Fucking Love

The seventh rejection of the week arrived at 11:42 in the morning, and I read it standing in the middle of a coffee shop I couldn't afford to be in.

After careful consideration, we have decided to move forward with other candidates. We wish you the very best in your future endeavors.

The very best. People always wished you the very best right before they shut the door in your face. I'd come to think of it as a code — a polite little chime that meant we Googled you, and we'd rather not.

I set my phone face-down next to a four-dollar coffee I'd been nursing for two hours, mostly so I could keep using the Wi-Fi, and I made myself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Count to four on each. The same thing I used to do before a big presentation, standing outside the boardroom with a deck of numbers I could recite in my sleep, back when I had a desk and a name plate that said S. VALE — SENIOR FINANCIAL ANALYST in brushed steel.

Eight months ago. It felt like another woman's life.

I'd been good at it. That was the part that still sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. Better than good — the one they handed the models nobody could untangle, who found the rounding error three layers deep everyone else had signed off on. Numbers made sense to me in a way people never did. They didn't lie, they didn't change their story, they didn't smile at you and then ruin you. Right up until the night Marcus Hale, managing partner, decided that my being good at my job was an invitation.

I could still feel the shape of that night if I let myself. His office, late, the floor gone dark. His hand on the small of my back, then lower, my name in his mouth like something he already owned. Sophia. The cologne, expensive and suffocating. I'd told him no — clearly, firmly, no room for misreading. He'd smiled like no was just the first move in a game we'd both enjoy, and reached for me again.

So I'd slapped him.

I didn't regret it. I'd had a fistful of every woman who'd ever swallowed it down for the sake of her job, and I'd put all of them into that one open palm across his smug, handsome face, and the crack echoed off the glass walls like a gunshot, and for one perfect second I had felt free.

The freedom lasted about eleven hours. That was how long it took him to have me written up for "conduct unbecoming," to have two junior associates who'd seen nothing suddenly remember a great deal, and to have me walked out by security with my things in a banker's box. As if I were the problem.

And then, because a man like Marcus Hale couldn't simply win, he made sure the word got around. Difficult. Erratic. Doesn't play well on a team. Finance is a smaller world than people think, a whisper network of partners and recruiters who all summered in the same places, and a managing partner's quiet warning carries further than any reference I could ever write. Eight months, forty-some applications, seven coffee shops, and the answer was always the same dressed in different words.

We wish you the very best.

I finished the cold coffee and walked out into a gray afternoon that couldn't decide whether to rain. My savings had a bottom now, and I could see it coming up fast — eight months without a paycheck had eaten through years of careful saving, and there was maybe a month of breathing room left if nothing went wrong. Rent was due in two weeks. The four-dollar coffee had been a small, stupid act of defiance, the last thread of a life where I could buy a coffee without doing the math first. But I'd figure it out. I always figured it out. That was the one thing being a kid nobody kept had taught me: there was no cavalry coming, so you learned to be your own.

I just had to get home first.

Home was the third-floor walk-up of a tired brick building on Cresswell Street, three apartments over a shuttered laundromat, the cheapest thing I'd found that didn't need a credit check or co-signer. I loved it the way you love something barely holding together because you're barely holding together too. The radiator clanked. The bathroom window didn't close all the way. But it was mine, and after a childhood of other people's houses and other people's rules, mine was a word I would have fought a war for.

I came around the corner onto Cresswell and saw the knot of people on the sidewalk before I understood what I was looking at.

Mrs. Okonkwo from the first floor, in her housecoat, both hands pressed to her mouth. The Delgados from the second, the husband holding their toddler against his shoulder. And Mr. Pierce, the landlord, on the stoop in a windbreaker, holding up a sheaf of papers with the harried, defensive energy of a man delivering news he'd rather mail.

"—nothing I can do about the timeline, the city's the one putting the order down, not me—"

"What's going on?" I came up the edge of the group, my bag still on my shoulder.

Mr. Pierce looked at me with something like relief. "Sophia. Good. Saves me a phone call." He held out a paper. "Gas main. They inspected the block two days ago and flagged a fracture in the main feed. It's been venting into the foundation cavity. A serious risk. Explosion risk." He said the word explosion carefully. "City's ordered the building evacuated. Effective immediately."

The paper had a city seal at the top and a lot of bold text underneath. IMMEDIATE and UNSAFE FOR OCCUPANCY swam up at me out of the legalese.

"Immediately," I repeated. "Meaning what."

