Page 8 of Dial F for Finance

I set the phone down. Pick it up again. Put it down. Pick it up.

No text from Dominic.

Which is correct. Which is what I asked for. I told him to enjoy his moral high ground, walked away, and didn’t look back. That’s what happened. He’s respecting the boundary I set, which is exactly what a decent man would do after a woman stormed off a terrace calling his integrity into question.

The problem is that I don’t want him to be decent right now. I want him to text me something stupid and charming and slightly too honest, the way he always does, so I can roll my eyes and feel annoyed and not have to sit with the possibility that I broke something last night that I’ve spent three years pretending I didn’t want.

I get up. Shower. Stand under water hot enough to strip paint and replay every excruciating frame.

His thumb along my jaw. The way he said yeah, sweetheart? like he’d been holding those two words hostage for years and finally let them out on parole. The look on his face when he pulled back . . .

I turn the water hotter. It doesn’t help.

Here is what I know, now that the champagne has metabolized and my prefrontal cortex has resumed operations:

Dominic was right.

I hate that. I hate it with a precision and thoroughness I normally reserve for bad typography and people who reply all unnecessarily. But he was right. I was drunk enough that my judgment had softened, my timing was terrible, and if he’d taken me upstairs, I would have woken up this morning with exactly the exit strategy he predicted—it was the champagne, it was the wedding, it didn’t count.

And it would have counted. That’s the thing I can’t get past. It would have counted, and I would have spent the rest of my life pretending it didn’t, and Dominic would have let me because that’s what Dominic does—he lets me set the terms even when the terms are designed to protect me from the thing I actually want.

I turn off the shower. Wrap myself in a towel. Stare at my reflection in the fogged mirror—flushed, mascara-stained, hair dripping onto shoulders that have carried the weight of every assumption anyone has ever made about what a woman who looks like me deserves.

Here’s what I’ve never told anyone in this group, and what Dominic will certainly never hear: I’ve been the joke before. The girl a beautiful boy paid attention to—not because he wanted her, but because the wanting was the prank. I learned young that when someone like Dominic Cruz turns his full, devastating attention on a woman like me, the safest assumption is that there’s a punchline coming. That the laughter is just around the corner, and the only way to survive it is to leave before it arrives.

I have been leaving before the punchline for most of my adult life.

And last night, a man I’ve been bracing myself against for years had me against a pillar with his hands in my hair and my body saying yes and every exit I’ve ever built wide open—and he stopped. Not because he didn’t want me.

Because he wanted it to be real.

There is no punchline.

There never was.

I stare at my reflection—this body, this face, this woman who has been so busy protecting herself from a joke that isn’t coming that she almost missed the man who was never, not once, laughing.

“You’re an idiot,” I tell my reflection.

My reflection agrees.

My phone buzzes on the bathroom counter. I pick it up, expecting Serena with follow-up questions or Audrey with a hydration reminder.

It’s Bennett.

Bennett:

I need you in the office. Now.

I check the time. Nine twenty-seven on a Sunday morning, the day after his own wedding. Bennett Mercer doesn’t text people the morning after his wedding unless something is on fire, sinking, or both.

Me:

You got married twelve hours ago.

Bennett:

Aware. Nakamura’s board just called an emergency session. They’re threatening to collapse the secondary partnership agreement. I need you in Tokyo ASAP