What happened Monday was that I walked into the Myrror lobby at 7:52 with a slightly damp coat, a mostly-empty stomach, and the travel tumbler I carried every morning because I couldn’t afford Bitstream prices on a junior PM salary, and Sutton Randall was standing fifteen feet away holding a Bitstream coffee cup.
I stopped walking.
I stopped so fast that the person behind me had to step around me, and I had to say sorry to her shoulder blades as she rushed past.
Sutton was standing near the security desk talking to Beckett. Beckett, whom I’d now seen twice in three days. Beckett, who was wearing a leather jacket and jeans and looked exactly the way the press always described him—handsome in a slightly chaotic way, like a man who’d never met a meeting he couldn’t show up late to.
Sutton wasn’t wearing a leather jacket. He was wearing another suit, navy this time, and the Bitstream cup in his hand had the green sleeve and the little stamped logo of the coffee shop on the ground floor of my building.
My building.
Where I lived.
That cup had been purchased this morning, in a coffee shop that was forty minutes from this lobby, on the ground floor of a building Sutton Randall didn’t live in and had no professional reason to be at, as far as I knew.
He went to Bitstream.
That was the only thing my brain managed to formulate for what felt like a long time but was probably one full second.
He looked up.
He saw me.
He didn’t look surprised. Did that mean he’d been waiting for me to come through the door?
His eyes met mine across the lobby. His jaw set. He took a slow breath. Then he said something to Beckett without looking at him. Beckett turned his head, looked at me, looked back at Sutton, said something I couldn’t hear, and clapped Sutton on the shoulder. Then he started walking toward the front doors.
He had to walk past me to get there. I expected him to nod or smile or do one of the polite things a man does when he passeshis girlfriend’s roommate on a Monday morning, but he didn’t do any of that. He just gave me a single look as he went by—quick, knowing, slightly amused—and kept walking.
The doors slid shut behind him.
I made myself start moving again. I made myself walk toward the elevator bank like a person who hadn’t just been clocked across a corporate lobby by the founder of her company while her CEO held a Bitstream coffee cup in his right hand.
Sutton fell into step beside me.
We didn’t speak.
We didn’t speak as we walked the twenty feet to the elevators. We didn’t speak as he reached past me to press the up button, which he did even though I was already reaching for it. Our hands almost touched, and for a fraction of a second, I forgot how to breathe properly.
We didn’t speak as the elevator opened and we both stepped in. We didn’t speak as the doors slid closed and the car started to move up.
I was very aware of the coffee cup in his hand.
He was very aware that I was very aware of the coffee cup in his hand.
I cleared my throat and said, “Bitstream’s a long way from your office.”
I’d been working on the line all the way from the front doors to the elevator. Actually, I’d been working on it from the moment I’d seen the cup, but I hadn’t actually committed to delivering it until it came out of my mouth.
Sutton looked down at the cup like he was noticing it for the first time. Then he shifted his gaze to me.
“It’s a good cup of coffee,” he said.
He held my eyes. He didn’t look away. He didn’t soften it. He didn’t turn it into a joke. He just said it like a fact, and then he kept looking at me.
I felt my mouth go slightly dry. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
