Meet My Part-Time Husband

Chapter 4: Dinner at 6PM

The restaurant wasn't what Elle expected.

It was simply a small Italian place on a side street with six booths, a chalkboard menu, and the smell of garlic thick enough to taste; there were no visible white tablecloths or a maître d' recognizing her name and rushing them to the best table,

As she slid into the booth across from him, she asked, "Is this your idea of making a positive impression?"

"You would either love it or hate that I was right, didn't I tell you?" Marcus already reached for the bread basket, entirely unbothered in a room with no one watching him. "Which is it?"

"Ask me after the food arrives," Elle tiredly said.

"That is quite fair." Without asking if she cared for bread, he took a piece of it, tore it into half, and handed her one of it. "The centerpieces caused a fight between us the first time we met. I figured you'd hate anywhere too polished or with too many things for you to fix.

"That's a very specific read of a stranger."

"Reading you is quite easy, Ms. Whitfield." The words came out lightly while his gaze stayed heavily on her a bit longer than the joke required. "You just don't get read very often, that's a different problem."

The waiter came and went, order taken without either of them opening the menu, because Marcus had already ordered for the table the moment they sat down, and Elle found she didn't mind.

"You do that a lot," she said. "Take charge before anyone asks you to."

"Occupational hazard. The whole room stalls out waiting for permission or someone has to step in." He lifted his shoulder with a show of uncertainty. "You know about that already."

"Yes, I do. I run a logistics company, you run dinner reservations," she added with a feeling of satisfaction, "same instinct, different scale."

He wasn't offended by the comparison, just amused by it. "You've been running something since before you could vote, I'd guess… Boarding school, debate team, class president, probably, the kind nobody dared to run against."

Elle set down her water glass. "How would you know that?"

"I don't. I'm guessing." Marcus leaned back against the booth. "But I'm rarely wrong about people, it's the job."

"Try again, then. Guess something else."

"You haven't taken a full weekend off in over a year," he said plainly, with no performance in it. "You eat lunch at your desk. You've read every page of every contract this company has signed since your father's stroke, because you don't trust anyone else to make the mistake you make. You go home to a house too big for one person, and you don't let yourself think about that part."

The table went quiet. Elle hadn't told him any of that, not one piece of it, and the accuracy of it landed somewhere she wasn't prepared to defend.

"That's not a guess," she said finally. "That's a file."

"I've seen the pattern before." For the first time that evening, something moved in his voice; it was quieter, more like one admitting something true, and less like one performing charm. "My mother ran a company too, smaller than yours, but she gave it everything she had, right up until there wasn't anything left over for anyone who loved her. I know what it looks like from the outside because I watched that happen while growing up."

"Are you giving a warning?" Elle quickly interrupted.

"It's an observation." Marcus met her eyes fully now. "You shouldn't end up like that, allow someone else to carry something once in a while."

"I've never had someone I trusted enough to hand something to."

"I know," he said simply, without pity, which was the only reason she didn't shut the conversation down entirely. "There was someone, once, it's been a long time, it didn't end the way I thought it would, and since then, I haven't let myself trust easily"

Across the table, Elle studied him carefully; the low light caught the tired edge under his eyes which she hadn't noticed before. This kind of tiredness wasn't from a bad week. "What happened to her?"

Something crossed his face, and was gone so fast that she almost missed it, a flicker she will have to remember much later and understand far too late that it was a reason for concern.

“She is no longer part of my life, that is what matters now," he said.

"I don't think that answered the question," Elle said unsatisfactorily.

"It did, maybe not the way you expected," he said with a firm voice as he reached for his water glass, as if the conversation needed to go somewhere else. "I want to know about your mother instead." I guess the house feels too big for one person. That's not just about your father, is it?"

Elle felt the familiar instinct to deflect, the same one she used in every boardroom when a question cut too close, and then, for reasons she didn't examine too closely, she didn't use it.

"She died when I was twenty-three," Elle said. "Heart failure, neither she nor anyone saw it coming because she never stopped long enough to notice the warning signs."

"I am so sorry about that."

"It's what everyone says." Elle turned her water glass slowly on the table. "You're the first person who hasn't followed it with some version of but you turned out fine."

"You didn't turn out fine, but turned out strong; they aren't the same thing." Marcus reached across the table without touching her hand but quite close that she felt the warmth of it anyway. "Fine implies nothing happened to you."

Elle gave him a very long gaze, she felt something that had been locked tight in her chest loosen, it had been locked since, long before he even walked into her ballroom.

"You are very competent at this," she said quietly.

"At what?"

"Making people feel visible." She only made an observation, not a compliment or warning.

Marcus gave a smile with hesitation which lasted for just half a second, it was so brief that she thought it was her imagination.

"I believe it was not an act," he said. "For your sake."

The waiter interrupted with their food so there was no time for Elle to ask him what he meant by that; by the time the plates were emptied, the moment had passed into something softer, it felt dangerously close to the beginning of trusting someone.

He never gave an answer to her question about who it was that made trust stop feeling safe, and she needed not remember until someday.