CHAPTER TWO
1032 Words
Julian
I had not planned on staying past ten.
The lounge Marcus insisted on dragging me to was the kind of place I used to like when I was younger and had fewer
reasons to sit with my back to a wall, watching exits out of habit rather than paranoia. Now it just felt loud. Expensive and loud,
which in my experience were rarely different things.
"You look thrilled to be here," Marcus said, sliding into the booth across from me with the particular smugness of a man who
had gotten exactly what he wanted, which was me, out of the penthouse, in public, pretending to have a personal life.
"I'm here."
"Barely." He gestured at the untouched scotch in front of me. "Richard know you left the building before nine?"
"My father doesn't track my evenings. Yet."
"Give him time. I hear there's a wedding to plan."
I didn't answer that. Marcus knew better than to push it further, which was the only reason I still tolerated him dragging me
out once a month, some misguided attempt to remind me I used to know how to enjoy myself before the company, before the
succession plan, before every decision in my life became a line item on someone else's five-year strategy.
I was two years into being groomed for a marriage I hadn't chosen, to a woman I respected and felt absolutely nothing for,
and I had stopped expecting an evening like this one to change that.
Then I saw her.
She was near the dance floor, laughing at something her friend had said, head tipped back, completely unaware that half the
room had noticed her do it. Dark hair loose around her shoulders. A green dress that didn't look like it was trying to prove
anything, which somehow made it the only interesting thing in the room. She wasn't performing for anyone. That was what
caught me first, before I could even call it attraction. She simply didn't care who was watching.
I watched anyway.
"Julian." Marcus followed my line of sight and grinned. "There it is. I was starting to think you'd had that surgically
removed."
"What?"
"Interest. In something that isn't a quarterly report."
I didn't dignify that with a response, mostly because he wasn't wrong, and I had no intention of admitting it.
She looked over eventually. Just once, just for a moment, but it was long enough that something in my chest did something I
hadn't authorized. Steady eye contact, no flirtation in it, no calculation, like she was simply cataloguing the room and I
happened to be part of it. Then her friend pulled her away, and she let herself be pulled, laughing again, and I sat there with a
scotch I still hadn't touched, thinking about nothing else.
I have built a career on reading people in under a minute. It is, without exaggeration, the single skill that has made me the
most money. I can walk into a boardroom and know within ninety seconds who's lying, who's frightened, who's about to fold. It
is not a gift I take lightly, and it has never once failed me.
It failed me completely, looking at her.
I couldn't read anything except that I wanted to know her name.
"Go talk to her," Marcus said, far too pleased with himself.
"I don't know her."
"That's generally how talking to people works, yes."
I should have stayed in the booth. I want that on the record, for whatever it's worth now. I knew exactly what my life looked
like, knew exactly what was waiting for me at home in the form of a merger disguised as a marriage, knew that whatever this
was, it had no business starting.
I got up anyway.
By the time I crossed the room she'd migrated to the bar, laughing with her friend over something on a phone screen, and up
close she was worse. Better. I don't have the right word for it. Up close I could see she had a small scar near her eyebrow,
barely noticeable, and a way of listening that made you feel like the only other person in the building, and I was already
cataloguing details about a woman whose name I didn't know, which was not a thing I did. Ever.
"You're staring," she said, without even fully turning around, like she'd clocked me the moment I got within ten feet.
"I'm aware."
That got her attention. She turned fully then, unimpressed, unbothered, looking at me the way most people never dared to,
like my suit and my watch and whatever she'd already guessed about my bank account meant absolutely nothing to her.
"Is that usually how you introduce yourself?"
"Not usually, no." I found I was almost smiling. "You're an unusual case."
"Am I."
"You're the only person in this room who hasn't looked at me twice."
Something flickered across her face, amused despite herself. "Maybe I'm just better at hiding it."
"You're not."
She laughed at that, a real laugh, startled out of her, and it did something to the room that I couldn't explain and didn't want
to examine. Her friend appeared at her elbow a second later, took one look at me, and grinned like Christmas had come early.
"I'm going to go get us a table," her friend announced, to absolutely no one, and vanished with theatrical subtlety toward the
bar.
Which left the two of us standing there, and me with absolutely no plan beyond this exact moment, a thing that had never
once happened to me in forty-five years of always having a plan.
"I don't know your name," I said.
She considered that for a moment, tilting her head, something calculating and amused behind her eyes.
"I don't think I'm going to tell you."
I should have found that irritating. I found it, instead, unbearably interesting, and by the time the night blurred into music
and dancing and a version of myself I hadn't accessed in years, I understood, somewhere underneath all of it, that I was no
longer in control of how this evening ended.
I have never been comfortable not being in control.
I stayed anyway.
- Writer
