Will sneaks a look at me, cutting into his roast chicken withcareful, meticulous precision. He looks… anxious, all of a sudden. I can tell by the way his eyebrows are drawn together, like he’s rehearsing his lines before he speaks them aloud. “I went to NYU for college and studied finance. After I graduated, I accepted a job on Wall Street at an investment bank—”
“No.” I cut him off. “You were afinance bro?”
I’m mostly joking, but Will blushes, caught out. “Reformed,” he corrects me, with emphasis, and quite a bit of self-awareness. “Don’t look at me like that, Josephine.”
“Like what?”
“Like I crush dreams. Like I’m thirty seconds away from lecturing you about diversifying your portfolio.”
“How bad is the itch?”
He glares, leaning an elbow on the table between us. “I left that job after three years,” he goes on, “and moved to the Carlisle Group. Which was fine until I got assigned to this company that was doing some shady stuff with privileged information.”
“Think I heard about that.”
“Everybody heard about that,” Will grumbles. “I couldn’t move past it, even though everyone else did, and fairly quickly. I’d reached a…” His head does a small tic. “Crisis of conscience, of sorts. I needed out.”
“Which leads us here,” I say.
Will nods. “Now I mostly work with start-ups in a variety of industries, but I try to avoid New York– or Silicon Valley–based companies.”
“Why?”
He frowns. “They more often cut corners I’m not interested in cutting. So, instead, I spend a lot of time in Austin, Boulder, and Miami when I travel, which suits me much better.”
“You really are reformed.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
The ambience of this restaurant—the low lighting, sultry music, overpriced wine warming my ears—is doing its level best to shrink the distance between us. Our voices drop lower, conspiring as well, and our shoulders droop in, magnetic.
I shake off the feeling, turn my attention to my plate. Will does the same, a quietness expanding as we start to eat. He refills both of our wineglasses wordlessly. Pours me water from the carafe.
“Can I ask you something?” I grab my wineglass by the stem, swirl it a couple times as I watch Will over the rim. He nods at me, taking a bite of his chicken. My eyes flick away from the sight of his jaw working, back to the deep red in my glass. “Did you tell your boss it wasn’t a good idea for Revenant to be your client because of Zoe or because of yourself?”
“Myself,” he answers immediately. “Zoe wouldn’t have cared.”
I frown. “You honestly don’t think so?”
“Iknowshe wouldn’t. Zoe and I…” He looks beyond me. “There were other things going on that had nothing to do with you that drove us apart during high school. But we’re as close now as we were when we lived in Austin. So no, I can say with confidence that when I tell her we’re working together, Zoe’s not going to mind. She may even think it’s some kind of cosmic fate. She’s like that.”
He smiles, and I do, too. “I remember. Obsessed with the zodiac, with destiny. All that.”
It eases my mind, knowing Zoe isn’t going to be furious when she discovers this. I should give all three of us more credit for how much we’ve grown up.
“Now can I askyoua question?” Will counters.
Something about the flash in his eyes gives me pause, as if the question coming my way has far more depth than I’m prepared for.
But fair’s fair.
“Sure,” I say.
“What is it,” he says, voice impossibly low, “that you want more than anything?”
Fuck.
“That’s rather broad,” I deflect. “And ambiguous.”
