Closer to amusement he was refusing to let out.
"Noted," he said, and returned to his phone.
The gala was exactly what I expected. Marble floors. Champagne that cost more than groceries. Women in gowns that floated when they walked and men who shook hands like it meant something.
Gerald Hartley found us within four minutes of arrival. He was sixty, silver-haired, with the handshake of someone who had built things with his hands before he built them on paper. He looked at Ethan first. Then at me.
Then his face broke open.
"Mara." He pulled me into a hug that surprised us both. "I wasn't sure you'd be here."
"Where else would I be?" I said against his shoulder.
When he pulled back his eyes were searching. Are you okay? Did they treat you right? Do I need to be worried? All the things he couldn't ask out loud in a room full of people.
I gave him a small smile. I'm okay. I'm handling it.
He turned to Ethan. The warmth in his face didn't disappear entirely, but it recalibrated. "Mr. Blackwell. Gerald Hartley."
"I know who you are," Ethan said. "Your restructuring of the Hartley supply chain in 2019 was one of the most efficient pivots in the sector that decade."
Gerald blinked. Then laughed genuine, surprised. "You did your homework."
"I always do."
I watched Ethan work the next hour with a kind of reluctant fascination. He was still controlled, still precise, but he'd turned the dial down on the frost. He asked questions that showed he'd actually studied these people not just their balance sheets but their histories, their decisions, the things they were proud of. Gerald warmed to him steadily, like a room with a fire finally catching.
It was impressive.
I resented how impressive it was.
"You're staring," Ethan said quietly, appearing at my elbow with a fresh glass of champagne.
I took it without looking at him. "I'm observing."
"There's a difference?"
"I'm trying to figure out which version of you is real."
He was quiet for a moment. Around us the gala hummed and glittered.
"The boardroom one," he said finally.
"I don't think so."
He turned to look at me then. Fully. In a way he hadn't all evening, and the directness of it did something inconvenient to my pulse.
"What makes you say that?"
"You remembered that Gerald's wife passed two years ago. You didn't bring it up, but you steered every conversation away from anything that would have made him have to mention her." I took a sip of champagne. "That's not strategy. That's consideration."
The silence stretched between us. Something in his expression had shifted barely, just at the edges like I'd said something that had gotten further in than he'd intended to allow.
"Don't make it into something it isn't," he said.
"I'm not." I turned back to the room. "I'm just updating my data."
He said nothing.
But he didn't walk away either.
We stood there together at the edge of the room not quite side by side, not quite separate and watched the glittering crowd move around us like water around two stones. And for the first time since he'd stopped my elevator doors with his hand, I felt something shift between us.
Not softness. Not yet.
But the first c***k in something
I'd been certain was solid.
I didn't like it.
I finished my champagne and went to find Gerald.
- Writer
