Julian was still Julian.
But young. Good grief. The physical differences were subtle enough: the hair a shade lighter, the skin more dewy; the face perhaps rounder, less chiseled. The distinction lay more in his expressions, his manner. He wore that unmistakable air of command about him, of course; he’d probably had it since infancy, and the experience of captaining a British infantry company had only intensified the instinct. But here, now, it combined with eagerness, artlessness, less ease and practice. He hadn’t quite celebrated his twenty-first birthday, I remembered. I was an older woman to him.
A dangerous line of thought, of course. With unnerving immediacy his golden body rose above mine in the summer twilight, so perfectly authentic that my head bowed before the vision and a heavy weight seemed to press the breath from my chest. I twisted brutally the ring on my finger, forcing my brain to detach, to distract itself with practicalities. No modern expressions, I reminded myself. Tuck in your feet. Posture.
I was going to throw up.
I cast about for a container of some kind, and spied a chipped blue-and-white vase on the windowsill. I staggered over and grasped it just in time.
“My God!” Julian’s voice exploded from the doorway in alarm.
I sagged against the window, my throat burning: bile and humiliation.
2.
I disliked Paul Banner for a number of reasons, but primarily because he was always hitting on me.
He wasn’t blatant about it. That I could have shut down pretty easily. No, his style was smarmier, sneakier, so I couldn’t quite pinpoint just where he’d crossed the line. He’d show up at my desk, for example, and take me out to lunch under the pretext of giving me career advice, but it would still have the nauseating flavor of a date with your lecherous rich uncle. I’d spend the whole time waiting miserably for his hand to show up on my knee, while he probably spent the whole time working up the nerve to do it.
“Katie,” he said now, materializing at the edge of my cubicle and taking a long look down the front of my shirt, “let’s debrief.”
It was just after two o’clock and I was about to crash. I’d had about four hours of sleep the entire weekend, and Charlie had just treated me to an enormous greasy Reuben sandwich—my favorite—from the deli around the corner, to settle accounts over the Alicia incident this morning. It sat in my stomach now in a warm planetary mass, drawing my eyelids downward with the force of its gravitational pull. I could hardly think straight. “Debrief?” I repeated.
“Well, you know, that was kind of an odd situation, back there in the meeting.”
I feigned innocence. “How so? By the way, how did everything go?”
“Good. Great. I think they liked me,” he said modestly. “Let’s grab some coffee. You look like you could use it.”
I couldn’t argue there. I sighed and reached for my bag. “Charlie,” I called over, thinking someone should know where I was going, just in case, “we’re just grabbing a quick coffee downstairs.”
He looked up from his computer screen and took everything in. One eyebrow elevated. “Sure, dude,” he said. “Bring me back the usual.”
One of the benefits of working at Sterling Bates, in my book, was the coffee shop next door. According to the office coffee bores—you know, the ones who drone on about Arabica versus Kenyan beans or whatever—Starbucks was crap, but it suited me just fine. It was a place to go when you were sick of the cubicle; at Sterling Bates we used it constantly as our de facto casual meeting space. Any financial journalist wanting an easy scoop, or for that matter any unemployed taxi driver looking for a stock tip, just had to sit in that Starbucks with a newspaper and a latte and keep his ears open.
“So what did you think?” Banner began, taking a drink of cappuccino. In Italy, two summers and a lifetime ago, I’d learned that nobody drank cappuccino after eleven in the morning; the knowledge gave me a pleasant surge of moral confidence.
I settled against the slippery wooden back of my chair and crossed my legs. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. What did they make of the revenue projections?”
“They had a few questions.” He drummed his fingers against the table and peered outside at the narrow swarming sidewalks. The Sterling Bates headquarters were located only one block down from the New York Stock Exchange, which meant we were among the relatively few people working on Wall Street who actually worked on Wall Street. My folks got a kick out of that.
I sipped at my mocha and waited for him to continue.
