by CD Reiss
“Good news is, Burke renewed the contract.”
My attention snapped away from Raven to my boss.
“Excuse me?”
Over Marie’s shoulder I saw Raven and Fitz with another man. Taylor Harden.
The first thing I thought of was her underwear. She’d promised to wear all the pieces in the set, but what if she decided to surprise me? What if there was only a couple of loose layers of silk between her and her old flame?
Taylor laughed at something.
That bothered me, mostly because she was having a conversation with him, a relationship, and I couldn’t go near her.
I shook it off. Barely.
“It was quite a sell, but I told them the only way to make sure the new VP is on the up and up is to throw a little temptation her way.”
I couldn’t unravel that while Taylor put his hand on Raven’s arm. It was a friendly gesture that could be explained away, but I was a stew of shit and foulness at that moment.
Marie winked at me and sipped her champagne.
“What?”
“Don’t worry. You earned yourself a name on the door.”
“By doing what?”
“What handsome men do. We got the contract renewed. We’ll be handling risk management and executive vetting. And the retainer fee? Very nice. You’ll have an office right below Burke at the General Counsel.”
“Hold on. Just let me say this back to you. I was supposed to have a thing with Raven?”
“You were supposed to test her,” Marie said. “She failed. You’re safe. And in the meantime your team put together a system the client can be confident in. Why do you look like that? Are you all right?”
“You used me as a honey trap?”
“I wouldn’t call us Siska, Welton + Bianchi unless you were also an excellent lawyer.”
Great.
I was an excellent lawyer.
“How did you find out?”
“I took her assistant out for a drink. She saw you two at the symphony.”
The SSV. The symphony I never actually saw. The violation got wider and the shame got deeper.
“Are you getting offended?” Marie asked. “If I told you, you would have tried too hard. That wouldn’t have been fair.”
Was I angry with Marie for using me? For playing me so she could play Raven so she could play Burke? Was I uncomfortable because we’d been so good at keeping our affair under wraps? Yes. All of it.
Did it have nothing to do with being manipulated? Was I disappointed that I had to stay at Neuronet?
None of it.
I was upset that in trying to protect Raven, I’d played right into endangering her dreams. I was the only thing standing between her and what she wanted most. Permanence.
I wanted to be her stability, not her chaos. I’d hurt her. I was regretful, angry, and helpless inside it because I had what I wanted.
I’d destroyed Raven and our relationship in the meantime, and there was not a goddamn thing I could do about it.
“I got my partnership.” I put my glass on a waiter’s tray. “That was all I wanted.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Excuse me for a minute.”
I had no patience for the party, but I couldn’t stand the idea of going home. I had to think. I went back up to my office.
Chapter 21
RAVEN
At one point, just as I was starting to relax, I felt Roman looking at me. Taylor was talking about some impossible aspect of quantum physics, and his new girlfriend corrected him with a snide remark that made him laugh. I think she corrected him. She could have been agreeing. I had no idea what they were saying, and not because the feeling that Roman was near distracted me. I didn’t know enough about quantum computing to make jokes about it.
Looking around, I didn’t see him. I wasn’t supposed to talk to him at the event, but we hadn’t said anything about looking at each other.
Finally, I found him. He was a tall silhouette in a window on the second floor. His old office looked down on the courtyard and he was watching me from above.
I excused myself and went upstairs.
“Hey,” I said when I got up there. He had a banker’s box on his desk. He took a picture of him and his sister out and laid it behind the computer, where it had always been. “I thought you were packing up.”
“I was.”
“That looks suspiciously like unpacking.”
He took a leather folder out of the box and laid it on the desk, then reached in for something else, ignoring me so pointedly I went from comfortably happy to deflated and awkward in fifteen seconds.
But I didn’t press him. I stood there and waited. It was his turn to talk and I had nothing to offer. I assumed he was sad he wouldn’t see me every day, or that he’d miss the fun of the secrecy.
“You know,” he started. “I went to law school because I wasn’t going to make it as a video game designer or player, and I had nothing else going on. But I like it. I like what I do. I like protecting companies from their own stupidity. I like knowing the law and using it to prevent lawsuits. It’s not glamorous. But it’s what I got, and you want stability, I get it. So do I. I want to be a senior partner so I can bust my ass ten months a year and take the other two up in the Sierras.”
He’d invited me up to the Sierras with him, up away from the noise of the city. But this didn’t feel like an invitation. It felt like the opposite.
“I have things that are important to me.” He put his hands on the edge of the box. “I wanted to make senior partner. I did that.”
“That’s great!”
I was genuinely happy for him, but something was off. He took a planner out of the box but didn’t put it on the desk.
“And we’ve been retained as outside counsel on risk management.”
“Ah.” So that was it. He wasn’t leaving the company. He was going to be around and as a couple, we were screwed. “That’s—”
“Great,” he snapped.
“Great, but it’s across campus, so—”
“That’s got no impact on the fraternization between us.”
