“It doesn’t really matter either way.” Sawyer turned and walked back toward her desk, noting with some private satisfaction the way Nellie’s eyes tracked her hungrily. “I’m not congratulating the county board. I’m congratulating you.” She stopped at the edge of her desk and turned around. “Which I am doing humbly, as the person you defeated. The first time I’ve lost a deal in—”she paused, made a brief performance of doing the math—“ten years.”
Nellie’s eyebrows skipped up toward her hairline. “Ten?”
“Give or take.”
“Give or—” Nellie laughed, a short, disbelieving sound. “Sawyer, that’s… You’re not supposed to say it like it’s something to be proud of.”
“I’m not proud of losing. I’m impressed by the margin.” Sawyer leaned against the desk, crossed her arms. “You should be too.”
Nellie opened her mouth, presumably to argue—the woman’s default setting, in Sawyer’s experience, was argue first, agreequietly later—and Sawyer kept going before she could build any momentum.
“Besides,” she said, “the county board is a formality at this point, because I’ve already instructed Gina to formally withdraw the development proposal.” She watched Nellie go very still. “Phoenix Ridge stays as it is. The trees, all of them, will remain untouched. Permanently.”
The stillness lasted about three more seconds.
Then Nellie crossed the room in a kind of half-sprint, which was the closest she ever came to restraint when she was excited about something, and threw her arms around Sawyer’s neck.
“Permanently,” she repeated, into Sawyer’s collar.
“That’s what I said.”
“Say it again. Please.”
Quietly groaning at how addictive hearing that word from Nellie’s lips was becoming, Sawyer tightened her arms around her. “Permanently,” she said, against the side of her head.
Nellie pulled back far enough to kiss her—harder this time, and longer, both hands cupped around Sawyer’s jaw like she needed something to hold onto. Sawyer let it happen. She let herself be held. These were both things she had needed practice at, and both were considerably easier with this specific person doing them.
When Nellie finally pulled away, she was grinning like the Cheshire cat.
Then she turned, dropped her bag on the nearest chair, and commenced exploring the office.
Sawyer had to bite back a laugh. The sweet, little ecologist looked so wildly out of her element.
There was no other word for what Nellie did. She explored, the way she explored everything, with the unselfconscious thoroughness of genuine curiosity: running a hand along the shelving built into the north wall, crouching briefly to examinethe spine titles she found interesting, straightening to peer out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the financial district laid out below. Forty stories of glass and altitude. The city in its efficient grid, its crawling traffic, its distant green corners where parks interrupted the concrete.
Nellie pressed her fingertips lightly against the window and looked out with the wary reverence she usually reserved for old-growth canopies.
“God.” She made a small retching sound. “How do you get anything done up here? I’d get vertigo.”
“It stops being as terrifying after the first week or so.”
Shaking her head, Nellie turned around. Her eyes ran the length of the plush carpet—the kind of carpet you didn’t find by accident, that required procurement and consultation and a not inconsiderable budget line—then traveled up to the height of the ceiling, then around to the raw-edge oak of the boardroom table in the far corner, the framed architectural prints.
“How the other half lives.” Nellie sighed again. She seemed sad and delighted at once, the two things so evenly matched it came out as neither.
“Tenth,” Sawyer chuckled. “At most.”
“Oh, much less than that.” Nellie spun slowly on the spot. “I’ve been in cheaper museums, Sawyer. This carpet alone, it’s softer than my bed.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“My bed is perfectly comfortable.” Nellie stepped further into the carpet and appeared to test this theory with her boot, pressing down. “Okay, that is unfair. How does carpetfeelexpensive? What are they putting in it?”
Still holding back laughter, Sawyer, who genuinely did not know and had never thought to ask, settled into her desk chair and said nothing.
It was its own kind of vulnerability, watching Nellie move around the perimeter of this room that tended to make people either gape or cower. The forty-thousand-dollar art piece on the west wall she spent approximately four seconds on. The client-approved awards displayed on the east wall, she gave a politely skeptical eyebrow. She had, Sawyer was fairly confident, just been more interested in the carpet.
She would not have described the feeling of watching Nellie survey her office as smug, exactly; there was too much hesitation in there to really be confident. She still hadn’t figured out where the scales settled between impressed and disapproving when it came to Nellie Fuller’s assessment of her position. And she wasn’t about to ask.