“Katie,” he said finally, “what are your plans for next year? Business school?”
“I think so. I just sent off the last application on Friday.”
“Where did you go to undergrad, again?”
I hesitated. “University of Wisconsin.”
“That’s right. I remember. We don’t usually recruit from there, do we?”
“No,” I said. “Not usually.”
“Well, I’m glad we made the exception. You’ve been a remarkably productive asset for us. We’d hate to lose you.”
I laughed politely. “Even after this morning?”
“Especially after this morning. Don’t think I didn’t see how Alicia sandbagged you in there. I’ve been around here long enough to know a thing or two.”
“Hmm.” Probably not the right moment to make my j’accuse just yet.
His eyes latched onto mine, trying to connect; I raised my coffee cup again as a buffer. “Now, that’s what I like about you,” he said. “You don’t waste your killer instinct on office politics. Unlike most of the jackasses around here. Myself included,” he added, with a laugh. “Anyway, you got out of there with poise, Katie. Real poise. Laurence was impressed.”
The coffee caught at the back of my throat.
“Very impressed. He was asking me a lot of questions about you at lunch.”
“Really.” Cough, sputter. “What kind of questions?”
“Just questions. Here’s the deal, Katie. I’d like you to take the lead on this thing. Rework the numbers, get something back to them in the next day or two.”
“What?” I wheezed out, through the coffee droplets. I set down my cup and wiped at my watering eyes, not quite sure I’d heard him properly.
He leaned forward across the table, until I could count the stress lines cutting across his forehead. “We need Southfield in on this deal, Katie,” he insisted, pressing his right index finger into the wood veneer. “If Southfield’s in, others will follow. Fucking lemmings. You know that.”
“No, I get it.” I edged back my chair as discreetly as possible. “I’m really flattered. It’s just… are you sure you want me taking the lead? I’m not exactly senior. I wasn’t even in the meeting.”
“If you’re worried about Alicia, I can promise you she won’t be a problem.”
“No, no,” I said swiftly. “I can handle that.”
He paused for a beat or two, inspecting my expression, and then his face eased into a smug smile. “Relax, Katie. Laurence likes you, and it would be a good high-profile project for you. Pretty straightforward, too. And I’d be one hundred percent behind you.”
“Wow,” I said. I was beginning to feel like one of those poor schmucks in the Godfather movies, being made an offer he couldn’t refuse. I ran my finger delicately around the rim of the plastic coffee lid and tried to think of something more to say.
“Good, then.” Banner sat back. “Consider yourself the point man. I’ll give Laurence a shout to let him know it’s coming.” He stood and picked up his cup with a wink. “Now, try to go home early and get some beauty sleep.”
“SO, DUDE,” CHARLIE SAID, around one o’clock the next morning, “what’s the fucking deal here? Banner’s not pimping you, is he?”
I swiveled my chair to face him. “What? Oh please. Not that Banner wouldn’t try if he could,” I admitted, “but I’m not exactly hedgie bait.”
“Whatever. I smell a Banner plot.” Charlie propped his feet up on his desk and balanced a red ed
iting pen on his knee. He looked tired and pasty under the fluorescent lights, like he’d been hung upside down in a meat locker for the day. “And Alicia’s on the fucking warpath, by the way. You’d better watch your ass.”
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. “That’s all I need.”
We were sitting in adjoining cubes, coming up with a more sensible revenue model for ChemoDerma. That was the cover story, anyway; at the moment my laptop displayed a long list of Google search results for Julian Laurence Southfield.
I’d already read most of them, doing my due diligence on Southfield the last few days, and there wasn’t much I didn’t already know. How Julian Laurence had started the fund in 2001, bringing together a couple of genius traders and his own impeccable talent for timing markets. Returns had piled up, new investors had piled on, and now Southfield Associates was one of the largest hedge funds in the world.
