I mean it. Not a line. A standing offer with no expiration date on it.
Her eyes go soft a moment.
“Oh,” she says, smirking. “I know.”
And shuts the door in my face. Hard.
The latch clicks.
I stand there in the empty hall, by myself.
Seriously?
Chapter 6
Elara
I get the door shut and put my back against it like he might try to follow me in.
Breathe.
“The jaw on him,” I tell Gerald, who has nothing to say about it, because he is a plant, and because there is genuinely nothing to say. There is no defense. I asked a grown man if his bone structure required a membership. I said the wordsis it a clubto his actual face. In an elevator. Out loud. With the mouth I use for professional writing.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see colors.
“Okay,” I tell the colors. “Okay. We’re going to be normal about this.”
We are not going to be normal about this. I can feel it already, the way the whole interaction is loading itself into the part of my brain that keeps things forever and replays them at three in the morning. The other tenants get a polite nod. I get to relivedo you practice thaton a loop until I’m dead.
It’s fine. People say things. Drunk people say more things, louder, with hand gestures. That’s just biology. It means nothing that I can still feel exactly how close he stood, like the air over on his side had felt different and it did things to me I’m definitely not talking about. It means nothing that I keep thinking about the spot at the small of my back where he almost touched me and didn’t. And yeah, I shouldn’t even know it’s there, because he didn’t, and it’s not…
Nothing happened there.
There is no there.
That’s the wine. Wine does that. Wine makes everything seem easy, too easy. Like blurting out things that absolutely should have stayed unsaid. Famous for it.
I push off the door.
And that’s when I see it.
A piece of cream paper on the floor, just inside the threshold. Folded once. Shoved all the way under — not slipped, not poking out where a draft could’ve nudged it. All the way under. Far enough that whoever did it got down low andmeantit.
That’s not…
But I know what it is before I bend for it. I’ve got its twin propped up on my desk, where it’s been being a problem at me for days.
I do not open it.
I am not, at midnight, in a dress that’s been betraying me since the elevator, with one shoe gone and a head full of cheap wine and a man’s jaw I did not ask for, going to start making decisions about a second handwritten note that arrived under my door like a threat or a valentine, I genuinely cannot tell which. I have a policy. The policy isno mysterious-paper analysis after ten p.m. or two drinks, whichever comes first, and tonight I’ve blown straight past both gates.
So I pick it up. I don’t read it. I carry it with me down the hall, which is not the same as keeping it, it’s just not leaving litter on my own floor. There’s a difference. I’m too tired to explain the difference but it’s load-bearing and it’s there.
My other shoe comes off somewhere between the living room and the bedroom, one of those mid-stride kicks where you just decide a shoe is over now. I leave it where it lands, abandoned like evidence at a scene. I’m not drunk-drunk. I’m the functional kind, where walking has become a series of individual small decisions I’m making one at a time, and I’m landing most of them. The rest are between me and the floor.
At least that’s the hope.
I make it to the bed and go down face-first, fully clothed, makeup intact, the green dress doing absolutely nothing for either of us at this angle. Tomorrow’s problem. The dress, the makeup, the elevator, the jaw, the note. All of it gets put away for tomorrow, which is a magical place where a more capable woman handles everything I’m currently choosing not to.
