"This is a check for fifty-three thousand dollars." She says it like an accusation.
"Yeah." I glance around like I'm looking for an escape route, but it's ridiculous. There's nowhere to run. "This is the amount we agreed on, isn't it?"
She nods and then pinches her lips, then takes a moment to herself.
"Are you in the habit of giving your employees the full amount of a contract in advance?"
The question lands and I freeze.
"It's not like that," I protest. "Of course this has nothing to do with us kissing. I know you. I can trust you to finish the job."
She shakes her head and looks at the check again, then swallows visibly.
"Do you even know what that number feels like to a regular person?"
Now at that, I bristle. "I am a regular person."
She scoffs again and taps the countertop with her nails.
"This is nothing to you, isn't it? It's everything to me and it will mean the world to my parents, but for you, it won't even make a difference."
The kitchen goes still as I take in what she said. And she's right, too. I wrote that check without even thinking twice. It is nothing to me.
But it's not nothing to her. I know that. I'm not the out-of-touch billionaire living in the clouds she thinks I am.
"You're right," I say. "It doesn't cost me very much. That is a fact about the world, not a judgment about your value."
I look at her, this woman who was eighteen years old the last time someone could have called her naive about anything, and I hear what she is saying. Not just the words. The thing under the words.
"Did you think," I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I planned, "that I was trying to buy your love back then?"
She blinks.
"No," she says. "I know you weren't. But you weren't able to understand that the kind of money you have, the kind of power, it's a great gift, it really is. But it's also a trap. I didn't want to get trapped by it. I wanted to keep loving you while still achieving my own goals. I wanted us equal."
She smiles and it's the saddest thing I've ever seen. "But you didn't want equal. You wanted everything or nothing."
The old wound, the one that took the shape of Maddie, reopens inside my chest, fifteen years old and still bleeding like it happened this morning.
"I'm not trying to buy my way back into your life."
I take a step around the island as I say it. The gap between us closes from several feet to approximately not enough.
She looks up at me. The guarded thing in her expression has dissolved. What's left is something so direct it takes a year off my life.
"I know," she says. "I don't think that."
Her eyes are dark in the kitchen light and her lips are slightly parted. She hasn't moved, which means she is choosing to be this close to me. It makes me brazen.
"I want to kiss you," I say. "Right now."
She looks at me for a long moment, then passes her tongue over her lower lip. Her eyes are wide and brilliant and her chest heaves with shallow, fast breath.
"I want that too," she says.
Then I move like I've pictured myself doing it thousands of times over the years.
I kiss her.
