“Don’t look now,” Tessa says quietly, her eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder, “but there’s a woman with a camera who has been tracking us for the last thirty seconds.”
I resist the urge to turn, trusting her read the way I trust a co-pilot’s instruments, not because I have no instincts of my own, but because hers are frequently better.
“Society reporter,” she murmurs. “The kind who writes ‘a source close to the couple’ when the couple is standing directly in front of her.”
“Options?” I say, keeping my voice even, keeping us moving.
“Follow my lead,” she says, and her grip on my hand shifts from polite to purposeful.
She steers us toward the far edge of the dance floor with a kind of unhurried precision, and then we are slipping behind a service partition, into a narrow alcove beside the kitchen entrance, and the noise of the gala drops around us to a muffled hum. The sudden quiet is almost physical.
We are standing too close for professional colleagues, but it doesn't feel wrong. It feels very right.
I catch the scent of her perfume, light citrus with something crisp underneath, subtle enough that it feels discovered instead of announced. Through the wall comes the working rhythm of the kitchen, the clatter of dishes, a voice calling an order, a door swinging open and shut.
The rest of the ballroom keeps existing somewhere beyond us, but none of it feels important compared to this cramped pocket of quiet and the woman standing in it with me.
“I think we lost her,” Tessa says, exhaling slowly.
Her breath is slightly uneven. I notice, with some discomfort, that mine is too, though I can’t construct a satisfying explanation for it. I also notice, and this is entirely involuntary, that a small curl of hair has escaped from behind her ear and is resting against her jaw at an angle that has no business being as distracting as it is.
She is watching me with an expression I do not have a category for. Not quite amusement. Not quite something else. Hovering precisely in between, in the space where I usually run out of useful vocabulary.
“You’re doing it again,” she says.
“What?” I say.
“That thing where you look at someone like you’re trying to figure out which column they belong in.”
The observation is accurate enough to be uncomfortable, which I suspect is at least partially the point.
“And which column are you in?” I ask. That is not the measured, professional response I intend to give. I’m not entirely sure where it comes from.
She tilts her head slightly, the corner of her mouth doing something complicated, and the space between us, already not significant, seems to have decreased by some increment I can’t measure but can absolutely feel.
Then a waiter’s cart hits a bump in the kitchen flooring and rattles sharply against the wall, loud enough that we both step back at exactly the same moment, as if we have rehearsed it.
Tessa smooths the front of her gown with one hand, a quick, collected gesture, and I straighten my collar, which does not need straightening.
“We should get back,” she says.
“Yes,” I agree, and mean it approximately sixty percent of the time.
She steps out of the alcove first, back into the noise and the light, and I follow a half-second later. Walking back toward the Hargroves, I run a quiet diagnostic on the evening so far, looking methodically for the point at which I stop operating according to any recognizable version of my plan.
I can’t find it. Which is either a failure of analysis, or evidence that the plan has simply never accounted for Tessa, and I am not yet prepared to decide which possibility is more unsettling.
