Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
I set down my fork. “You’re very observant.”
“It’s my job.”
“Reading people is your job?”
“Reading people is what keeps the people I love alive.”
It’s the first real thing he’s told me. Not charming, not performed, not wrapped in tissue paper. It sits between us on the white linen, and I feel it in my sternum, and I don’t know what to do with it except hold his eyes and not blink.
We eat. He asks about Idaho again, but differently this time. Not the conference-room version. He asks about winter. He asks if I’ve ever been snowed in. He asks what my mother cooks for Christmas and when I tell him pot roast and mashed potatoes he closes his eyes for a second and the expression on his face is so unguarded, so briefly and completely human, that my throat aches.
“You miss home,” I hear myself say.
His eyes open. The unguarded thing is gone. The performance is back, seamless, as if it was never absent.
“I don’t have a home, Miss Fletcher. I have addresses.”
The candle between us gutters. The waiter clears plates. The restaurant empties around us in degrees, table by table, until we are the last ones and the hush has thickened into something that presses against my skin.
And then he says it.
He sets down his wine glass. He leans forward. His elbows on the table, which should be wrong but isn’t, and his face in the candlelight is all angles and shadows and those grey eyes that see everything and give nothing back, and his voice drops to a register I haven’t heard before.
“I want to be honest with you, Daisy.”
My first name. He has never used my first name.
“I know how things work at Keyes. I know what the firm is. I know what the women do, and I know the arrangements that are available to someone in my position.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “I want you to know that I’m prepared to make yours very comfortable.”
The restaurant goes silent. The candle goes silent. The blood in my ears goes loud.
“Arrangement,” I repeat.
“Whatever you need. An apartment. An allowance. Access to anything the firm can’t provide.” He recites this like terms he’s offered before, like the girl across the table in the green dress is a line item in a negotiation that’s been running since the coffee appeared on her desk Monday morning. “You’re exceptional, Daisy. I want to make sure you’re taken care of.”
I go still.
The stillness starts in my hands and moves inward, through my wrists, up my arms, into my chest, until my entire body is a held breath. The green dress. The unsigned coffee. The car in the rain. The fish he ordered because he’d read me cover to cover and knew I couldn’t read the menu. None of it was what I thought it was. All of it was an interview for something that isn’t in the job description, and the job description was never a job at all.
“I think,” I hear myself say, and my voice comes out level, which surprises me, because everything beneath it is on fire, “there’s been a misunderstanding.”
He smiles. Not the half-lift. The full one. Both sides. The one that costs nothing and promises everything. “I don’t think there has.”
I put down my napkin. I stand, and my chair scrapes the floor, and the sound is too loud in the empty restaurant, and his smile doesn’t change, and his eyes don’t change, and he is still leaning forward with his elbows on the table like a man who has read the ending of this story and is waiting for me to catch up.
“Thank you for dinner,” I tell him.
I leave.
The door is heavy. The street is dark. The man in the suit who opened it for me opens it again and the night air hits me and it’s warm, too warm, and I walk to the kerb and raise my hand for a taxi and my hand is shaking.
A car stops. I get in. I give the driver my address and sit in the back seat with my hands in my lap and I don’t cry and I don’t scream and the city slides past the window and I’m shaking, shaking, and it’s not from anger alone.
It’s from the second before.
The second before the word arrangement hit the table. The second when he leaned forward and said my name and his eyes were close and the candle was between us and I wanted him to mean it differently. I wanted the dinner to be a dinner. I wanted the coffee to be coffee. I wanted the car in the rain to be a man who couldn’t stand the thought of me getting wet and not a move in a game I didn’t know I was playing.
The taxi turns onto my street. I pay. I walk upstairs. I close my door.