Page 39 of Anything For You
She was wrong. She was so completely wrong.
But Elizabeth couldn’t correct her. Because if she said Grace isn’t what’s making today hard, Kelsey would ask what is. And the answer was sitting right next to her in pale gold silk with her knee pressed warm against Elizabeth’s thigh, and there was not enough wine left in this glass or any glass to make that conversation survivable.
So she didn’t pull away. She pressed her knee back. A fraction. The smallest possible answer to a question Kelsey hadn’t actually asked.
Kelsey’s shoulders loosened. Her breath came out in a slow, controlled exhale. She thought it worked. She thought she was helping.
The song ended. Applause rose and scattered across the room. The DJ invited other couples to the floor, and chairs scraped back, and bodies moved, and Elizabeth reached for her wine glass, finishing what was left.
“Bar?” Kelsey asked.
“Yes.” Elizabeth set the glass down. “I think I need something stronger.”
They pushed back from the table together, and they moved through the space between the dinner tables toward the bar.
The reception hall was different now. Dinner had given everything a shape, rows of seated bodies and fixed sightlines and the manageable geometry of table assignments. That was gone. The chairs had emptied out in ragged patterns, guests standing in loose clusters with drinks in their hands, drifting between conversations, moving toward the dance floor or away from it. The volume had climbed. Laughter layered over the music layered over the clink of glassware and the bass thrum of too many voices bouncing off the high ceiling. The lights had been dimmed another notch, and the room felt closer than it had an hour ago. Warmer.
Kelsey steered them to the least crowded end. The bartender, a young guy with rolled sleeves and a quick professional scan, glanced their way.
Kelsey lifted two fingers and caught his eye before anyone else in the cluster managed it.
“Can I get a Jameson and ginger ale, and,” she turned her head toward Elizabeth, mid-sentence, no pause, no formality, “Liz, what would you like?”
Two things landed at the same time.
First: Liz.
No one called her that. Not colleagues, not Sonia, not anyone in this building or in any building where Elizabeth existed as a professional entity. Elizabeth was a complete word. It carried its own weight, and it did not invite abbreviation. She had been Elizabeth her entire adult life.
Grace had called her Elizabeth. Her mother called her Elizabeth. Partners at the firm, clients, judges, opposing counsel. Elizabeth. Always the full name, always the clean, measured authority of every consonant in place.
Kelsey just said it like breathing. Like somewhere between the coffee shop counter and this mahogany bar, she had decided that Elizabeth was Liz, and she hadn’t asked permission because it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d need it. The way you shorten someone’s name when they already belong to you.
She should correct her. She always corrected people. A junior associate had tried Liz once, in her second year at the firm, and Elizabeth had said “Elizabeth, please” with enough frost to end the experiment permanently.
She didn’t correct Kelsey.
Because when Kelsey said it, turned halfway toward her with her forearms on the bar and her gold dress catching the low light and her eyebrows slightly raised, it sounded like something Elizabeth didn’t know she’d wanted to be called.
Second: Jameson and ginger ale.
Kelsey had been drinking wine at dinner. And now she was switching to whiskey.
Elizabeth’s brain did what it always did. Assembled the evidence. Built the case.
Kelsey needed something stronger because this was getting harder for her. Because smiling through dinner and holding Elizabeth’s hand during the ceremony and pressing her knee against Elizabeth’s thigh under the table and pretending to be in love required more than Chardonnay. She needed fortification. She was enduring this.
“Whiskey,” Elizabeth said to the bartender. “On the rocks.”
He poured. She watched his hands, the tilt of the bottle, the amber catching light. Clean, simple actions with predictable outcomes. She missed those.
Kelsey picked up her glass first. She took a sip, and her eyes closed for half a second. A small, involuntary exhale through her nose. The kind of sound that lived in the body, not the performance. Her lips pressed together and then softened.
“God, that’s good.” Her voice was low, almost to herself. “I’ve been wanting this all day.”
Wanting it all day.
Elizabeth lifted her own glass and drank. Because of course Kelsey had been wanting this all day.
