Page 36 of Anything For You
Elizabeth’s hand found the vodka soda. She lifted it. The ice had melted, diluting what little bite it had. She drank it anyway.
Denise was asking about the coffee shop now, what the regulars were like, whether Kelsey had any good customer horror stories. Kelsey was telling some story about a man who’d tried to pay for his office’s coffee order in cryptocurrency, and Denise was delighted. Kyle checked his phone behind them.
Elizabeth watched Kelsey talk. The way she angled her body toward Denise, open and generous, her free hand moving as she spoke. The way she laughed from her whole face, eyes crinkling, nose scrunching, nothing held in reserve. Denise was responding to it the way everyone responded to it. The way the party at James’s brownstone had responded to it. Kelsey was warm the way a room with good light was warm, the kind you wanted to stand in.
And her other hand stayed on Elizabeth’s back. Through all of it. Through the anecdote and the laughter and the easy back-and-forth with a woman closer to her own age who shared her references and her energy. Kelsey’s hand stayed exactly where it was, her fingers spread against Elizabeth’s bare skin, steady and present and not going anywhere.
Denise touched Kelsey’s arm lightly while making a point about some neighborhood restaurant, and Kelsey smiled but didn’t shift her weight, didn’t lean in, didn’t move her hand from Elizabeth’s spine.
Elizabeth set her empty glass on the bar.
“...right, Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth blinked. Denise was looking at her expectantly, eyebrows raised, champagne glass paused halfway to her mouth. Kelsey had gone still beside her, the small circles on Elizabeth’s back suspended mid-rotation.
She’d missed something. An entire exchange, from the feel of it. Denise and Kyle were both watching her with the particular patience people reserved for someone who’d obviously drifted.
“Sorry.” The word scraped out rough, half a register lower than she intended. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I was just saying you never bring anyone to firm events.” Denise’s smile was warm. “Kyle and I were starting to think you were married to your job.”
Kyle nodded behind her, grinning into his bourbon. “Denise literally has a running bet with Martinez about whether you’d show up solo today.”
“Had,” Denise corrected. “Past tense. I just lost a hundred dollars.” She raised her glass toward Kelsey in mock salute.
Elizabeth made herself smile. The right smile, the one that saidI’m a good sport about this.The muscles in her face knew the shape.
But there it was. The thing she’d spent years building, spoken aloud in casual cocktail conversation as though it were funny. As though it were a quirk. The woman who doesn’t bring anyone. The woman who has her work and that’s enough. Denise was confirming it in front of Kelsey, and the confirmation landed somewhere Elizabeth hadn’t braced for.
Because Kelsey had gone quiet. Not performing quiet, not strategically quiet. Actually quiet, in the way that meant she was absorbing something. Elizabeth could feel it in the shift of Kelsey’s hand on her back, fingers still warm but no longer moving. Listening. Processing the fact that Elizabeth hadn’t brought someone to a firm event in years.
And Denise had just told Kelsey, in the cheerful shorthand of office gossip, that Elizabeth didn’t let people in. Didn’t do this. That the very act of bringing someone was so out of character that it had been the subject of a wager.
Elizabeth didn’t look at her. If she looked at her, she would see whatever Kelsey’s face was doing with this new piece of information, and she wasn’t ready to read it.
The bar was getting louder. More guests filtering in from the lobby, voices layering over each other, laughter and the bright percussion of ice in glasses. The cocktail hour had that tipping-point energy where the room goes from populated to crowded in the span of five minutes.
Someone pushed past. A man Elizabeth didn’t recognize, tall, his elbow catching the air near her shoulder as he reached for the bar. “Sorry, excuse me,” over his shoulder, already gone.
Kelsey stepped closer.
Not back. Not sideways. Into Elizabeth’s space, her front brushing Elizabeth’s side, and her hand slid from Elizabeth’s back to her hip to steady herself. The heel of Kelsey’s palm settled against her, fingers curling slightly into the navy silk.
Elizabeth stopped breathing.
She stood with her empty glass on the bar top, and Kelsey’s body against her side and no air in her chest and thought, very clearly:Move.
She didn’t move.
They were close enough now that the details collapsed into sensation. The warmth of Kelsey’s shoulder against her arm, the press of a hip bone through two layers of silk.
The crowd shifted. A pocket of space opened to Kelsey’s left. Enough room to step back, reestablish the six inches of distance that separated them.
Kelsey didn’t step back.
“Sorry,” Kelsey murmured, and her voice was lower than it had been with Denise. Rougher at the edges. Her hand stayed on Elizabeth’s hip, fingers curled against the silk in a way that was not steadying herself. That was holding on.
Her eyes dropped. Half a second, maybe less. Down to Elizabeth’s mouth and then away, fast, to some fixed point past Elizabeth’s shoulder. But Elizabeth saw it. She was trained to see it. Sixteen years in courtrooms watching witnesses’ eyes for exactly this kind of involuntary tell, the glance that lasted a fraction too long, the one the person hoped no one caught.
