“At a place known for ball pits and the toys in the kids’ meals?”
“In my defense, I’ve never been in the ball pit.”
“That’s the lowest bar I’ve ever heard you set, Sterling.”
The car pulled up to a small restaurant with warm light spilling onto the sidewalk. The host knew Gabriel by name and walked them to a back-corner table where two candles flashed, and the menu was a single typed sheet.
A young waiter named Peter appeared, took their wine order, and disappeared.
Gabriel pulled out her chair, and once she’d sat, he took the seat across from her. The flame threw light across his face she’d remember the rest of her life. He was staring. She was too.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re beautiful.”
She felt the heat in her cheeks and ignored it. “Get used to hearing it back.”
“Working on it.”
Peter returned with the wine, poured, and was gone again. Tessa took a sip and let it sit on her tongue. It was good wine, the kind she’d have ordered for a client.
“Why Oath Capital?” she asked. “The name.”
“It sounds like something an investment firm should be called. We make an oath to do our best by our investors. Build wealth. Steward it well. The whole pitch.”
“That’s a marketing line.”
“It’s a good one.”
“You workshopped it.”
“Endlessly. Knox is unbearable with a thesaurus.”
She laughed. He laughed too, but his came a beat late, and she filed it under things that probably had a longer answer. The harder questions could wait. She’d wanted this version of him tonight—the one across the table, ordering wine, watching her like she was the only thing on the menu.
Peter brought warm bread, fried calamari, and olive oil. They ate. She told him about Lucy, who had walked into her culinary school dorm uninvited at midnight on her third night and saidI’m Lucy, I bake, you cater, we’re going to be friends, and I brought cookies.Lucy had been right about all four. He toldher Knox was a closet Hallmark movie watcher and would deny it under oath, and that Ronan’s closet was sorted by color, then season, then formality, with a printed key taped inside the door.
The Bolognese was good. Gabriel ate like a man who hadn’t realized he was hungry, or one who’d been ordering off the value menu way too long.
She watched him across the table and thought about the fact that she had wanted this conversation for years.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“Right now or in general?”
“In the bigger sense, like what are your dreams.”
“You want my dreams?” She sipped her wine. “I’d like a Sunday off.”
“That’s not a dream.”
“It is when you haven’t had one in three years.”
He paused. He didn’t look away, and he didn’t speak, and the silence between them felt like a promise she hadn’t heard yet. “Tell me more.”