But for such a dynamic company, it had remarkably little buzz. Here and there a quote appeared, attributed to Julian, usually some dull reflection on market conditions, nothing with any sort of personality.
And that was the strange part. Here was this freakishly handsome man, the young CEO of an explosive hedge fund, an absolute prodigy in every respect: where were the interviews, the Vanity Fair cover, the snarky New York magazine hit job? Even Page Six returned only one mention from last year, when he had attended some charity function at MoMA: Julian Laurence, the elusive founder of mega hedge fund Southfield Associates, made a rare appearance, setting socialites’ hearts briefly aflutter until his early departure.
That was it. Not even a photo of that remarkable face.
I ran my cursor over his name. Why keep such a low profile? He ought to be out enjoying himself, dating supermodels and buying up beachfront property in the Hamptons. He had the world at his feet. He couldn’t just be staying in at night.
“So are we supposed to check any of this shit with ChemoDerma?” Charlie was asking. “Because it’s pretty weird, messing with the IPO pitch without… shit.” His feet swung back down to the floor.
I looked down his line of sight and saw Alicia marching toward us in a sleek black pantsuit. There were about a dozen other analysts still in the bullpen, working on various projects, but I knew there wasn’t a chance she was hunting down one of them.
It didn’t take her long to find me. “Kate, I’d like to…” She stopped and ran her eyes up and down my figure. “Is that what you’re wearing these days?”
My hand went to the strand of faux pearls at my throat, lying atop the wide neck of my charcoal sweater-dress. “I don’t have any meetings today.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Whatever, Kate. I need to talk to you. Is there a conference room free?”
“There should be,” I said. “We’re not too busy right now.”
She followed me into an empty room and shut the door, bracelets clanging against the handle. The floral scent of her perfume closed densely around us. “Just what the living fuck do you think you’re doing?” she hissed.
“Wow,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Stealing my fucking deal, that’s what! Cutting me out. Setting Banner against me. And after all I did to make you look good…”
My cheeks grew warm. “Excuse me, but what planet are you living on? I had nothing to do with any of that. Banner called me in for a meeting and said he was putting me on the revisions. It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t even have a choice.”
“Do you think I’m a fucking idiot, Kate?” Her voice, building in shrillness, crested on the verge of a shriek.
I raised one fatal eyebrow.
She turned red; her eyes bulged, blue and globular, from beneath their heavy lids. When she spoke, however, her voice had sunk nearly to a whisper. “Oh, you fucking bitch. You fucking bitch. You have no idea, no idea, no fucking clue what I’m going to do to you. If I have to blow up the whole fucking bank, so help me.”
She turned and stalked out of the conference room. I stood there, frozen, watching the door ease behind her until it closed at last with a final click.
“MESSENGER IT? ARE YOU KIDDING?” Banner wasn’t looking at me as he said this; his thumbs flew away on his BlackBerry, firing off some e-mail.
I folded my arms. “Don’t we always messenger these things? Do you want me to e-mail it instead?”
His eyes flashed upward. “No,” he said, as if he were stating the obvious. “I want you to deliver it yourself.”
I was sitting in the chair in front of Banner’s desk, feeling like a kid hauled in to see the principal. As head of Capital Markets, he had one of the plushest offices in the building, full of dark brown furniture and gleaming upholstery, designed to strike clients into acquiescent awe. The lion-footed desk roared Important Antique, or at least a convincing reproduction, and the handsome wing chair in which I was sitting could swallow me whole without a burp.
“Oh,” I said. “What about Charlie?”
“Charlie? What the fuck?” He began to laugh. “You really don’t get it, do you? Look,” he said, still chuckling, “here’s Laurence’s e-mail address. Let him know you’re stopping by the office to drop it off. Say you’re on your way to the airport for Christmas, and thought you’d hand it off in person.”
“But I’m not leaving until tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Katie, Katie.” He turned back to his phone. “Work with me here.”
