Page 34 of The CEO’s Assistant

At a quarter past seven, the executive elevator car came up. She heard it through the wall as it arrived and kept her eyes on the screen, on an email she had opened and not processed a single line of.

The footsteps in the corridor were Wren's. She knew them by now—the weight of them, the small pause at the antechamber door where Wren shifted the strap of her bag. Wren crossed the antechamber, then Cordelia heard a chair scrape against the floor and the familiar sound of the computer waking up. Wren didn’t waste any time getting to work, and soon, there was the steady patter of keys as she typed. Cordelia stayed where she was, her hands flat on the desk and her eyes trained on the screen, letting it settle. Wren had come in.

At seven-thirty, she stood and went to her office door. She stopped in the frame of it without fully crossing the threshold. Wren was still at her desk, already deep in some task. She was wearing dark slacks and a shirt the gray of slate, her hair still damp at the ends from a shower. It was clear she was working, not just performing it. Wren looked up. For a second, neither of them said anything, only took in that the other was in the room.

"Good morning," Cordelia said, trying to maintain her usual detached voice.

"Good morning." Wren matched her tone exactly.

Cordelia went back into her office and sat down, and the day officially started. She chaired the ten o'clock meeting, and Wren took notes to turn into minutes she’d distribute in an email later. Three calls came in before noon, and through them Wren was in and out with the documents each of them needed, the same dry two or three words at the door, no coldness laid over them. Etta's office sent through a markup of the schedule of reps a little after two, the version they would have to work through in the morning. Wren answered it within ten minutes, a single line back to the company’s counsel with Cordelia copied. Whatever was still unsettled between them, none of it showed in the work.

At three, Wren came in with coffee, set it down, and went back to her desk, same as always. Cordelia just watched as she walked back to her own desk, and when Wren sat, Cordelia slipped her hand through the handle and gripped it. The mug was warm against her palm but gave her nothing else. Three days ago, she would have known exactly what it was: the small, unasked tending Wren did for the people she had decided to look after. Now she couldn't read it at all. She couldn't tell if it still meant that or if Wren had only kept on with the job out of habit while the rest of her sat in judgment on the woman who had lied to her. She took a sip of the coffee. It was good, made the same way as always, and she could read nothing in that either.

The afternoon stretched long. She took two more calls and could not have said afterward what either was about. All day she had been reading Wren’s nonverbal cues, watching for whatever moved underneath. And all day, Wren had kept the surface smooth and let nothing through and had not once been unkind about it. Wren wasn't punishing her. She had come in and done the work anyway.

By half past five, she knew what she was going to do, and it sat in her stomach like something swallowed wrong. She was going to ask Wren to come home with her tonight. For eight years, she had made sure there was never an evening when someone was coming over, and now she was going to change that on purpose. She was afraid in a way she had not been in longer than she could remember. It was the same fear that had closed her throat three times on the porch at the coast, when the sentence had been right there and she had reached for her wine instead, every time.

She waited out the rest of the afternoon. When the light in the office had gone from bright white to the low gold of evening and Wren began closing down the work for the night, Cordelia made herself stand and cross the office. She stopped in the doorway leading to the antechamber, her heart pounding hard against her ribs, a wholly unfamiliar feeling for her in the last several years.

Wren already had her coat on and her bag on her shoulder, ready to leave. Six feet of carpet lay between them. Out past the inner sanctum, the last of the associates had gone home an hour ago, and the rest of the office was empty.

The sentence was in her mouth. She didn’t reach for a distraction this time and knew there was no better moment coming. "Will you come over to my place tonight, Wren?" It came out quiet, and not in her professional voice at all.

Wren stood planted to the floor, the bag half on her shoulder, and looked at her. To Cordelia, it felt like every second of silence stretched into infinity. Finally, Wren put her out of her misery. "Yes."

She didn’t make the acceptance conditional, nor did she come toward Cordelia or make it more than it was. She had just answered plainly. Cordelia had braced all day to manage her response to whatever Wren would have said, and it went straight through her and left her knees unsteady under her.

"I'll be home by eight," Cordelia said, barely getting the words out.

"I'll come at eight then." Wren turned and went down the corridor to the elevator. Wren stepped into it, and the doors closed behind her.

She was now alone with what she'd said still hanging in the air. Cordelia went back to her desk and worked until seven because it had always been easier for her to lose herself in work than face the quiet. She left a few minutes after seven and was home by half past, and then had thirty minutes before eight that she did not know what to do with. She hadn't cooked. She hadn't lit anything or changed out of her work clothes; she'd only taken off her blazer and set out two glasses and a bottle of wine she'd bought for herself in the last year. With ten minutes left, she picked up her phone and looked at the darkened screen. She knew she could send a message to call it off. It’d just take one line about the early meeting, a reason Wren would see through immediately but still accept without protest. She stood there with the phone in her hand, then set it face-down on the counter and left it.