“No,” I said. “ I mean I get it but—”
“Which shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
“You can stop fucking interrupting me now.” I let sharpness cut into my voice. I was done with being treated like crap.
He looked at me for the first time, and that gray green was darkened to steel. Cold, hard steel. I didn’t like it.
“What I was trying to say was that you shouldn’t be putting all your stuff back on this desk when you’ll probably be over in the General Counsel’s office.”
“Right.” He dropped the planner, snapped up the picture and the leather folder and put them back in the box.
“So what do you want to do?” I asked.
He sighed. I’d never heard Roman sigh. He wasn’t a resigned kind of person. Or maybe I just didn’t know him.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. I don’t. I was totally unprepared for this.”
He was unprepared. Boo-fucking-hoo. I was getting a little pissed off. The bucket was filling, but wasn’t quite there yet.
“So, you want to split up?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t not say it either.”
“If you have a suggestion, I’m all ears.”
Bucket. Full.
“I have a suggestion. Yeah. I do. You stop acting like a spineless jackass and decide if you want me or not. Because if you don’t, I can move on. And just say it, you don’t. If you did, you’d say fuck Neuronet and fuck the firm. I’m with Raven. She’s mine and none of this other shit matters. But you didn’t. You balked. So I’m sitting here, ready to toss everything and start over for the sake of being with you, and you’re rearranging shit in a cardboard box. That tells me everything I need to know about what I mean to you. You should have listened to my email if
you were going to do this.”
If he was going to argue with me or defend himself, he didn’t do it quickly enough. He didn’t leap to comfort me or disabuse me of my convictions. He just stood there with his hands in that motherfucking box as the music from the party rose up from the courtyard.
“For your information,” I said, “I wore underwear for you.”
I spun around before I was even finished, walking down the carpeted hall so fast the tulle flew out behind me. I didn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with him, so I took the stairs. The door clapped closed behind me and my shoes clicked on the concrete.
His did not.
The stairway was silent except for my clacking shoes. Every step hurt. The shoes were too high. My toes were jammed and my heels were blistered. That didn’t hurt half as much as the realization that he wasn’t following me. I was as good as alone in this world. Employed. Safe. Steady and alone.
I didn’t have him, but I had this stupid job. Without realizing it, I’d chosen stability over love, and so had he. I hadn’t had a warning, time to think, weigh the pros and cons.
That’s not how life works, is it? Choices aren’t made so clearly by filling in boxes or clicking one button instead of the other. Choices are made over time, little by little while we aren’t looking, until the result is inevitable and the consequences are unavoidable.
Stepping onto the courtyard, I slowed down. If the career was what I’d chosen, I wasn’t fucking it up by running through the event like a damsel in distress.
I was, however, going to power through my aching feet, go right through the party, and disappear on the other side.
“Raven!” It was fucking Taylor running behind me.
“What?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay, yeah. No.”
He took me by the elbow and I jerked away. He put his hands up. Was I making a scene? I didn’t want to make a scene.
“I have to—”
“You’re crying.” He took a hankie out of his pocket and flipped it to me. I touched my cheek. It was wet. For the first time, I noticed my breath was catching.
“Great.” I dabbed under my eyes. “Just great.”
“If it’s the job, you know you can come back to QI4.”
He dangled his little treasure in front of me as if I was a kitten and he’d just brought home a new toy. Going back to QI4 would solve the Roman problem, even if that meant I got away from him, but it wouldn’t solve the me problem.
“What is it with me, Taylor? Why do I end up with guys I work with?”
He shrugged, looking around as if trying to find someone besides himself.
“Not you, asshole. But yeah. You. Plus.”
His eyes lit on his new girlfriend, who was talking to Fitz a few feet away.
“There’s something about seeing a person doing what they’re good at that’s sexy. Outside work they’re normal. You might not even notice them. But when you see someone where they’re important—needed. Competent. Whatever, add your adjective—it’s pretty hot.”
I laughed a little, just enough for him to hear.
“What?” he asked.
“I never took you for someone who could tell me about myself. But, yeah. I just need to find a company without a non-fraternization policy or something.”
“Can you imagine the orgies?”
We laughed together. I sniffed. Dabbed the sides of my nose.
Roman was looking at me from the cafeteria, standing with some of the lawyers who had been in and out of the office and an older red-haired woman in a pants suit.
I was supposed to be going home. I’d told myself I was crossing the courtyard and going down to the parking lot. I was going to rip the damn shoes off and drive like there was no tomorrow.
“I was actually thinking of leaving it out of the QI4 policy,” Taylor said from the other end of a very long tunnel.
I needed to do what I was supposed to do. Walk to the parking lot. Immediately. Because Roman was coming toward me with the pantsuit woman in tow, chatting at him as if he was listening.
“…sixteen-hour days, and if we’re going to have a bunch of…”
He wasn’t. His eyes were on me.
