I need coffee. I need coffee and a shower and a stern internal monologue, and then I need to go to the office and behave like a functioning adult professional, because that is what I am. That is what I have worked very hard to be. I didn’t spend years climbing to this position to throw it away because I momentarily lost my mind.
But I prefer the positions he had me in last night.
It was a mistake.
I tell myself this while I brush my teeth. It was a mistake, and mistakes happen, and the measure of a person is how they handle the aftermath. We are both adults. Presumably, Pavelhas navigated complicated situations before. The man runs a criminal empire. He can certainly manage one regrettable lapse in professional boundaries. We will be adult about this. Brisk, professional, and adult.
The way he said my name before he even knew I was there?—
I spit toothpaste into the sink with perhaps more force than necessary.
That’s the part that won’t file away neatly. Everything else I might eventually manage to package into something containable. A momentary weakness, the lateness of the hour, the tension of the office yesterday… it all boiled into something else.
But I can’t forget how he said my name. Not his voice in the dark, moaningMollylike it was something he’d been carrying deep inside of him.
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. My pale red hair is a disaster. There’s a mark below my collarbone that I immediately button my collar over without fully looking at, because looking at it will not be productive.
He is your boss, I tell my own reflection. You are his employee. That is the entire sum of what you are to each other, and last night was an aberration, and today you will walk into that building and you will be competent and professional and you will not think about his hands.
My reflection doesn’t look convinced.
“It was a mistake,” I say out loud. My voice is steady, which feels like a victory.
The word sits in the steam of the bathroom. Mistake.
The way he looked at me afterward was something else. Not the look of a man dealing with a mistake. Not sheepish or regretful or reaching for distance the way I’d expected—the way I’d braced for, because I know how men like Pavel operate, and I have watched him conduct business long enough to know how he seals off anything inconvenient.
This wasn’t that.
Instead, he tucked my hair back from my face with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with everything I thought I knew about him. The scrape of his rough fingertips there sent a shiver through me. There was something in his expression that I didn’t have a clean word for, something that made my chest feel too small for everything inside it.
Then I gathered my dignity, and I left on legs that barely remembered how to work. I didn’t look back. I was terrified of what I’d see if I did.
By the time I’m dressed and holding a coffee I’m not tasting, I’ve constructed a plan. Straightforward. Manageable. I will walk in. I will be professional. I will not avoid him. Avoidance reads as guilt, and guilt implies there’s something to feel guilty about, and I have decided there is nothing to feel guilty about because it was a mistake, and mistakes are finite. They have edges. They end.
Last night was complete. We made a mistake together, then went our separate ways, ending the mistake. That’s all it was.
I will look him in the eye. I will be perfectly, serenely fine.
My coat is by the door. My bag is packed. I have reviewed the morning’s agenda, which includes a nine o’clock briefing with Pavel about the Vasiliev acquisition, and I am not thinking aboutthat, I am simply… I’m simply a professional woman going to her professional job, and the fact that her employer touched her like she was the most significant thing he’d encountered in a long, long time is simply not?—
Is simply not relevant.
I button my coat.
It can never be more than that, I think firmly. Boss. Employee. That’s the math.
I pick up my bag.
Can it?
The question punches through my façade before I can stop it, quiet and treacherous. I stand in my cozy apartment in the morning light and let it hang there for exactly three seconds before I lock it away somewhere deep and sensible and responsible.
Then I open the door. Today won’t get easier by avoiding him. The reality is, I fucked up.
So did Pavel.
He’s the one who has authority in this situation. If I didn’t pump the brakes on our shenanigans, he should have. I said yes, and that was stupid of me, but he’s the one who posed the question.
