I knew what going there meant. I also knew what it meant for the video on the building security footage that would stick around long after. I’d told myself, in the car on the way home,that I was going to do this slowly. Carefully. Not all at once. Going to the office tonight was none of those things.
I typed,I’m on my way.
I sent it. I stood up. I changed faster than I’d ever changed in my life. I put on jeans. I put on a soft cotton tank top I’d worn three times that week because the heat had been miserable. I put on sandals. I twisted my hair up off my neck and pinned it with a clip I found on my dresser without looking at which clip.
Finally, I grabbed my keys, my wallet, my phone, and the small black bag I’d carried to the reception. I stopped at my bedroom door, turned around, came back, picked up the silver chain necklace I’d worn to dinner Monday night and the reception tonight, and fastened it around my throat with hands that weren’t quite steady.
Then I walked out of the apartment.
The rideshare took twelve minutes. I sat in the back seat the same way I had on the way home, except this time I was awake to every block. I counted streetlights. I watched the traffic thin as we moved through the financial district. I felt my phone buzz once in my bag and didn’t check it. I felt it buzz again three minutes later and didn’t check it.
I checked it on the third buzz.
It was him.
I’m at the front entrance.
The car turned the last corner. The Myrror building came into view at the end of the block. Twenty-seven floors of glass and steel, mostly dark at this hour, the lobby lit from inside like an aquarium. I could see him through the glass before the car had finished pulling up to the curb.
He was standing just inside the doors.
His suit jacket was off. He’d rolled his sleeves up. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was watching the curb. His eyes found the car the second it stopped.
I thanked the driver without looking at him and got out. The June night air hit me again—warm and slow and thick with the smell of the river two blocks over—and I crossed the sidewalk to the front doors. Sutton pushed the door open for me.
I stepped inside.
The lobby was quiet. The night security guard was at her desk on the far side of the space, head down over a screen. She glanced up as we crossed to the elevator bank, registered Sutton, registered me, and looked back down at her screen without comment. She’d been trained well, or paid well, or both.
I followed him to the executive elevator.
Sutton tapped his keycard against the reader. The doors opened. He gestured me in. I stepped inside.
He stepped in after me. The doors slid closed.
We were alone.
He didn’t touch me.
I didn’t touch him.
He pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. The executive floor. The floor I’d been on exactly four times in fourteen months at Myrror—twice chaperoned past closed corner-office doors I’d never been on the other side of, once a week ago to stand in front of him and four executives and defend the best idea I’d ever had, and once on Monday to sit across his desk and not open the notebook in my lap.
The car began to move. I could feel him breathing. I could feel the heat coming off his body in the small space between us, and the way the elevator hummed faintly as it climbed, and the soft mechanical click each time the floor counter changed. Two. Three. Four. I watched the numbers light up one at a time above the doors.
He didn’t speak.
I didn’t either.
His hand moved. Not toward me. Just to his side, where his fingers brushed the back of my hand once and then settled there, the side of his hand against the side of mine. Not holding. Just touching.
I let it happen.
I didn’t move my hand away. I didn’t move my hand toward him. I stood there with the side of his hand against the side of mine and the elevator climbing through the dark middle floors of the Myrror building, and I felt his pulse through the back of his hand.
Or I felt mine. I couldn’t tell which.
The counter above the doors lit up the number eighteen.
