Mira had seen me.
Mira, who had given me my first real shot. Mira, who’d let me present to Sutton on Friday morning because she’d decided I was ready for the room. Mira, whose office door had just closed.
I looked down at my keyboard.
The cursor was still blinking.
I had eleven hundred more messages, and a meeting in twenty minutes, and a job to do. I also had a CEO who’d walked away from my desk forty seconds ago with his folder still in his hand and his line about working late hanging in the air over the pod.
I started typing.
I had no idea what I was typing. But I typed for the next twenty minutes without stopping, because if I stopped typing, I’d start thinking. And if I started thinking, I’d have to figure out what I was going to do about a grand-boss who’d just decided I was worth her concern, and a CEO whose hand had been on my jaw ten hours ago, and a heart that didn’t know how to be in two places at once.
6
SUTTON
The partner from Ohio had been talking at me for nine minutes, and I hadn’t heard a word of it. The venue was the same one we used for every partner reception—a rooftop space on the west side that the events team liked because it photographed well and I tolerated because it had a terrace where I could disappear when I needed to.
I knew this man. I’d negotiated against him twice and with him once. He ran the licensing arm for a regional retail chain that had been making noises about expanding their use of our tech, and his name was on a contract I needed to close before the end of the quarter. At any other moment in my professional life, I would’ve given him the full force of my attention.
I was not giving him the full force of my attention.
I was tracking Joss across the room.
She’d come in at 7:42, twelve minutes after the official start, which I’d noticed because I’d been counting the minutes since 7:30. She was in something dark blue. Sleeveless. The hem hit just above the knee. The silver chain was back at her throat—the same one she’d worn Monday night at dinner, the one I’d noticed then because I’d been looking for reasons to look at herneck. Her hair was up tonight, which surprised me, until she’d turned her head to greet the head of design and I’d seen the loose pieces she’d left at the nape of her neck.
She was holding a glass of white wine and a small black bag. She nodded at the right moments, kept her smile measured, and didn’t let her gaze drift once.
Not even in my direction.
That was deliberate. I knew it was deliberate because I’d been doing the same thing for the last hour and change, and the effort of not looking at someone across a crowded room was approximately seventeen times the effort of looking at them. I’d been clocking her location in my peripheral vision like a man tracking stock prices.
The partner from Ohio was telling me a story about his daughter’s wedding. I nodded at what I hoped were the appropriate places.
Across the room, Joss had moved from the head of design to a small cluster of people standing near the bar. I recognized two of them. The third I didn’t. He was tall, mid-forties, in an unstructured linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up and the collar left open one button too far. He had his back half-turned to the rest of the cluster and his attention fully on Joss.
He was standing closer to her than he needed to be.
She’d clocked it. I could see her clock it. Her shoulders had moved up half an inch and her smile had gone two shades more polite. The small black bag had migrated from her left hand to her right, which put a barrier between her body and his.
He leaned in to say something to her. She tilted her head a fraction to listen. He stayed leaned in after he finished talking.
She took half a step back. He closed the half step.
I excused myself from the partner from Ohio.
I didn’t run. I didn’t even hurry. I crossed the room with the same measured walk I used in every executive setting I’d everbeen in, nodded at a board member who tried to catch my eye, accepted a glass of something from a passing server without looking at it, and arrived at the bar cluster at exactly the moment Joss’s smile was about to crack.
“Joss.”
She looked up.
Her relief registered for one half second before she covered it. The half second was enough.
“There’s someone I need you to meet,” I said.
I didn’t look at the tall man in the jacket. I addressed Joss directly. I let the other two members of the cluster see that I was extracting her, and I let the tall man see that he was being dismissed. Then I waited the necessary beat for Joss to give me the small professional nod of a PM following her CEO’s lead.
