What she truly was, on the inside, was utterly, irrevocably distracted.
Why the fuck did she have to mention the vibrator?
She attended the board call mid-morning, which she ran competently, and then a forty-minute lunch she’d agreed to two weeks ago when her mind wasn’t consumed by the rosy color of a certain ecologist’s nipples. During the meal, she ate approximately a third of a chicken sandwich and managed not to think about Nellie Fuller for stretches of up to seven consecutive minutes.
By two in the afternoon, she had accepted that the day was what it was.
At 4:15, she walked past Martha’s desk. “I’m leaving at five,” Sawyer said without stopping.
Martha’s expression performed a small, contained miracle of neutrality. “I’ll hold your calls.”
“The Nakamura response can wait until tomorrow.”
“Of course.”
The Chinese restaurant was four blocks from the office, a narrow, fluorescent-lit place Sawyer had never eaten at but had walked past three hundred times and once overheard a contractor describe as having the best hangover soup in Phoenix Ridge. The woman behind the counter regarded her with understandable skepticism when Sawyer pointed at the menu and requested the congee and a large order of won ton soup, then shifted to something more pragmatic when Sawyer paid in cash and asked her to double wrap the takeout containers.
The bakery next door was closing soon, and Sawyer got there with four minutes to spare, scanned the remaining cases, and bought a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting and a single birthday candle already pressed into the top.
Although she was famed in the business world for her forethought and watertight contingency planning, Sawyer had not considered the logistical challenge of transporting soup and a boxed cupcake in a car with any semblance of security. She managed it by wedging the cupcake box between the passenger seat and the center console and placing the soup bag on the floor mat where it could not slide. This was, she’d concede, not peak executive transport management. She didn’t particularly care.
She spent the forty-five minute drive imagining what Nellie might look like making herself come.
The cottage door opened before she’d finished knocking.
Nellie was wearing a plaid shirt that had been buttoned incorrectly. She looked like someone who had celebrated her birthday enthusiastically and was currently paying for that decision. Her hair was escaping its loose braid from approximately eleven different angles. Her eyes were bright enough, if slightly shadowed. She was holding a mug in one hand and looking at Sawyer on her doorstep between slow blinks, as if she had not yet confirmed to her own satisfaction that this was real.
“Hi,” Nellie said, a little hoarsely.
“You look terrible.” Sawyer chuckled.
Nellie blinked again. “Thanks.”
Sawyer lifted the bag. “Hangover soup. From the place on Prentiss. I was told it would help.”
The expression that transformed Nellie’s face was one Sawyer recognized from the ridge, from the couch in the storm, from every unguarded moment where Nellie hadn’t quite managed to dim the full luminosity of what she was feeling before it showed through. And Sawyer, who had spent almost four decades successfully inoculated against sentimentality, had to swallow around a sharp lump in her throat.
“And…” She cleared her throat while producing the cupcake box from under her arm. “Happy birthday. Belated. By approximately nineteen hours.”
Nellie stared at the box. Then at Sawyer. Then at the box again.
“I suppose you got my voicemail,” she mumbled.
“I did.”
Nellie made a sound that was half laugh, half groan, and pressed her free hand over her eyes. “I need you to know that I did not plan that. My fingers acted independently of my wine-addled brain. And I suppose my tongue too.”
“I figured.” Sawyer laughed sympathetically. “Though you wouldn’t have had to leave me one at all if you had justtold meit was your birthday. At any point in the last several weeks, using any of the many standard mechanisms of communication available to two adults in near-constant contact with each other.”
Nellie dropped her hand, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. “Are you telling me off?”
“I’m pointing out an administrative oversight.” Sawyer extended the cupcake box. “Take this before I drop the soup.”
Nellie snorted at that, and stepped back to let her in.
The congee seemed to work. Sawyer watched Nellie eat half of it at the kitchen table while the color slowly returned to her face and declined the offer to share it. By the time the cupcake came out, Nellie had almost all of her usual vibrancy back.
“I can’t believe you got me a cupcake,” she gushed.