"Meaning end of day." He winced. "I'm sorry. They're shutting the gas at five and locking the building behind us. You've got until then. The rest — storage, deposits — I'll do what I can. But tonight, nobody sleeps here."

Behind me, Mrs. Delgado started to cry, soft and furious, her husband murmuring to her in Spanish, the toddler wailing. Mrs. Okonkwo was already on her phone, somebody with a couch. Everyone, it turned out, had a somebody.

I stood on the sidewalk and felt the bottom go out of the afternoon.

I did the math the way I always did it, fast and merciless, because the math was the one place I never lost my footing. What was left in my account against a motel at sixty a night, rent I'd never see again, a deposit I'd be lucky to claw back, zero income, no offer on the horizon. The number was ugly. A motel would burn through my last month in a week and leave me exactly where I was now, except with nothing. The people I might have called were the kind you trade favors with, not the kind you ask to take you in indefinitely with two suitcases and no end date. I'd spent my whole life being very careful not to need anyone, because needing people was how you ended up disappointed, and now the bill had come due at once, and I had nobody.

I went up because I didn't know what else to do with my body, and that's where I was — standing in my kitchen, holding an evacuation notice and nothing else — when my phone rang and Mia's face lit up the screen.

I almost didn't answer. I had about four seconds of composure left, and I knew her voice would spend all four in one go.

I answered anyway. I always answered.

"Soph!" She was bright, breathless — the shimmering happiness of a woman a month out from marrying someone she actually loved. "Okay, I need my best friend's advice, because Daniel thinks the place cards are insane and I think they're the only thing standing between us and total social anarchy at table six, so —" She stopped. The way only Mia could stop, because she'd heard something in the half-second of my breathing nobody else would have caught. "Sophia. What's wrong."

And that was it. All four seconds, spent.

"Nothing," I said, and my voice cracked clean down the middle on a single two-syllable word.

"Sophia."

"They're evacuating my building." It came out in a rush, the dam going all at once. "There's a gas thing, a fractured main, they're shutting it at five and I have to be out tonight, Mia, everybody has somewhere to go and I don't, I'm almost out of money and I still don't have a job and I've had seven rejections this week, seven, and I don't have anywhere to —" I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth, hard, like I could force the sob back down where it belonged. It didn't work. I slid down the cabinet to the kitchen floor and cried the way I never let myself cry in front of people, ugly and gasping, because I was alone, and so tired of being alone, and because the one person on the line was the one person I'd promised myself I wouldn't burden.

"Okay." Mia's voice had gone very calm, very level — the gear she went into when things were actually serious, the same gear that ran in her brother's blood too. "Soph, breathe. I've got you. Are you hearing me? I've got you. We're going to fix this in ninety seconds, so stop crying and listen."

"You're getting married, I'm not going to —"

"Stop." Gentle, but a wall. "When they thought it was cancer — when I was in that hospital for three months not knowing if I'd be okay — you were there every single evening. Every one. You came straight from work and sat with me until they kicked you out, and on the bad nights you talked them into letting you stay. So you do not get to sit on a floor somewhere and decide you're a burden to me, because that's not a thing that's true. Now. Here is the actual plan."

I wiped my face with my wrist and hated how much I needed someone else to hand me a plan. "I'm listening."

"You're going to stay at Aiden's."

The crying stopped. Not because I felt better. Because the sentence was so absurd it short-circuited my grief.

"At — your brother's. Mia. I have never even met your brother."

"Right, which is the beauty of it, because he's not even there. He's still up in Halford. He won't be down here for two weeks at the earliest — some project at the firm finally needs his actual physical body in the room instead of him phoning it in from four hundred miles away. The penthouse is just sitting there. Soph, it's enormous. Offensively enormous. He bought it two years ago when he quit the circuit and basically never uses it. Four bedrooms and he sleeps in zero of them because he's never home."

"Mia—"

"It's the obvious answer. Empty, clean, free, and it buys you a couple of weeks to land something. By the time he even gets to the city you'll have a job and a lease and you'll be gone before he notices the air's been disturbed."

"He just lets a total stranger move in because his sister asked?"

The briefest pause. "He lets me ask him for things," Mia said, and there was a whole history in it, something complicated and unfinished I didn't have the context for yet. "He doesn't say no to me. It's sort of the one reliable thing about him." She exhaled. "I'll text him. He'll grumble and then he'll say fine. Two weeks, Soph. Give yourself two weeks to breathe."

