Page 43 of His Good Girl

I set the phone down on the seat beside me, but it buzzed again.

Benjamin:I will interpret your silence as both confirmation and a cry for help.

I almost smiled despite myself, then did not, because he was not entirely wrong.

This was a bad idea.

I had known that when I sent the text. I had also known that if I let the first real conversation I had with Avery in years be a job interview, with my desk between us and Benjamin breathing fire outside the door, I would be doing exactly what Robert would have hated. She deserved more than an onboarding packet and a probationary title. She deserved a meal, at least, and a chance to be human. She deserved to have a chance to be spoken to without being evaluated.

That was the second story I told myself.

That one was true too.

The driver glanced at me through the rearview mirror. “Would you like me to call up, sir?”

“No,” I said. “She knows I’m here.”

I got out of the car and a few minutes later, the front door opened. Avery stepped out of the building, and every story I had assembled with such care went up like paper to a struck match.

Her dress was navy. It was simple, at first glance. It had long sleeves, soft waist, hem just below the knee. It wasn’t obviously expensive or obviously seductive, which made it worse, because there was nothing to dismiss as performance. It followed her in quiet lines, catching at her waist, moving against her thighs as she took the final step onto the pavement. Her coat was open. Her hair was down, pinned back loosely on one side and falling around her shoulders in soft waves that looked different from the damp, hurried knot she had worn in my office that morning.Her face was composed, but not perfectly. I could see the nerves in how she held her purse, in the half-second pause beneath the building light before she saw me.

And then she saw me and she paused. It was brief enough to be denied and long enough to be noticed. Her eyes found mine across the sidewalk, and the city narrowed with a violence that had no business in such a quiet moment. She did not look like a girl playing dress-up for dinner with her father’s friend. She looked like a woman who had been thinking about this, worrying about it, maybe wanting it, and had come downstairs anyway.

There were rules for these things. Simple rules. Men like me survived by respecting simple rules when complicated desires tried to make themselves sound exceptional. Do not stare. Do not touch without reason. Do not say the first word that comes into your mouth if the first word is beautiful and your use of it will alter the conversation between the two of you. Choose restraint early, because restraint chosen later was mostly damage control.

“Avery,” I said. “You look lovely.”

Lovely was safe. Lovely had manners. Lovely could be said by a godfather, a dinner host, a man with no ulterior motive beyond catching up with the daughter of his oldest friend.

It was also insufficient to the point of dishonesty.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was steady, barely. “You’re early.”

“I know.”

“Do you have a condition?”

“Several. Punctuality is the least concerning.”

She laughed, and I had to look away toward the driver for a second because I liked making her laugh too much. That was new or maybe it was not new, and I had simply failed, before now, to understand the nature of the pleasure. There had always been a satisfaction in Avery’s laugh, even when she was younger, because it came honestly and often after resistance, but this was not that. This felt like being rewarded by a woman whose guard had lowered one cautious inch.

The driver opened the door. I let Avery enter first and kept my hand to myself.

That, too, felt like an accomplishment.

Inside the car, she sat beside me with her knees angled slightly away, purse in her lap, her coat folding around her like dark petals. The scent of her reached me in the closed space, soft and faintly floral. It wasn’t heavy, but intimate enough that I wished I had not noticed it.

“How was the rest of your day?” I asked as the car pulled away from the curb.

She gave me a look. “Do you want the honest answer or the answer I would give in a job interview?”

“The honest one. I think we exhausted the interview version this morning.”

“I panicked for six hours, ate fries and drank wine with my best friend Jules, read Benjamin’s onboarding packet, panicked again, borrowed this dress, and was told not to decide the entire moral geometry of the evening before appetizers.”

I looked at her. “Moral geometry?”

“Jules was having a metaphor day.”