“…coders in the cage, it’s going to happen anyway…”
Taylor could tell me his crazy idea another time. I turned and tried to walk away while he was midsentence, crashing right into Burke.
“Whoa!” he cried, rescuing his drink from a major spill.
Taylor, “…why not be a disruptor in…whoa!”
“I’m sorry!”
“It’s fine,” Burke said, getting his balance. “I was coming here to—”
“Raven,” Roman’s tone demanded attention but Burke was in the middle of… “—I need to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said to Burke, as Roman held up a piece of paper. “We can go over by the Big Circuit,” I continued absently as Roman flung the piece of paper at me. I caught it.
“You finally got what you wanted.” Roman had the attention of the entire circle. Even Taylor redirected from his radical fraternization policy.
Mr. Bianchi:
Thank you for joining me for lunch.
As a matter for the record, you have pursued me up to the limit I find appropriate.
I didn’t need to finish it. I skipped to my name and title at the end.
“I didn’t publish this,” I said.
“But you sent it.” Roman pointed at me as if he wanted to nail me to the wall. The gesture was accusatory and forgiving at the same time.
Marie held her hand out for the page. I gave it to her.
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“So, I didn’t listen. Well, now you have what you want. I’m across the campus. Are you happy now?”
My mouth hung open. I wasn’t happy, but somehow I knew I was supposed to play along with an act I hadn’t rehearsed.
Marie handed me back the letter. “Mr. Bianchi,” she said. “Let’s discuss this elsewhere.”
“No. You did your job a little too well. You wanted to test her, but I was the one who failed. I’m obsessed with her. She’s perfect for me, even if she doesn’t know it. Perfect, and being here, looking at her every day? It’s been hell, and I can’t do it any more.”
I was so confused, but that was about to get worse.
“You know what?” He threw his hands up. “I quit.”
He walked away without looking back.
FILE UNDER: Free
Chapter 22
RAVEN
I had pieced it all together in the following ten minutes, with my official rejection of the man I loved crunching in my hand, then I got in my car, kicked my uncomfortable shoes off, and drove to him in my stocking feet.
Burke had been about to fire me.
There was no traffic, and the streetlamps streaked by as I broke the speed limit to get to him. My phone was face down on the passenger seat. Out of the corner of my eye, it lit up, bleeding light from the space between the device and the leather. I didn’t answer. Dying on the way to him would defeat the purpose.
Oona was raving about the SSV show. She said she saw us in the hall together, not knowing Marie was Roman’s boss.
I wasn’t sure if my job was completely safe. I wasn’t sure if any job was ever completely safe. But it was safe from my love for Roman Bianchi.
When I saw him in the office, he was trapped.
I passed the edge of the park. The grassy field he’d carried me over twice was spotted with dim yellow lights. The chess pieces were put away. Leaves rustled over the board. I parked and took a breath. His car was in the driveway.
He’d made partner, then quit to protect me.
What would we do now?
My feet hurt when I put my heels back on, as if protesting losing their freedom so soon. I left my shawl in the car and went unprotected into the chilly night. As I walked across the street to his front door, I asked mysel
f what I wanted from him. From us. I wanted everything, but he’d given up so much already.
His door opened and he stood in the frame with his jacket and tie gone. He worked on undoing his French cuff while my heels clacked along the walk.
“Ms. Crosby,” he said.
“Mr. Bianchi.”
We faced each other. He absently slipped his cufflinks in his pocket. I put my hands on my hips.
“I didn’t tell you how nice you looked in that underwear,” he said.
“You didn’t have to quit.”
“On the contrary. If I wanted you, I had to. And I want you.”
I started to explain that he didn’t have to resign. We could have figured it out somehow, but he held his hand out.
“Let me finish.”
I crossed my arms impatiently. I hoped he wasn’t going to talk all that long. I wanted to kiss him, and soon. But his posture was clear. No kissing. Not yet.
“I could have stayed with you on the down low,” he continued. “But that’s not a long-term solution, and I want a long-term solution. I could have been assigned outside Neuronet, but that would have damaged my seniority in the firm. I wasn’t letting you quit. I wasn’t going to let you be fired. I wasn’t getting in the way of what you need.”
I couldn’t bear it. I had to talk.
“But you wanted to make partner.”
“True.”
“You love your job.”
“False,” he said. “I enjoy my job. It’s you I love.”
Did my feet hurt?
Were my arms cold in the spring night?
My eyes. Were they dry? Or did a layer of tears form between me and the sight of him?
“I don’t want to hurt you,” was all I could choke out before I had to swallow a throat full of sobs.
“You’re not hurting me.” He broke the threshold and took my bare shoulders in his hands. “The partnership was a brass ring, but when you walked out of my office, I realized I traded a gold ring for brass. You are my ambition. You are my mountain to climb. You’re my only aspiration.”
I took a step closer and put my hands on his chest. He’d never felt so real and solid as that moment, heavy and hard in my hands. A man of substance.