I straightened in the chair with some effort. “Look,” I began, about to make some high-minded protest, like I’m just not comfortable hanging myself up in the shop window like that. But then I realized two things. First, arguing with Banner over something like this was akin to the old saying about teaching a pig to sing.
And second—God help me—I wanted to see Julian Laurence again.
“Aren’t you going to check over the book first?” I asked instead, waving my hand at the printout on his desk.
He didn’t look up. “No, I trust you. Look, I’ve got to get going. Did you write down his e-mail?”
“Yes. Safe in the BlackBerry.” I held it up to demonstrate, but he wasn’t watching.
“There you go, then. Merry fucking Christmas.” He ripped his gaze away from his phone and grinned at me.
I struggled upward from the chair. “You too.”
I snatched the presentation from his desk and stalked back to my cubicle, where my laptop bag slumped tiredly against the dividing wall in a bristle of zipper tabs. I stood there a minute, nibbling my lower lip, presentation dangling from my folded arms. Then I tossed the book on the desk and burrowed in the bag for my wallet.
It took some time to find the scrap of paper I sought; it had wedged itself between my University of Wisconsin senior year ID and an ancient loyalty card from the hairdresser next door to my apartment in Madison. I removed it slowly and stared at the image for a long dense moment: a heart, colored in blue-black ink, surrounded by a circle with a slash across the center, like a traffic warning sign.
I’d drawn it on the flight to New York City two and a half years ago, full of apprehension and introspection and a margarita or two from my farewell lunch with Michelle and Samantha. There, cruising above the patchwork farmlands of Pennsylvania, I’d promised myself—in the kind of melodramatic gesture that had once been typical of me—to avoid any kind of romantic involvement until I’d completed the three-year Sterling Bates analyst program. I’d take myself out of the game, keep my life neat and tidy, stay focused on work. Not a single date. Not even a casual flirtation. And I’d kept that vow with near-obsessive scrupulousness.
So what now? Because I wasn’t stupid, and for all the orderly window dressing of legitimate business purposes, Banner’s scheme had flirtation and more written all over it.
Quickly, before I could second-guess myself, I stuffed the paper back in my wallet and reached for my phone to type a short message: Hello Julian, heading uptown now, can I drop off the ChemoDerma book on my way? Best, Kate Wilson.
My
fingers hovered uncertainly—should I make the greeting more formal?—but Dear Mr. Laurence sounded starchy and Dear Julian coyly intimate. I held my breath and hit send and tossed the phone on my desk, as if it were a ticking bomb.
I looked over my cubicle. I should probably be gathering up my few things; I wouldn’t be back in the office until Monday. I reached for my bag and began putting file folders inside, mostly ChemoDerma material. There would be other meetings, after all. We were flying up to Boston on Tuesday.
My phone buzzed. I counted off three full seconds before snatching it up.
Already gone home for the day. Don’t suppose you’re on the Upper East? Julian.
My fingers danced over the keypad.
Actually yes, 79th Street.
The response came back just as fast.
I’m at 52 E 74. Could you bring it by?
Me: Of course. Which apt?
Julian: Just the house.
The entire house, his own private rectangle of Manhattan; why not? My fingers began to shake. This was bad. This was monumentally stupid. I should not be doing this.
Okay, be there in half an hour.
Amiens
I felt Julian’s arm close around me, thick and steady along my waist. I tried to shrug it off, but my belly heaved up bile again and it was all I could do not to keel forward onto the floor. I felt the sweat pearl out on my temples.
“Sorry,” I gasped, pulling away.
“You’re ill. You must sit down.”
“No, I’m all right, really. Just a little hungry.”
“The tray should be along directly. I…” He stopped, looking awkward.
I stood there witlessly, staring at the floor, holding an old blue vase full of my own vomit, or what there was of it, considering I hadn’t eaten in nearly eighteen hours. “I don’t know what you must think of me,” I said, sliding the vase behind my skirt.
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