COLD TERMS

EPISODE FOUR CONTINUE

She blinked. She'd prepared an argument. She'd had three points ready, ordered logically, with supporting references to two precedent cases she'd found in a contracts database she'd paid a day-access fee to use.

'You didn't even negotiate,' she said.

'I didn't need to. It was reasonable.' He folded his hands on the desk. 'Questions four through six relate to your right to continued employment, your right to privacy on personal communications, and your requirement for two weeks' notice before schedule changes.'

'Yes.'

'All agreed, with the addition of an emergency exception for schedule changes — defined as within forty-eight hours — in which case you retain the right to decline.'

She had been planning to raise the schedule change gap herself. He had already added the emergency exception before she'd gotten there.

She didn't know whether to be impressed or unsettled.

She wrote the last of her notes.

'Are there concerns not on your list?' he asked.

There were. They weren't the kind she could put in a notepad and take into a meeting. They were the kind that belonged in the pink section and stayed there.

Like: why her, specifically. He had resources, connections, a legal team. He could have run a far more efficient selection process than whatever this was.

Like: what did he actually see when he looked at her across this desk. Not the paralegal, not the candidate. What he actually saw.

Like: was she going to be able to spend twelve months in the same building as someone who made the room feel smaller just by existing in it, and come out of it without having given something away that she couldn't get back.

'No,' she said.

'Then we can schedule the signing.'

She stood. He stood — the automatic courtesy of it, practiced but not false, and she was close enough now to register it properly: he was taller than her by several inches, and he held himself with a stillness that should have read as cold and instead read as very, very concentrated.

She caught the scent of him. Clean, dark, something understated — aftershave or soap or just the way he was. Her next breath came out slightly wrong and she filed that under 'information to ignore.'

'One more thing,' she said, because she needed to say something to cover the moment she'd just lost.

He looked at her.

'I'm not going to perform a personality,' she said. 'I can play the role — the appearances, the story, the convincing couple. I'll do that well. But I'm not going to become someone else for your grandmother. If she's as perceptive as you say, she'll see through a performance anyway.'

He looked at her for a moment that stretched just long enough to be different from the other moments.

'I'm not asking you to,' he said.

She nodded once, turned, walked to the door.

'Ms. Malone.'

She stopped. Turned just enough to indicate she'd heard him.

'You'll want to start thinking of me as Damian.'

It was so simple. So direct. Delivered in that flat, uninflected voice that made everything he said sound like a fact that had always existed and he was simply noting it.

She turned that syllable over in her chest the whole elevator ride down. The way he'd said it wasn't warm, exactly. But it wasn't cold either. It was something like — an offering. Something small and quiet, wrapped in the same composure he wrapped everything in so neither of them had to acknowledge what it was.

Damian.

She said it once, quietly, to the mirrored elevator wall.

It felt dangerous in her mouth. Not dangerous like a warning — dangerous like something at the edge of a cliff that you looked at too long.

She took a breath, looked at herself in the mirror once, and decided she was going to be fine.

She was absolutely going to be fine.