Page 34 of Anything For You
The silence expanded. It filled the room, pressing against the walls. Elizabeth’s eyes were wide and very still, and her jaw had gone tight in that way Kelsey recognized, the way it went when she was working through something she didn’t want to show,and her chest rose once, a controlled breath that lifted the cowl neckline and then lowered it again.
She still said nothing. And the longer she didn’t speak, the louder the silence got, and the louder the silence got, the more Kelsey felt the gold dress was a mistake. Because Elizabeth was looking at her the way you looked at something that wasn’t what you ordered.
Kelsey’s stomach dropped.
She had chosen wrong. The neckline was too much, too low, too revealing for a room full of Elizabeth’s colleagues and Elizabeth’s ex-wife and people who would take one look at the plunging V and the bare shoulders and the visible cleavage and thinkof course Elizabeth’s new girlfriend is the young one in the flashy dress, how predictable, how embarrassing.Elizabeth in her elegant navy silk with its restrained cowl neck and its devastating back, every inch of her polished and precise, and Kelsey in gold with her chest on display like she’d confused an upscale wedding with a nightclub.
“Is it too much?”
The words came out before she could stop them, thin and uncertain, and she heard herself say them and wanted to pull them back into her mouth and swallow them. But they were already in the room, already hanging in the air between them, and Elizabeth blinked once, and her hand dropped from her ear.
“No.” The word came out fast. Almost clipped. Elizabeth’s throat moved as she swallowed, visibly, the muscles of her neck contracting above the cowl neckline. “You look amazing.”
Her voice was lower than usual. Half a step down from its normal register. Her eyes held Kelsey’s for one more second, steady and very blue in the afternoon light, and then she looked away toward the desk where her clutch sat beside her phone.
“We should get going.”
Kelsey slipped on her heels and crossed to the nightstand where she’d left the small gold clutch, lipstick and phone and room key already inside. She snapped it shut and caught herself in the full-length mirror on the way to the door.
The gold silk moved when she moved. The necklace glinted in the hollow of the plunge. Her hair fell in that perfect wave over one shoulder, and her makeup was flawless, and she looked, objectively, like someone who had tried very hard to be beautiful for a woman who had already turned away to check her phone.
You look amazingcould mean anything. It could meanyou look amazingor it could meanthat’s fine, let’s goor it could meanI am being polite because you are standing in front of me in a dress I paid for and I don’t have time to discuss alternatives.
Elizabeth was a lawyer. She chose words the way surgeons chose instruments, and “amazing” was the kind of word you used when you didn’t want to say what you actually thought.
Elizabeth was already at the door, clutch tucked under one arm, her bare back a clean line of skin above the midnight silk.
Kelsey’s gaze caught there and held. The disappointment about her own dress, the sting of Elizabeth’s reaction, all of it just dissolved, because Elizabeth looked like that, and Kelsey was supposed to function tonight.
She was supposed to hold a conversation, remember names, play the part of the adoring girlfriend while Elizabeth looked breathtaking.
She hadn’t told Elizabeth she looked beautiful. She’d thought it so loudly it was a miracle the woman couldn’t hear it, but she hadn’t said it. Hadn’t trusted herself to say it in this room, alone, where there was no audience to hide behind.
Maybe downstairs. In front of people. Leaning in close the way a girlfriend would, letting the words land soft against Elizabeth’s ear like they were part of the act.
That way Elizabeth wouldn’t know how much Kelsey meant every syllable.
17
The vodka soda was doing nothing.
Elizabeth set the glass down on the bar top, the base clicking against wood, and tried to focus on what Denise was saying. Something about a case, or a client, or the new associate rotation. She’d completely lost the thread.
Kelsey’s hand rested on the small of her back. Skin on skin. The cowl neckline in front meant coverage, professionalism, control. The back of the dress was a different story entirely. Kelsey’s palm sat just above the base of Elizabeth’s spine, warm and steady, and Elizabeth could feel each finger.
Four of them. Resting lightly. The pinky slightly lower than the others, just brushing the silk where the fabric picked up again. The thumb settled near the curve of her waist.
Elizabeth had chosen this dress because it was elegant and modern and because the front gave away nothing. She had not, somehow, accounted for the back. For the fact that when your fake girlfriend touches you there, there is no barrier between her hand and your nervous system.
“...and Kyle’s been saying we should move to Westchester, which, I told him, over my actual dead body.”
Denise laughed at her own joke. She was thirty-five, dark-haired, wearing a fitted burgundy sheath that made her look like she belonged on a magazine cover rather than in a courtroom. Her husband Kyle stood slightly behind her right shoulder, drink in hand, pleasant smile fixed in place. He had the look of a man who’d long ago made peace with being decorative at his wife’s professional events.
“Where are you guys?” Denise turned to Kelsey with the easy warmth of someone who collected new people the way other lawyers collected billable hours. “In the city?”
“Astoria,” Kelsey said. “Queens.”
“Oh, I love Astoria. We almost rented there before we got the place in Gramercy. The food alone.”
