"Just flagging."
"Noted, Mr. Sullivan."
"Am I supposed to trust you with my image when you can barely manage your own?"
I turn to face him.
Anger, irritation, and frustration bottle up in my shoulders all at once. I open my mouth to tell him to fuck right off — and then his eyes dart to my lips and his tongue runs briefly along his bottom lip, and whatever I was about to say dissolves completely.
Just as quick as whatever that was, it's gone.
He looks me up and down like something he's deciding whether to step over, top lip curling. "There's a lot riding on whatever it is they hired you to do. If you can't do it, we'll find someone who can." A pause. "Get your shit together, Mrs. Monroe."
The way he says it.
Mrs. Monroe. Like the name itself has offended him. Like it tastes wrong in his mouth, and he wants me to know it.
I am speechless. Genuinely, completely speechless, which has not happened to me in a professional context in years.
His jaw is tight. His fists are closed at his sides; the tension running up his forearms — and he is looking at me with something that feels a hell of a lot like anger. I back out of the elevator on instinct, our eyes still locked.
The doors close and he’s gone.
I stand in the lobby with shaking hands and a gambit of thoughts running through my mind.
I don’t know why I thought I could do this. It’s not the right time. I’m never this fucking fragile and every time I interact with this man, I’m on the verge of tears by the time he’s done shredding into me.
And I don’t know what the fuck that even was.
Not the words — I've had difficult clients say worse. It's the delivery. The specific heat underneath the cold of it. The wayMrs. Monroe came out of his mouth like an accusation aimed at something I don't understand yet.
People are dismissive. People are rude. People are territorial about their image and take it out on the person hired to fix it. I've seen all of it.
That wasn't any of those things.
That was personal.
And I have no idea why.
I pull my robe closed, walk to the Verona host stand, and order the ravioli to go.
CHAPTER TEN
BENNET
I press the stop button on the elevator and stand in the sudden stillness and breathe.
I have a date downstairs. Jenn, who has done nothing wrong except live in my building and want something from me I don't know how to give. She is waiting in the lobby, and I am stopped between floors, talking myself down from something I can't name out loud.
Blaire had been crying.
That's what I saw the second the doors opened — before the robe, before the ruined makeup, before my brain engaged any kind of filter. She'd been crying. Hard enough that it had dried into tracks down her face, and she hadn't noticed or hadn't cared, and she was walking to dinner alone in her pajamas with a blank look on her face.
My first instinct — and I mean the very first thing my hands wanted to do before my brain had any say in it — was to reach for her, ask her what happened.
Then the thoughts came in order, rapid, like a door slamming shut, one lock at a time.
Blaire doesn't know who I am.
