The Boyfriend Rental service

Chapter 5: Closer Than Intended

The room had decided something about us without being asked.

I noticed it within the first hour — the way people approached differently when Sophia was on my arm versus when she wasn't. More carefully. More interested. Like the combination of us was something worth paying attention to.

She noticed it too. I could tell by the way she stayed closer than the job required.

A woman named Claire — late thirties, the kind of confidence that came from never hearing no — found me near the drinks table while Sophia was talking to someone across the room. She came in easy, touching my arm like we were already familiar, laughing at something I hadn't said yet.

"I don't think we've met," she said.

"We haven't."

"That's a shame." She tilted her head. "Are you here with someone or—"

"He's with me."

Sophia appeared beside me. Not aggressive, not loud. Just present, her hand finding my arm, her body language doing the talking without her having to raise her voice. She smiled at Claire the way women smiled at other women when the smile was really a door closing.

Claire read it perfectly. "Of course. Sorry to interrupt." And she was gone.

Sophia kept her hand on my arm.

I looked down at her. "You didn't have to do that."

"I know," she said, and didn't move her hand.

We stayed like that longer than the moment required.

The rest of the evening moved differently after that. She laughed more — not the performed laugh from earlier, something looser. She leaned into me when someone said something boring, which happened often enough to become a private joke between us without either of us naming it. When an older man talked too long about his investment portfolio she pressed her shoulder against mine slightly and I felt it and said something that ended the conversation in thirty seconds.

"How do you do that," she said afterward.

"Do what."

"End conversations without being rude."

"Practice," I said. "Lot of boring events."

She smiled. Actually smiled, not the version she used on the room. "Is this one boring."

I looked at her. "Not particularly."

She looked away first.

More women found reasons to come close throughout the night. Some subtle, some not. Each time Sophia pulled slightly closer without acknowledging she was doing it. By the end of the evening her hand was in mine and neither of us had made a decision about that — it had just happened the way things happened when you stopped paying attention to the rules.

Outside waiting for her car she stood close enough that the cold air between us wasn't much.

"You were good tonight," she said.

"So were you."

She looked up at me. The event noise behind us, the city in front, something sitting in the space between us that hadn't been there at the restaurant. Her eyes moved to my mouth for just a second — brief, probably involuntary — then back up.

Neither of us said anything about it.

Her car came.

"Same arrangement next time?" she said.

"Call Marcus," I said, and opened the door for her.

She got in. The car pulled away.

I stood on the pavement for a moment in the cold and thought about the look on her face right before the car came.

Then I got in my own car and drove home.

Inside the event Richard stood with Gerard in a corner of the emptying room, voices low.

"You're letting this continue," Gerard said.

"I'm handling it."

"You didn't look like you were handling it."

Richard took a slow sip of his drink. "The boy is a distraction. Sophia is angry. She'll get over it."

"She didn't look like she was getting over it."

"She looked like she was enjoying herself," Richard said. Something moved behind his eyes that wasn't quite anger. "Which is fine. Let her enjoy herself."

Gerard studied him. "You're not concerned."

"I'm curious." Richard set his glass down. "There's a difference."

He said goodnight to Gerard and crossed the room to where his assistant Marcus waited near the exit — not Marcus from the rental service, his own man, twenty years in his employ, discreet in the way that came from being paid well for it.

"The young man," Richard said quietly. "Caleb. Find out who he is. Where he came from. Everything."

His assistant nodded once. "How far back."

Richard thought about the jaw. The build. The thing he couldn't place that had been bothering him since the man walked through the door.

"As far as it goes," he said.

He put on his coat and left.

Behind him his assistant sat down, opened his laptop, and started typing.