Page 10 of Belong to Me
Not anger.
Want. The wanting underneath the insult, still there, still burning, still his.
Chapter 4
DAISY
“I’d like to be reassigned.”
Kaye doesn’t even look up from her laptop. Her fingers keep moving across the keys, her reading glasses catching the harbour light through her office window, and the typing sounds like a woman who has already decided this conversation isn’t happening.
“Fletch.”
“I can take any other account. I’ll take the smallest client on the books. I’ll reorganise the filing system. I’ll do intake for the rest of the year. I just need to be moved off the Almazov account.”
The typing stops. Her eyes come to me over the rims of her glasses and they are warm and patient and absolutely immovable.
“Anton Almazov is the single largest retainer this firm has ever held. He specifically requested you. And you want me to reassign you because, what, you didn’t enjoy the restaurant?”
My throat closes. Because the answer is worse than that. The answer is that I did enjoy the restaurant, and the fish, and the wine, and the sound of his voice telling me about landlocked states and French menus, and I enjoyed every second of it until the word arrangement landed on the white linen like a grenade and blew my entire understanding of the past two weeks into pieces so small I’m still finding them.
“The restaurant was fine,” I tell her.
“Good.” She goes back to typing. “Then you’ll stay on the account.”
I stand in her doorway a moment longer. She doesn’t notice, or pretends not to, and I walk back to my desk and sit down and the coffee cup is there again, warm, black, one sugar, and I pick it up and throw it in the bin and the sound it makes is louder than it should be and Blythe, two desks over, lifts her head.
SHE FINDS ME IN THEkitchen at lunch.
I’m not eating. I’m standing at the counter holding a glass of water I haven’t drunk and the water has gone warm in my hand and I’m staring at the fridge, which has a staff notice about a birthday cake for someone named Petra, and I’m reading the notice again because reading it means I don’t have to think about anything else.
“What happened?” Blythe asks.
“Nothing.”
“You threw away the coffee.”
“I didn’t want it.”
“You drank every cup he left you for a week.”
I set the water down. My hand isn’t trembling but it wants to. “How did you know it was him?”
Blythe gives me the expression she saves for questions with obvious answers. “Everyone knows it was him. The buildingconcierge lets his driver in before the office opens. The coffee is from Café Rideau, which charges a fortune for a black coffee and doesn’t do deliveries. He brings it himself.”
He brings it himself.
I close my eyes. Because the image of Anton Almazov walking into that coffee shop before I arrive and carrying a paper cup to my desk and setting it down and leaving before I arrive is an image I cannot afford to hold, because if I hold it, it will rearrange everything I decided in the taxi on Friday night, and I decided in the taxi on Friday night that he sees me as a transaction and I refuse to be purchased.
“Daisy.” Blythe’s voice is closer. “What happened at the dinner?”
I open my eyes. She’s right there. Close enough that I can see the mascara smudge under her left eye and the crease between her brows that means she’s not performing concern, she’s feeling it, and I want to tell her. I want to tell someone. I want to say the wordarrangementout loud in a room where someone might flinch at it how I flinched, because if someone else flinches then it means I wasn’t wrong to leave.
But if I say it, I have to explain what he thought I was. And if I explain what he thought I was, I have to face the question of why he thought it. And the why leads to Kaye and the firm and the women who touch clients’ arms and the meetings behind closed doors and Blythe telling me to tab it blue, and I’m not ready for the shape of that answer.
“It was just a dinner,” I tell her.
Blythe holds my eyes for a long time. Then she nods, once, and takes my water glass and pours it out and refills it with cold water from the tap and hands it back.
