Page 27 of Shades of Grey & Gold

“He looks at me like I’m something he lost.”

He did lose something. The thought arrives with a completeness—not sympathy exactly, more like clarity you get when you’ve watched a situation from the outside long enough to understand it. Patrick Ellison had the fucking tragedy of being too small and too stupid to hold something that was too good for him, and the even greater tragedy of not knowing it until it was gone.

I have spent years watching that from across an office. Watching him fail month after month. Watching Richard pass him up for promotion. Listening to the whispers and rumors of Max leaving him being his professional undoing because she did most of his work for him.

And after watching her for years in college make herself smaller to fit the shape of what he wanted and calling it love… I loved every second of his failure.

I still do.

I do not, however, enjoy thinking about how it all affected Max.

“He did lose something,” I respond. “But I think he looks at you like he’s a puppy who peed on the floor and wants forgiveness.”

She laughs once and it rings through the night air. “Oh, don’t make me sympathize with a poor puppy dog.”

“I’m not.” I steer her left toward the restaurant I’ve been thinking about all week, the Italian place two blocks down that does the kind of pasta that requires a full minuteof silence after the first bite and reminds me of my mother’s cooking. “I’m just being accurate. But he isn’t yours to deal with.”

She looks at me sideways in a way I’ve seen countless times—the look that means she’s deciding whether to push back or let something go. There’s a slight tilt to her head, a fraction of hesitation before she makes the call. She’s done it four or five times today. I’ve noticed all of them. I notice every little thing about her every second of every day I am near her.

But this… this isn’t new. I’ve been noticing the way she makes decisions since she was twenty and figuring out how to outwork everyone around her without letting them see how hard she was working at it.

“You’re allowed to be angry,” I tell her. “And he’s allowed to feel the consequences of being an idiot. Both things exist at the same time.”

“That’s very evolved of you.”

“I have my moments.”

She laughs again—surprised, like she didn’t mean to—and I file that magnificent sound away, too.

I hold the restaurant door. She passes me and I let the door close and she’s stopped just inside, turning back to look at me with an expression I cannot read yet, one that lives somewhere between question and decision.

The hostess grabs menus and walks us out to the patio lined with heaters since we have Bart.

“For what it’s worth,” I say, and lower my voice as I get closer to her where she walks in front of me. “And I mean this in a way that I’m not going to fully explain right now: he’s not who I think about when I picture you.”

She turns her head slightly, holds my gaze for a long second, and I watch heat rise into her cheeks. It makes me smile and something happy and warm settles inside of me.

My apartment is four blocks from the office and two blocks from the restaurant Max and I ate at tonight.

This was on purpose. When I heard from Richard that we were moving the offices, I rented this apartment specifically for its proximity to the office, told myself it was practical,told myself I wasn’t the kind of person who bought fancy furniture because I’m not home much anyway.

The apartment reflects this philosophy. It’s clean. It’s quiet. It has a couch that is fine and a bed that is good and a kitchen I use for coffee and not much else. The building is solid and anonymous, which is the arrangement I prefer.

I drop my jacket on the back of the fine couch and loosen my tie and open the window slightly because I think better with cold air. And I need to think.

Dinner went well.

That’s understating it considerably, but I’m practicing restraint. Because if I didn’t practice that restraint, I would have begged, or dragged Max back to this shitty apartment to have her in that perfectly fine shit bed, too.

She ordered the pappardelle and ate the whole thing without apology, which made me practically fall at her feet with happiness. I appreciated every second of watching her enjoy something so thoroughly the same way I do, and it made me wish she could have Sunday dinner with my mother’s cooking instead.

Then she argued with me about case strategy for forty minutes over the Halbrook case and was right about two of her three points, which I also appreciated.

She laughed three times—really laughed, the kind that takes over her face, and lights up the room. The laugh she sometimes tries to pull back like she’s been trained to make herself smaller, but then doesn’t, because underneath that bullshit Patrick had her feeling, she is brighter than the sun itself.

If I could put my fingers around his throat without consequence, I would’ve done it day one.

I pour two fingers of whiskey and stand at the window looking out at the street below, which is empty at this hour except for a cab and a couple walking a dog that reminds me of Bart.