Page 12 of Claimed By the Boss
6
CELINE
The airport smellslike burnt coffee and recycled air.
Lena’s gate is at the far end of Terminal 4.
Priya walks beside her with their carry-ons, Lena’s with the broken wheel that wobbles left, Priya’s perfectly upright because Priya is the kind of person whose luggage cooperates. I walk on Lena’s other side. We’re not talking. We said everything last night at the kitchen table.
At the gate, Lena turns to me. She doesn’t say anything right away. She looks at my face the way she’s been looking at my face her whole life, reading the version of me underneath the version I’m presenting.
“Stop doing the math,” she says.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Celine.”
“Lena. Go.”
She hugs me. Hard. She smells like the conditioner she has used since high school. Her arms are thinner than they were six months ago. I hold on longer than I mean to. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright, but she doesn’t let anything fall.
“Video call,” I say. “Every day.”
“Every day,” she says.
Priya wraps an arm around her. Looks back at me once with an expression that meansI’ve got her. The broken wheel wobbles through the security gate. I watch them until the crowd takes them.
Then I stand at the window for a long time looking at nothing.
The car Zane sent is at the curb. Black, quiet, the driver holding the door without being asked. I get in. I look out the window the whole ride uptown. The city does what the city does, indifferent, loud, already three hours into its day.
I don’t cry. I haven’t cried in a week. I don’t intend to start in the back of a car that belongs to the man whose penthouse I’m moving into today.
The penthouse is on the fifty-third floor.
I’ve been in this building for two weeks. I have never been above the forty-fourth. The elevator opens onto a private foyer with a single door, and the quality of silence that exists in places built to exclude the world rather than simply rise above it.
The housekeeper, a woman named Diane who has the efficient warmth of someone who has worked for difficult people longenough to have stopped being surprised by any of them, shows me to my room. It’s larger than our living room at home. The bed sits against one wall at a height that requires a small decision every morning. The window looks over the park, bare trees, and the geometry of paths below.
I put my bag on the chair in the corner.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
I think about Lena somewhere over the Atlantic, Priya beside her, the broken wheel in the overhead compartment. I think about the house on Mercer sitting empty with the soap on the counter and three spots on the floor that creak.
I don’t think about how long I’m going to be here.
By Wednesday, I have his mornings mapped.
Coffee at seven, black, no sugar. Emails between seven and eight before Roman arrives with the day’s agenda. He reads standing up, at the window in his office, which I did not expect. I expected a desk. He reads at the window with the city behind him and a coffee going cold on the corner of the desk, and I’ve started making a second cup at seven forty-five so there’s a hot one ready when he’s done.
He has not asked me to do this. I do it because it’s efficient.
“You didn’t have to,” he says Thursday morning, looking at the cup.
“I was already making one.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he picks it up.
