*Present*
Two weeks in my new position at Howell Capital, and I still haven't mastered the coffee situation.
The break room has two machines—one for the executives, one for everyone else—except no one has actually told me this. I learned it the way I learn most things here: by doing it wrong first.
By reaching for the Nespresso pods on the left shelf and watching Mariela from accounts receivable wince on my behalf.
Don't touch the left pods. Noted.
Daniel never let me work in the first years after we got married. Not once did he frame it as cruelty—he dressed it as protection, as love. As an act of devotion so total it bordered on erasure.
'A wife's place is at home. Her husband is taking care of everything else.'
I heard it so often it stopped sounding like control and started sounding like weather.
It's almost funny how quickly the weather changed.
The gambling debts came first. Then Daniel gets laid off. Then the version of him who had curated my smallness for years suddenly needed me to be useful in ways he'd spent half a decade making certain I couldn't be.
If I wasn't able to fulfil my role as a mother and wife, the least I could do was stop being an infertile slacker and finally bring something to this family.
Infertile slacker. I still feel the shape of those words sometimes.
I couldn't get pregnant again after the miscarriage. And so I became, in his vocabulary, a problem. Something malfunctioning. Something that had failed to deliver on its promise.
So I worked, without a degree and wherever I could. And Daniel took most of it, reliably, with the calm authority of someone performing a reasonable act.
You can't handle finances.
Now I sit in fancy open-plan meetings and try to decode the language of people who have been navigating professional spaces since their early twenties. Who knows intuitively when to speak and when to let the silence hold. I don't know.
I smile too much or not enough. I apologize when I haven't done anything wrong, a reflex so deep it has become part of my syntax.
Sorry. Excuse me. Pardon. Sorry again.
Across the room, Finn moves between meeting the way water moves through a landscape. He belongs here the way I've never belonged anywhere.
And I am aware of him the way you're aware of a change in pressure before a storm.
Wednesday afternoon finds me in his office delivering a file he requested. His office is all glass and clean lines, the city burning gold behind him.
Finn is at his desk when I enter when I walk in. His jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and I register this in the precise, clinical way I register everything about him that I'm not supposed to notice.
Whatever the years have done to him, they haven't been subtle about it. He's broader through the shoulders than he was in college. The tendons in his forearm shift as he writes something, and I find a fixed point on the wall behind his head and hold it like a lifeline.
At twenty-three he had the face of someone who would eventually be remarkable. At thirty he is the most arresting man I have ever been in a room with.
"The Alderton file," I say, and cross the room toward him.
He nods without looking up from whatever he's reading, and I cross to the credenza along the side wall, scanning for a clear space between his stacked folders and the architectural models he keeps for reasons I haven't yet decoded.
I'm leaning forward, shifting things aside, reaching… I go absolutely still.
His presence arrives before he does. That's the only way to describe it.
The warmth of him at my back, close enough that the air between us disappears. Then his fingers find the collar of my shirt and pull it gently to one side. "What's this?"
His voice is low and right behind my ear, and for a suspended second I don't breathe. Then I turn, perhaps too quickly and startled, and find myself facing him with practically no space between us. I have to tip my chin up to meet his hazel eyes.
His gaze isn't on my face. It's on my neck. "I…" I blink. "What?"
Finn doesn't answer immediately. He reaches out and touches the side of my neck with one finger, at the exact spot where my collar had fallen open. Then his eyes on my face. "There's a bruise there."
The sentence lands quietly and its meaning doesn't reach me fast enough.
But then I understand, all at once: the foundation.
I'd applied it that morning, layered it carefully over the marks Daniel's fingers had left on my neck. He'd lost again the night before and was in a shitty mood since then. So when I walked in wearing this blouse, he'd gone very still before lost it completely.
Anger. Jealousy. Violence.
I couldn't even register his movement before he grabbed me by my neck and slammed into the nearest wall, hissing in my face. Said he knew I was going to the office to show off in front of every man there. Said if he found out I was making him look like a fool he would make sure I never wanted to leave the house again.
Said that if he'd ever get to know that I cheated on him… well. He doesn't even need to end that one.
The foundation had seemed sufficient at 7AM, but apparently it hadn't survived nine hours.
"It's nothing." I reach up to adjust my collar. "I must have…"
His hand closes gently around the side of my neck, fingertips gently grazing the hair on my nape. "Aubrey, don't lie to me."
My name in that register… Low and unhurried and aimed with precision at the place behind my sternum where my composure lives. "I just bruise easily," I say and the words are smooth with practice. "Low iron. I've been meaning to—"
He takes one step forward, but the credenza is behind me and there is nowhere for the step to go except into me.
My back meets the shelving with a soft sound and his forearm comes to rest beside my head while he is looking at me with an expression that is heat and cold all at once.
My heart is doing something I refuse to acknowledge.
Finn reaches up, and I watch him, bewildered and rooted and not breathing, as he lifts his thumb to his mouth. As he touches it to his tongue, slow and deliberate, his eyes holding mine the entire time.
After his hand rises to my jaw, tilting it just enough, he presses the wet pad of his thumb to the front of my neck and wipes.
The world narrows to that contact. To the warmth of his thumb. To the exact quality of his expression as he looks at what the foundation has been covering.
He goes still and I watch the fury arrive. Not loud or sudden, nothing as manageable as that. His eyes come back to mine, and there is something raw and unedited and so focused on me that the air in my lungs becomes a problem I can't solve.
We are very close. Too close.
His forearm's still bracketing the space beside my head, his hand still warm at my face. Hazel eyes moving between my throat and my expression with a thoroughness that makes the back of my neck go hot.
"Aubrey." My name, ground down to something barely above a whisper. Harder at the edges than I've ever heard it. "Who the hell did this to you?"
He looks at me the way you look at a sentence that doesn't add up.
"It's not what you're making it into." The words come out steadier than I feel, which is the only victory available to me right now.
"Please, spare me." His voice has gone to something real and angry, except the anger isn't aimed at me. It never was. That's the part I can't defend against. "Don't stand there and hand me a story we both know isn't true."
"I'm not…" The denial dies before it finishes forming, because his eyes won't let me complete it.
I have always recognized that look. It's the same look he used to aim at problems he refused to leave unsolved, patient and relentless and completely without exit.
I don't look away. Neither does he.
My phone buzzes against my thigh and I don't need to look at it, I already know. But I look anyway, because refusing to look has never solved the problem.
Daniel: where the fuck are you? I texted you eight times with no reply! answer me right now or I'll go get you myself at this shithole you call office, slut
Finn's eyes move from the screen to my face, and I watch him read every color draining from my expression.
"Aubrey." His voice barely qualifies as a whisper. "Is this the guy whose hands I'm going to have to break?"
I don't have time to say anything or to even react, because suddenly the door behind us swings open.
Did he really come to my work? God, if Daniel sees me with Finn like that…