“Drink,” she tells me. “And eat something. You’ve had nothing since yesterday.”
I drink. The cold water hits my empty stomach and I feel it down through me, bright and sharp, and for one second the world is simple again: water, glass, throat, cold.
Then the front door opens and the lobby recalibrates and I know he’s here before I see him because my body knows before my brain does, and the cold water turns warm in my hand.
HE ACTS AS IF NOTHINGhappened.
That’s the cruelest part. He walks into Keyes, Inc. on Monday afternoon in a grey suit with no tie, top button undone, and he nods at the reception desk and crosses the lobby and his eyes find me at my desk like my desk is magnetic north and he’s been calibrated to it, and he smiles.
Not the half-lift. Not the full one. Something new. Something with warmth behind it, as if the dinner never happened, as if the word arrangement was never spoken, as if we are simply a man and a woman in an office and the space between us is clean.
I don’t smile back.
He notices. His eyes register it, catalogue it, file it somewhere behind that grey, and he walks past my desk toward Kaye’s office and his cologne catches me as he passes, cedar and something darker, and my fingers grip my pen so hard the plastic creaks.
He’s at the firm for the rest of the morning.
He reviews documents in the conference room. He takes a call in Kaye’s office with the door open, speaking Russian, his voice carrying down the corridor in a low, musical current that I can hear from my desk and that I refuse to listen to and that I listen to anyway. He asks for the Dela Cruz file and I bring it and when I set it on the conference table his hand is already there, reaching for the same folder, and our fingers touch.
I pull back. He doesn’t.
His fingers stay where they are, resting on the edge of the folder, and his eyes come up to mine and they are close and grey and completely unhurried, and the touch was an accident and we both know it wasn’t.
“Thank you, Daisy.”
My name in his mouth. He’s using it now, since the restaurant, since the candle, since the proposition. Miss Fletcher is gone. It’s Daisy every time, and every time he says it something in my ribs tightens and I can’t tell if it’s anger or want and I’m starting to suspect it’s both.
“Will that be all, Mr. Almazov?”
The half-lift. “For now.”
I leave the conference room and I walk to my desk and I sit down and I put my hands in my lap where nobody can see them grip each other, knuckles white, and I think about Idaho. I think about pot roast. I think about the porch that needs repainting. I think about anything that isn’t the feeling of his fingers on the edge of a folder where mine had been, like the folder was a proxyfor my hand and the touch was a sentence he didn’t need to finish.
IT GETS WORSE.
He comes back on Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Each visit is longer than the last, and each visit brings him closer to my orbit in ways that are technically professional and functionally devastating. He stands behind my chair to review a document, and his nearness moves the hair at the back of my neck. He asks me to walk him through the billing timeline, and we stand at the whiteboard side by side and his shoulder is an inch from mine and the inch is the loudest thing in the room. He brings me a pen when mine runs out, and when he hands it to me his thumb brushes my palm and the contact lasts a beat and I feel it for the rest of the day.
None of it is enough to report. None of it is enough to name. All of it is enough to make me lose my mind.
And through it all, he says my name.Daisy, can you pull the Q3 disclosures? Daisy, I’ll need the retainer amendment by Thursday. Daisy, there’s a clause in section four I’d like your thoughts on.Like I’m a person he respects, a colleague he values, a woman whose opinion matters. As if the word arrangement belongs to a different man in a different restaurant, and the man standing at my whiteboard has never heard of it.
On Friday, he corners me in the file room.
I’m pulling the Dela Cruz correspondence from the third shelf, standing on my toes because the shelf is high and I am five foot four and the filing system at Keyes was designed by someonewho is neither, and I hear the door and I know it’s him because I always know it’s him and I hate that I always know.
“Daisy.”
I don’t turn around. I keep reaching for the file, my fingers brushing the spine, and I can feel him behind me, not touching, not close enough to touch, but close enough that the air between us has texture.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
“I’ve been doing my job.”
“You haven’t met my eyes in days.”
I pull the file down and turn around and he’s closer than I calculated, close enough that the file in my arms is the only thing between his chest and mine, and his eyes are grey and intent and there isn’t anything performative in them, nothing charming, nothing practised. He is just here, in a file room, standing too close, and his face carries something I haven’t seen before.
“I offended you,” he says. Not a question.