At eight, the lobby buzzer sounded. Cordelia pressed the call button and stood in the kitchen while the elevator climbed the shaft to her floor. When she heard the soft rap on the wood, she lingered for a beat longer to make it seem like she hadn’t been waiting by the door the whole time. She opened the door to find Wren. She had evidently gone home and changed out of her work clothes, and she was now in jeans and a soft dark sweater. She looked almost relaxed.

Cordelia said her name, and it came out soft. She stepped back to let her in, and Cordelia shut the door behind her. They went to the kitchen, Wren a half-step behind her. She poured two glasses and carried them through to the living room. They sat at either end of the long sofa, a clear width of cushion between them, and for a while they talked around the small business of the day. It took until a natural lull in conversation for Cordelia to realize that she had barely touched her wine. She'd poured it thinking she'd need it to get through the evening, but she didn't. What was even more surprising to her was that the quiet wasn't uncomfortable. It was the first honest thing all night.

"I almost didn't come in this morning," Wren confessed, looking at her glass and not at Cordelia. "I stood in my kitchen last night and wasn’t sure if I would walk into the office until just before I left home."

Cordelia's throat went tight. "I didn't know either, honestly. I was at my desk at six, waiting to find out whether you would or not."

Wren looked up at her. Whatever she'd expected Cordelia to say, clearly, it wasn't that. For a moment, they only looked at each other. Then Cordelia set her glass down and held out her hand. Wren looked at it a moment, then closed her own around it. Her fingers were warm. Cordelia stood, and Wren rose with her.

They went down the hall together. The bedroom door stood open at the end of it, and she let Wren go in ahead of her. The bedside lamp was on, the bed made, and the closet shut. Above the headboard hung the photograph of Eleanor on the porch at the coast, caught mid-laugh at thirty-two. Wren took it all in with one pass, and Cordelia was grateful that she didn’t ask about the photo or remark on the room at all. She turned back to Cordelia, who had stopped just inside the door and couldn't make herself go any further because now her hands were shaking, a fine tremor she couldn't stop, and her breath had gone shallow and uneven. None of it would have been visible to anyone normally, but Wren crossed the small space and took Cordelia's hands and stilled them between her own. She didn't ask if Cordelia was all right and didn't step back to give her room. She stayed close. She was the one, tonight, who slowed everything down. Cordelia, who never let anyone else lead, let her.

Wren held Cordelia's hands for a long time, long enough that the tremor faded into something she could breathe around, the way a boat finds its mooring. Wren's thumbs traced slow arcs across the backs of her knuckles, and Cordelia watched them move, watched the worn leather band of the watch shift on Wren's wrist with each small rotation. She could feel the warmth of Wren's palms, the dry steadiness of them, and underneath that steadiness, there was something else—a held breath, a carefulness that went deeper than simple courtesy. Wren was being gentle like she was expecting Cordelia to break apart and shatter. Cordelia hated that. She hated being the fragile thing in anyone's mind.

"Come here," Wren said.

Cordelia came closer to her. One step, then two. Wren brought Cordelia's hands to her own mouth and pressed her lips to the knuckles, first the right hand, then the left, unhurried, her breath warm. It was the kind of gesture that should have felt ceremonial, and instead it felt like being learned. Like Wren was reading something in the texture of her skin, the ridge of each tendon, the slight swelling at the base of her left thumb where she'd sprained it years ago and it had never quite gone down.

Wren released her hands and reached for the top button of Cordelia's blouse, at the small button, cream against white cotton. She undid it without fumbling and moved on to the second one, then the third. Cordelia watched her face—the concentration, her hazel eyes lowered, the way Wren's mouth was set not in a smile but in something more private, a kind of attention that made Cordelia's chest ache. No one had undressed her like this, not this slowly with this level of patience. Not as if the act of uncovering her was the whole point and not a means to something else.

The blouse fell open. Wren pushed it off Cordelia's shoulders and let it drop behind her on the floor. Cordelia stood in her bra, and Wren looked at her, her eyes roving around her body just as slowly. Cordelia could feel her gaze as if Wren were caressing her with her hands.

Wren's fingers went to the bra clasp at the front. She undid it with one hand, the gesture practiced, and the cups separated. Wren drew the straps down Cordelia's arms, and the bra joined the blouse on the floor, leaving Cordelia now bare from the waist up.

Wren put her hands on Cordelia's ribs, resting them there, her fingers spread and palms flat. Cordelia felt the contact land in her body like something she'd been bracing against for years, a pressure she hadn't known she was holding. Her shoulders dropped a fraction, and her jaw muscles unclenched.