CHAPTER ONE
1264 Words
I rehearsed the phone call four times in my head before I actually made it, and I still botched the opening line.
"Mom. Mom, I got it."
There was a beat of silence on the other end, and then a sound that was half laugh, half sob. "You got it? The Garrison job?
Maya."
"I got it." I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk outside the interview building, phone pressed so hard to my ear it
hurt, grinning like an i***t at strangers who were very clearly trying to walk around me. "Marketing Coordinator. I start Monday."
"Oh, baby." My mother's voice cracked, and I felt my own throat tighten in response, the way it always did when she got
emotional. "I knew it. I told you they'd be fools not to hire you."
"You tell me that about every job I apply for."
"And I've been right every time you actually got one."
I laughed, wiping under my eye before it could turn into anything embarrassing on a public street. "I have to go, I'm meeting
Ginny, she's already texted me eleven times."
"Go celebrate. You earned it." A pause. "And Maya, don't worry about the rent this month. We'll figure it out."
"Mom."
"I mean it. Go have fun tonight. For once, don't think about money."
I closed my eyes for a second. That was the thing about my mother, she gave advice she'd never once managed to follow
herself, not since my father died and left us with more love than income. But I let it go, because arguing would eat into the
fifteen minutes I had left before Ginny showed up demanding details in person.
"I love you. I'll call you tomorrow."
"Love you more. Now go be twenty-four and happy about something."
• • •
Ginny was waiting exactly where she said she'd be, outside the coffee shop two blocks from my old apartment, already
holding two celebratory lattes she absolutely could not afford on a marketing executive's early-career salary.
"There she is." Ginny thrust one of the lattes at me like a trophy. "Maya Bennett, professional adult with a real salary and, I
assume, health insurance."
"Dental too."
"Be still my heart." Ginny looped an arm through mine and started walking, already talking faster than I could keep up with.
"Okay, so, we are celebrating tonight. Not a quiet dinner. Not wine on your fire escape. An actual night out, because you have
spent the last three months surviving on ramen and rejection emails and you deserve to feel like a person again."
"Ginny, I have training materials to read before Monday."
"You have all weekend to read training materials." Ginny stopped walking and turned to face me, and something in her
expression went from teasing to sincere so fast it caught me off guard. "You worked so hard for this. Harder than anyone I
know. Let yourself have one night where you're not stressed about anything. Please. For me."
I looked at my best friend, who had spent the last two years dragging me out of every low moment life had handed me, who
had covered half my rent one terrible month without ever mentioning it again, who believed in me even during the stretches I
had stopped believing in myself.
"Fine," I said. "One night."
Ginny's whole face lit up. "One night is all I need. I already picked the dress."
• • •
The dress, it turned out, was not something I owned. It was something Ginny had been saving in the back of her closet for
exactly an occasion like this, deep green, fitted, the kind of dress that made me stand up straighter the second I put it on.
"You look incredible," Ginny said, zipping me up. "Like a woman who did not spend the last two years eating cereal for
dinner."
"I look like I'm wearing your dress."
"You look like you're wearing your dress. It suits you better than it ever suited me." Ginny stepped back, studying me in the
mirror with the same fierce pride she'd had outside the coffee shop earlier. "Tonight, Maya Bennett, you are not the girl who's
been holding everything together for her family. You're just a girl who got the best job of her life. Let's go be that girl for a few
hours."
The club Ginny picked was loud in the way that made conversation impossible, and honestly, that was fine. I didn't want to
talk. I wanted to feel the bass in my chest and let myself forget, just for a night, about my mother's medical bills stacked on the
kitchen counter, about the six months of interviews that had gone nowhere before this one finally did, about how much rested
on Monday going well.
Ginny ordered a round of drinks the second we found a table. "To Maya Bennett," she said, raising her glass, "who is about
to make Garrison Holdings very lucky."
"To surviving my first month before you jinx it."
"To surviving," Ginny agreed, and we drank.
The night blurred pleasantly after that, the way good nights sometimes do. Dancing until my feet ached. Ginny shouting
something about a guy at the bar that I couldn't hear over the music and didn't try to.
Another round of drinks I probably
shouldn't have had, but it was one night, and I'd earned it, and for the first time in months nothing in my chest felt tight.
It was somewhere near midnight that I noticed him.
He was seated at the far end of the private lounge area, the kind of section roped off from the rest of the club that told you
exactly how much money it took to sit there. Dark suit, no tie, top button undone like even he had decided to relax for once. He
wasn't dancing. He wasn't really doing anything except watching the room with an unhurried, unreadable calm that made him
look like he belonged to a different night entirely, one with better lighting and quieter music.
And he was watching me.
Not in the obvious way men usually did, the up-and-down glance I'd long since learned to ignore. This was different.
Steadier. Like he'd already decided something about me and was simply waiting to see if I'd notice.
I held his gaze for exactly three seconds longer than I should have before Ginny grabbed my arm and spun me back into the
crowd, laughing about something I immediately forgot.
"Who was that?" Ginny shouted near my ear.
"No idea."
"He's still looking at you."
"Ginny."
"I'm just saying, if a man who looks like that is staring at you like you're the only thing worth looking at in this entire club, I
feel like that's information you should have."
I laughed and let myself be pulled toward the bar, glancing back once despite myself. He hadn't moved. Hadn't looked away
either.
I didn't know his name. I told myself it didn't matter, that I'd never see him again after tonight, that in a city of eight million
people a single glance across a crowded room meant absolutely nothing.
I would think about that moment a lot, later. How wrong I'd been.
The last clear thing I remembered was Ginny pressing another drink into my hand, laughing, telling me I'd earned every
single one of them tonight.
After that, the night dissolved into fragments I wouldn't be able to piece back together in the morning. Music. Laughter. A
pair of gray eyes finding mine again, closer this time.
And then, nothing at all.
- Writer
