Chapter 5: Learning Each Other
1192 Words
Living with Simon Lee was nothing like she'd imagined.
Which was a problem, because she had imagined it with considerable precision. The arrangement as she'd conceived it was clean: separate schedules, parallel lives sharing square footage, two people occupying the same penthouse the way two companies might share a building — professionally indifferent to each other beyond what was required in public.
What she hadn't planned for was the coffee.
She came downstairs the first Monday at five forty-seven — still wearing yesterday's exhaustion, hair up in the way that meant she hadn't slept enough to justify doing anything with it — and found a fresh pot already made.
Not the coffee she made. She made functional coffee, thin and deliberately unpleasant in a way that guaranteed consciousness. This was different. Darker. The smell alone was almost confrontational in its quality.
She stood in her own kitchen and stared at the pot.
Simon's bedroom door was closed. The apartment was quiet.
She poured a cup, drank it, stood at the window watching the city come awake below her and felt, against her will, marginally more human than thirty seconds ago.
She didn't mention it. He didn't either.
The pot was ready the next morning. And the morning after that.
By the end of the first week, she had catalogued other things.
He left his sketchbooks on the dining table — never in the way, always at the far corner, but there. She caught herself glancing at them when she walked past. She never opened them. But she glanced.
He cooked on Thursdays. She hadn't asked him to. He simply appeared in the kitchen at seven and produced things that smelled extraordinary while she was on calls in her office, and when she emerged at nine — hollow with the kind of hunger she'd been refusing to acknowledge — there was always a plate on the counter waiting. Not made into a production. Not positioned to make a point. Just there.
She ate alone both times, at her desk, reading emails. Told herself it was because she had work.
She ate every bite.
Saturday's board dinner was the first real test.
The restaurant was the kind where the menus had no prices and the lighting was designed to make everyone look as though they were being considered for something. Vivian arrived with Simon at her side, his hand resting at the small of her back — casual, assured, the touch of a man who'd done this a thousand times, which he hadn't — and she was acutely aware of the warmth of it through the fabric of her dress and decided not to be.
Richard Hale was already seated when they arrived.
He looked at Simon the way he looked at everything Vivian produced — searching, immediately, for the flaw.
"Simon Lee," he said, offering a hand. "Architecture, is it?"
"That's right." Simon shook his hand. Uncomplicated. Unimpressed.
"Interesting career for a—" Hale paused in the particular way that means the pause is the point. "For someone in your position."
The table went fractionally still.
Vivian's hand tightened around her water glass.
"The most interesting buildings usually start with someone underestimating what the site can hold," Simon said pleasantly. He reached for the bread basket. "You'd be surprised what good bones support." He held the basket out toward Hale.
Vivian looked at her menu to hide whatever was happening at the corner of her mouth.
By dessert, Hale had asked three questions about structural engineering and looked, against what were clearly his own intentions, almost charmed. Patricia Osei, the second board member, had decided within twenty minutes that she approved entirely and spent the rest of the evening asking Simon about community projects in the eastern district.
In the car afterward, Vivian looked out the window.
"You didn't need any of the background notes," she said.
"I read them."
"You didn't use anything I wrote."
"Notes are for after," he said. "People tell you who they are in the first five minutes."
She turned to look at him in the dark. He was watching the city through his window, profile calm, apparently unaware that he'd just described exactly how she operated in every boardroom she'd ever entered.
Or aware, and simply not making anything of it.
She couldn't decide which was more unsettling.
The cracks appeared at the end of week two.
She'd been in Chen Group negotiations for eleven hours across three time zones. By the time the last call ended at one-seventeen in the morning, her vision had developed that blurred softness that meant she'd gone past tired into somewhere more dangerous. She moved through the penthouse on autopilot — kitchen, water, vague intentions of sleep.
She nearly walked past him.
Simon was at the dining table, lamp on, sketches spread wide. He looked up. Took one look at her face.
"When did you last sleep?" he asked.
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
"The Chen call ran long. It's handled."
He looked at her for a moment in the lamplight.
"Sit down," he said. Quietly. Not a command — more like something that had already been decided.
She sat.
He went to the kitchen and came back with the tea she hadn't asked for. Chamomile, which she would have said she didn't like, except that the warmth of the mug against her palms did something to her that she couldn't afford to examine.
He sat back across from her. Returned to his sketches. Didn't speak. Didn't watch her. Just stayed.
The apartment was very quiet. The lamp threw a small warm circle around the table. Outside, the city hummed its distant indifferent hum.
She should have gone to bed.
She sat at the table in the amber light while he sketched, and drank her tea, and for seventeen minutes she was not a CEO or a headline or a woman with a company to defend. She was just tired, being allowed to be tired.
She woke at three in the morning, cheek on her folded arms.
The mug was cold. The lamp is still on.
A blanket was around her shoulders that had not been there before.
She sat up slowly. Looked at the empty room. Looked at the blanket — soft, grey, pulled carefully around her without disturbing her sleep.
Simon's bedroom door was closed.
She sat in the silence with the blanket around her shoulders and her heart doing something completely unauthorized, and then her phone lit up on the table beside her.
Zac Taylor is following you.
And beneath it, a message preview.
Viv. We need to talk. I made a mistake and I think you know it too. Please.
The warmth drained from the room.
She stared at the screen. The blanket was still around her shoulders.
And she realised she could not work out which of the two things frightened her more right now — the man who had just walked back in.
Or the one sleeping twenty feet away, who had been quietly, without announcement or drama, dismantling every reason she'd given herself for needing a contract in the first place.
- Writer
