Hate me harder

Off the clock

It started with a Saturday.

Mara hadn't had a proper Saturday in longer than she could remember — the kind where nothing was scheduled and nothing was urgent and the day just existed to be moved through at whatever pace felt right. Since the fire her weekends had been consumed by insurance calls and flat assessments and the administrative misery of rebuilding a life that had been partially incinerated.

But this Saturday the insurance company wasn't calling. The flat assessment was done. Priya had explicitly told her on Friday afternoon that if she sent a single work email before Monday she would personally confiscate her laptop.

She slept until eight-thirty, which was decadent by her standards.

She came downstairs to find the house empty — Ethan's keys gone from the hook by the door, the kitchen clean, the coffee machine still warm which meant he hadn't been gone long. She made herself a cup and took it to the living room and stood at the window and looked at the street below and let the morning be quiet around her.

Her mother's photograph caught the light from the window.

She looked at it for a moment — that mid-laugh face, that unaware joy — and felt the familiar complicated mixture of love and grief and the particular guilt of being happy in a moment when she was also sad. She was working on that. The guilt. Dorothy had told her once that carrying grief didn't mean you weren't allowed to put it down sometimes, that her mother would have been the first person to tell her to go outside and live something.

She picked up her bag and went outside.

The city on a Saturday morning was a different animal entirely. Slower, softer around the edges, the weekday urgency replaced by something more human. She walked without a destination for the first twenty minutes and let the morning do what it wanted with her — coffee shop smell here, someone's music from an open window there, a dog pulling its owner toward a pigeon with the absolute conviction of an animal with one purpose.

She ended up at a market two streets from the office that she'd walked past a hundred times on weekdays without stopping. It ran along the inside of a covered arcade, stalls pressed close together, the smell of fresh bread and cut flowers and something frying at the far end that she was going to investigate. She moved through it slowly, the way you moved through places when you had nowhere to be, picking things up and setting them down.

She was examining a jar of something at a spice stall when she heard her name.

She looked up.

Ethan was three stalls down.

He was in a dark jacket and no tie, hands in his pockets, looking at her with the mild expression of someone who had also not expected this and was deciding how to react to it. He had a paper bag in one hand — the good bread from the note on his fridge, she realized, which meant Mrs. Crane's list sent him here on weekends, which meant this was a regular thing.

They looked at each other across the Saturday market for a moment.

"You don't work Saturdays," he said.

"Apparently neither do you," she said.

He walked over. Stood beside her at the spice stall and looked at the jar in her hand. "What is that."

"I don't know. I was trying to figure that out."

He took it from her, read the label, handed it back. "Smoked paprika blend. My housekeeper uses it."

"Mrs. Crane uses smoked paprika."

"Apparently." He looked at the stall. Then at her. "Have you eaten?"

She had not eaten. She'd left the house on coffee and good intentions.

"There's a place at the end of the arcade," he said. It wasn't quite an invitation. It wasn't quite not one either.

She put the paprika down. "Lead the way."

The place at the end of the arcade was a small breakfast spot with no reservation system and four tables and a chalkboard menu that changed daily and the particular confidence of somewhere that didn't need to try very hard. They got the last two seats at a table by the window and ordered without much deliberation and the food arrived fast and was exactly what a Saturday morning required.

It was different from the dinner two weeks ago.

That dinner had still had the shape of two people being careful. This had no shape at all — it had happened by accident on a Saturday in a market and nobody had prepared for it and that meant there was no performance of civility to maintain, no careful navigation of professional distance.

He was easier like this. She noticed that. The particular controlled quality he wore in the office and even at home sometimes was looser here, something about the weekend and the market and the accidental nature of it.

He told her about the building he'd grown up in — a different part of the city, older neighborhood, the kind of place where everyone knew their neighbors whether they wanted to or not. He said it without nostalgia, just factually, the way he said most things, but she could hear something underneath it that she recognized. The texture of a place that had shaped you before you had any say in the matter.

She told him about the first office she'd ever rented for Nexara — a single room above a dry cleaner, perpetually smelling of chemical solvent, so small that her first two employees had to take turns standing up.

He listened the way he listened — fully, without interrupting, with that attention that made you feel like what you were saying was worth the time it took to say it.

"You built it from that," he said when she finished. Not a question.

"From that," she confirmed.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked out the window at the market moving past outside and said nothing and she had the impression he was sitting with something, turning it over, the way he did when something had landed differently than he'd expected it to.

She didn't push it.

They walked back through the market afterward, no particular direction, no particular hurry. He stopped at a flower stall and bought something without explaining why and she didn't ask. She bought the smoked paprika because it had started the whole thing and it felt right to finish with it.

At the entrance to the arcade they stopped.

His house was left. She'd been planning to go right, toward the bookshop she'd spotted earlier.

"The bookshop on Canter Street," she said. "I was going to —"

"I know it," he said.

A pause.

"It has a good architecture section," he said, which was not what she'd expected him to say.

She looked at him. "Do you have an interest in architecture."

"I have an interest in good things," he said simply.

She didn't know what to do with that so she started walking toward Canter Street and after a half-second he fell into step beside her and they didn't discuss it and the Saturday morning opened up around them like it had been waiting.

In the bookshop he went to architecture. She went to fiction. They didn't look for each other and somehow kept ending up in the same aisle anyway — once at the same shelf, both reaching for different things, close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him beside her before she heard him.

She found a novel she'd been meaning to read for a year. He bought two things she didn't see the titles of.

They walked home the long way without deciding to.

At the front door he took out his key and she realized she'd left hers upstairs and opened her mouth to say so and he was already unlocking the door and stepping aside.

She walked in.

He put the flowers — white, simple — in a glass on the kitchen counter and put the bread away and it was all so ordinary that she had to stand in the hallway for a moment and just breathe.

Because ordinary with Ethan Black was turning out to be the most dangerous thing of all.

Not the power. Not the coldness. Not the fact that he'd taken her company and dismantled her building.

This. Saturday mornings and accidental markets and bookshops and bread. The version of him that existed off the clock.

That was what she hadn't prepared for.

She went upstairs and sat on her bed and opened her new novel and read the same page four times without taking in a single word.