Married to the Monster

CHAPTER THREE Untitled Episode

The trouble with pretending to be in love with someone is that you have to pay attention to them. Real attention. The kind that remembers details and notices changes and leans in when they speak, and the trouble with paying that kind of attention to Caius Voss is that he pays it back.

Chambers was a restaurant on the Upper East Side that did not have a sign outside because the people who ate there did not need to be told where they were. The interior was all dark wood and candlelight and the particular quiet of a room where everyone is performing and everyone knows it and no one mentions it. Our table was in the corner, positioned so that Caius could see the door and I could see the room. I noticed the positioning when we sat down and did not comment on it.

Robert Ashby was fifty-six, silver-haired, and laughed too loudly at his own observations. His wife, Diana, was twenty years younger, smiled at everything, and watched the room with the focused patience of a woman who had learned that appearing not to pay attention was the most efficient way to pay it. I liked her immediately.

Caius introduced me as his fiancée with the practiced ease of someone who said true things in a neutral tone and let other people decide whether to believe them. I smiled. I accepted the congratulations from Robert Ashby, who looked at Caius with the barely concealed surprise of a man who had known him long enough to consider this impossible.

"Caius," Robert said at one point, swirling his wine, "this is not what any of us expected."

"Most worthwhile things are not," Caius said.

He said it without looking at me. I looked at him. His profile in candlelight was the kind of thing that would have given a less careful woman an entirely different set of problems, and I was beginning to understand that I was not as invulnerable to it as I had intended to be.

Diana asked me what I did. I told her about the publishing house, the editorial work, the authors I managed whose books I genuinely loved. She asked which ones. I told her. Her face changed the way a person's face changes when you say a name they know and care about.

"You work with Marcus Bell?" she said.

"I am his editor. Have been for two years."

She looked at me with a warmth that was entirely underperformed. Then she looked at Caius with an expression I could not fully read but that seemed to contain the words: Where did you find her?

Caius was watching me. He had been watching me since Diana asked the first question, the quality of his attention shifting from the social politeness of a dinner companion to something more concentrated. When I glanced at him, he did not look away. He simply held my gaze for a moment and then lifted his wine glass slowly, as though the surrounding conversation was secondary to whatever he was deciding about me.

Robert brought up a property deal. Caius shifted into a mode I had not seen before, precise and fast, a man moving through the vocabulary of financial structure the way a musician moves through a piece they have played ten thousand times. I listened and understood perhaps seventy percent of it. The rest I noted to research later.

It was during this conversation that his hand found mine on the table.

Not dramatically. Not a statement. He simply set his hand over mine the way you would if you were sitting beside someone you had touched a hundred times before, and he continued talking to Robert without missing a word, and I sat completely still because if I moved I would have to acknowledge it and if I acknowledged it I would have to decide what it meant.

His hand was warm. That was the detail that stayed with me afterward. I had expected something cooler. Something that matched the temperature of his office and his voice and the careful distance he maintained in every interaction. His hand was warm and his thumb moved once, absently, across my knuckle, and I looked at my wine glass and told myself it was a performance.

It did not feel like a performance.

In the car afterward, we sat in the special silence of two people who had shared something they were not ready to name. The city moved past the windows. He looked out his side. I looked at mine.

He spoke first.

"You know Marcus Bell's work."

"I know everyone I edit. That is the job."

"Diana Ashby has read every novel he has published. She cried when his third book ended. Robert bought three copies of the fourth and gave them to people in his office because she asked him to."

I turned from the window. “How do you know that?”

"Because Robert told me three years ago, and I pay attention to what people tell me."

I looked at him. In the dark of the car, with the city light moving across his face at intervals, he looked less like the man behind the fifty-seventh floor and more like someone simply tired in a way he would never admit.

"You chose that table intentionally," I said. "You knew she knew his work. You set me up to succeed tonight before I even arrived."

He was quiet.

"Caius."

He turned from the window. His eyes found mine in the dark and stayed.

"I set the table," he said. "You did the rest."

There was something in the way he said it, quiet and without any attempt to diminish it, that moved through me before I could stop it. He had told me a true thing without being asked and without any visible purpose for telling it, and for a man who communicated exclusively on strategic information, that was not a small thing.

The car stopped outside my building. He waited while I gathered my bag. Then he said, without looking away from the window:

"You were good tonight."

I stopped with my hand on the door handle.

"Good at the performance?" I asked.

He looked at me. His expression in the final second before I opened the door was not the controlled mask of the executive floor or the practiced neutrality of a man managing an arrangement. It was something underneath all of that, something that had nothing to do with the contract.

"Good at being you," he said.

I went inside without answering. I stood in the dark of my apartment for a full minute before I turned the lights on.

My phone buzzed. Petra.

How was the performance dinner with the devil?

I typed back: fine.

Her response came in three seconds: Viv. I know you're fine. That was not your fine.

I put the phone face down and lay there in the dark, replaying the moment his thumb moved across my knuckle until my phone lit up again.

Not Petra.

The Hartwell Gala is in five weeks. I need you to know something before we arrive there. Come to the office tomorrow. Not in your capacity as my fiancée. In your own capacity.

In your own capacity. Not the role. Not the performance. Not Ms. Cole from the contract. Me. He wanted to speak to me. And whatever he needed to say was serious enough that he could not say it over the phone at one in the morning.

I did not sleep at all after that.