THREE CAN PLAY

Chapter 3

KIMBERLY'S POV

For the past four days, Kimberly had been busy covering up for the classes she'd missed — emailing professors with half-true excuses, borrowing notes from a girl in her cohort who asked too many questions, staying up until two most nights just to keep her GPA from sliding somewhere she couldn't climb back from. Luckily for her, she'd made a whole lot of cash before then, enough that rent wasn't the thing keeping her up anymore. Tuition, though. Tuition never stopped being the thing.

The morning of the interview, she hadn't slept more than four hours, and it showed in the way her hands wouldn't stop smoothing down a blazer that didn't need smoothing. She stood in front of the mirror in her cramped studio apartment, running through her elevator pitch for the third time that morning, the words starting to lose all meaning the way words do when you've said them too many times before breakfast.

Kimberly Jones, third-year business admin, minor in finance, currently seeking—

"Currently seeking a reason not to throw up," she muttered to her reflection, and pinned her hair back one more time.

She grabbed her portfolio, her resume printed on the good cardstock she couldn't really afford, and headed out the door before she could talk herself out of the whole thing.

The company wasn't hard to find — a sleek glass building downtown, still smelling like fresh paint and ambition, the kind of place that had clearly existed for under a year. BROWN HOLDINGS, the sign said, brushed steel letters catching the morning light. She'd found the listing two weeks ago, buried in a college career board, one line that had made her stop scrolling: fast-growing startup, founder-led, business admin internship, flexible hours. Flexible hours mattered more to her than anything else on that page.

She checked in at the front desk, was handed a visitor badge, and sat in a lobby that looked like it cost more to furnish than she'd make in two years. Her knee bounced. She made herself stop. Started again five minutes later.

"Kimberly Jones?"

She stood too fast, nearly dropping her portfolio, and followed the assistant down a hallway lined with glass-walled offices, half of them still empty, waiting for a company that hadn't fully arrived yet. Her heels sounded too loud on the polished floor. She practiced breathing.

"He'll see you now," the assistant said, gesturing toward a door at the end of the hall, and pushed it open.

Kimberly stepped inside already talking, riding the momentum of the pitch she'd rehearsed a hundred times in her bathroom mirror. "Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me, I really appreciate the opportunity to—"

She stopped.

The man behind the desk stood up, and for one long, suspended second neither of them said anything at all. He looked different in daylight — a fitted charcoal suit instead of a rumpled shirt with whiskey on his breath, hair actually combed. But it was him. Same eyes that had gone glassy and desperate under a red light.

"You gotta be f*****g kidding me," she said, before she could stop herself.

*****

ADRIAN'S POV

For a second, nothing landed. Adrian just stood there, half out of his chair, running the sentence back through his head like it belonged to someone else — some visitor, some stranger with an attitude problem, nothing that concerned him. His brain was still catching up, still somewhere in CEO-mode, cycling through the resume he'd skimmed twenty minutes ago. Jones. Kimberly Jones. Third-year business admin.

Then it landed.

The voice. The mouth. The exact tilt of her chin when she was daring someone to say something first.

The stripper.

His stomach dropped somewhere south of his shoes, and for one disorienting second he was back there — a couch, a red light, her hand sliding a ten-dollar bill into her bikini top without breaking eye contact.

He remembered waking up the next morning to an empty side of the bed, headache splitting his skull in two, the sheets cold where she'd been. He remembered patting down his pants out of habit, checking for his wallet — and coming up empty. He'd sat up too fast, head swimming, torn the sheets back, checked his jacket, checked under the bed, checked it all twice, a cold, ugly feeling closing in around the guilt already sitting in his chest. Gone. She'd taken his wallet and left without a word.

The only thing she had left behind was a small card on the floor by his discarded jeans, glossy black, VELVET's logo stamped in gold, and beneath it, handwritten in loopy pink ink: Raven. Ask for me. Like she wanted him to know exactly who to blame and dared him to do something about it.

Bold enough to rob a man and sign her name to it. That was Raven — audacious, unbothered, a woman who did exactly what she wanted and made you chase the rest. He hadn't decided yet, in the days since, whether he was angrier about the s*x or about how much he still thought about her anyway.

And now Raven was standing in his office in a blazer and sensible heels, calling herself Kimberly Jones, and he had absolutely no idea who that was.

"Sir?"

Her voice pulled him back into the room. He blinked, cleared his throat, and sat, gesturing stiffly at the chair across from his desk like he hadn't just spent ten full seconds somewhere else entirely.

"Ms. Jones." He said it carefully, testing the name in his mouth like it might not hold. "Please, sit."

She sat.

He didn't say the other name. He wanted to — it sat right behind his teeth, ready — but something stopped him, some instinct that saying it now would break whatever fragile, absurd thing was happening in this room, and he wasn't ready to know what would be left if it broke.

"Your resume," he said instead, flipping through it, not really reading it, using it as somewhere to put his eyes that wasn't her face. "Tell me about your knowledge of — " he glanced down, grasping — "operations."

She answered. He watched her mouth move and heard maybe half the words, caught up instead in the strange vertigo of her sitting there so composed, so buttoned-up, hands folded neatly in her lap like they hadn't been fisted in his shirt four nights ago. He found himself cataloguing her without meaning to — the small furrow between her brows when she concentrated, the way she said I believe like she'd practiced sounding certain, the chip in her nail polish she kept tucking out of sight. None of it matched the girl on the couch. All of it was somehow her anyway.

The interview went on like that — her answers sharpening as she found her footing, him nodding at things he wasn't fully absorbing, both of them performing a version of professional normalcy so thin it was practically translucent. Neither of them brought up the club. Neither of them brought up the crying, or the s*x, or the card still sitting in the drawer of his desk not two feet from her knee.

"I think," he said finally, closing her resume, "you'd be a strong fit here."

That was not what he wanted to say, but that was what he said anyway.

Relief broke across her face before she could stop it — real, unguarded, the first thing he'd seen all interview that looked like it belonged to neither Kimberly nor Raven, just to her.

"Thank you, sir. I won't disappoint you."

"I know you won't." He said it quieter than he meant to, and something crossed behind his own eyes that made her stomach drop for an entirely different reason than before.

He stood to shake her hand, and when her palm met his, neither of them let go quite as fast as a handshake required. Her breath caught. His jaw tightened.

"Welcome to Brown, Ms. Jones," he said.

And then, just as she turned to leave, just as her hand touched the door —

"One more thing." His voice had dropped, low enough that it wasn't meant for the hallway. "You still owe me my wallet."