The cab smelled like pine air freshener and old leather. The city slid past the windows in streaks of orange and white.
I hadn't meant to drink anything. Two glasses, maybe two and a half, over four hours. Enough that the edges of things had softened slightly. Enough that the walls I'd been maintaining with both hands for six weeks felt, in the back seat of this cab, slightly less essential.
Rory was beside me. Not touching. Just there, in that way he had of occupying space without taking it.
We'd gone maybe ten blocks before I said it.
"Why do you do it?"
He didn't ask what I meant. "The glasses?"
"All of it. The glasses. The briefing materials at five a.m. The contracts you've already read before I ask." I kept my eyes on the window. "All of it."
A pause. Short but real.
"I prefer you sharp."
It was a clean answer. Professional. True, probably.
And completely insufficient, and we both knew it.
I turned and looked at him then. The city light moved across his face in slow pulses — amber, dark, amber, dark. He was looking at me with that expression he almost never let out. Not the boardroom expression. Not the problem-solving one. The one that lasted a half-second too long.
This time it didn't stop at half a second.
"Rory."
His name. Just that. But something in the way I said it must have been different, because he went very still.
I don't know who moved first. I'm not sure it matters.
What I remember is the city going quiet. The way his hand came up to my face like he'd been deciding whether to do it for a very long time. The way I let him.
Neither of us said anything after. There was nothing to say that wouldn't have made it smaller than it was.
---
He was at the office before me the next morning.
Of course he was.
My coffee was on my desk. The right order. The right temperature, which meant he'd timed it. My schedule was open on my screen, the day already organized into blocks. A note clipped to the top brief — one line, his handwriting, flagging a clause in the Meridian follow-up that needed a response by noon.
Professional. Precise. Completely normal.
He walked in at eight-fifteen with his notebook and didn't look at me any differently than he had on day one.
Except that he did. Slightly. In ways I couldn't have explained to anyone but felt in my sternum like a change in air pressure.
I caught myself watching his hands when he turned a page. The line of his jaw when he was reading something he didn't like. The way he moved through a doorway — unhurried, always, like a man who had decided long ago that rushing was a form of fear.
I looked away every time. Filed it. Pressed it flat.
Because the last person I'd trusted this close had stood at a microphone in front of two hundred people and gutted me with a smile on his face.
I knew the difference between Rory and Greyson. I wasn't a fool. But knowing the difference and letting myself believe the difference were two entirely separate things, and I hadn't figured out how to cross that distance yet.
So I kept the desk between us. Kept my voice even. Kept my eyes on the contracts.
Rory let me. He didn't push. He didn't name it.
He just kept showing up, every morning, before anyone else. And somehow that was the most terrifying thing of all.
---
Simone's text came on a Thursday.
*Hey. I know things are complicated right now. I've been thinking about you. Can we get coffee? Just to talk. I miss you.*
I read it once.
I thought about her hand on my arm at Eli's sixth-grade concert. The way she'd laughed at my kitchen table a hundred times. The expensive wine she always brought, the cashmere things, all those careful gifts from a woman who understood, somewhere beneath the warmth, that she was always taking something.
The voicemail came two hours later. Her voice was soft. Careful. All that practiced warmth, perfectly calibrated. *Clear the air.* Like what had happened was weather. Like it was something that had simply passed through and left a mess neither of us had caused.
I set the phone face-down on my desk.
Picked up the contract in front of me.
Read it from the top.
There was nothing to clear. The air between Simone and me was not dirty. It was just gone. She could talk into it as long as she wanted.
I had work to do.