I sat on the floor of the kitchen I was about to lose, my carefully built independence collapsing around my ears, and understood I had exactly one option: take help. The thing I was worst at in the world.

"Okay," I whispered.

"Okay?"

"Yes. Two weeks. And I'm paying him back, every —"

"You can fight him about money in two weeks. Go pack. I'm sending the address and the door code now, and I love you, and you are not a burden, and if you argue with me about either of those things I'm coming over there myself in my wedding-stress sweatpants and you do not want to see that."

Packing took twenty minutes, which tells you everything about the size of my life.

Two suitcases, one of them half empty. I've never been a collector of things — when you grow up moving between placements with everything you own in a garbage bag, you learn early that objects are just future losses with price tags on them. A few books, my good knife, a handful of clothes. And the little ceramic bird my second foster mother had given me, the only one who'd ever felt like she meant it, the one belonging I'd have run back into a burning building for.

I stood in the doorway and looked at the empty rooms, gray in the failing light, and didn't cry again — I'd used it all up on the kitchen floor. I turned off the lights out of habit and went down to call a cab I couldn't afford, two suitcases rolling behind me on the broken sidewalk.

The address took me across the river, into the part of the city I only saw from the outside — glass towers, lobbies with actual people behind actual desks, air that seemed filtered and expensive. The doorman barely looked at me, which I appreciated; I was too tired to perform belonging. The code worked first try. A private elevator carried me up so smoothly my ears popped and opened directly into the apartment — no hallway, no door, just there, like the place couldn't be bothered with the formality of a threshold.

The penthouse opened in a long sweep of dark wood and pale stone and floor-to-ceiling glass, the city spread beyond it in a glittering grid, lit low and golden by lamps on a timer because there wasn't a soul to have turned them on. It was beautiful and cold — not in temperature but in spirit, a magazine spread of a home, every surface clear, no coat over a chair, no mug out, no photographs, nothing that said a person actually lived here. It looked like a place someone owned but didn't inhabit. It looked, I'd think later, exactly like its owner.

I was too exhausted to explore. The cab, the crying, the eight months, the whole collapse of the day had caught up with me at once. I needed two things. Water. And horizontal.

I drank a glass at the marble island, then went looking for somewhere to sleep, dragging one suitcase down a hallway of closed doors.

The first one I opened looked safe. Neutral — a wide bed made up in soft gray, a single chair, a window with the city in it, and crucially nothing personal, no clothes, no clutter, no clue it was anyone's. A guest room, I decided, with the easy confidence of the truly depleted. I didn't look closer. Looking required standing up longer than I had left in me.

I took the kind of shower you take when a day has physically happened to you — too hot, too long, until the water ran cool and the day had sluiced off me, or as much as water could take.

The sheets smelled faintly of cedar and something else, something warm, something I was too far gone to identify. The bed took my weight like it had been waiting for it. I was asleep before I could think a single thought about the fact that this was, by any reasonable measure, the strangest night of my life.

I woke to the crash of something heavy hitting something hard, and a man's voice swearing in the dark.

There was no slow surfacing — just the violent jolt of being yanked from the deepest sleep I'd had in months by a bang and a curse three feet from my head. My heart was going before my eyes were open. I shoved myself half upright, hair a wet tangle across my face, brain scrambling to assemble where I was and why it was dark and who was that —

He'd walked into my suitcase — the one I'd left open in the middle of the floor — barking his shin hard enough to send it skidding into the wall. He'd frozen mid-step, one hand braced on the doorframe, and even half-blind with sleep and panic I saw the exact moment his attention left the suitcase and landed on the bed.

On me.

In nothing but a thin t-shirt and underwear, the sheet kicked down around my knees, sprawled across what was apparently his bed like I owned it.

For a long, terrible beat, neither of us moved.

He was big — a tall, broad shape filling the doorway, backlit by the hallway glow. The second thing was the stillness that came over him, the stillness of a predator that has walked into its own den and found it occupied. Not afraid. Not even confused. Affronted. A man looking at something that had no business existing where it was existing.

"I'm going to need you," he said, in a low, rough, unhurried voice that did nothing to disguise the danger humming underneath it, "to explain — very quickly, and very convincingly — what you're doing in my bed."

"You're two weeks early."

Aiden

I should have been asleep four hundred miles north, in a hotel that knew how I took my coffee, with a morning flight that would have put me in the city at a civilized hour. Instead I was doing ninety on an empty highway at one in the morning because Stephen had called me twice in the same afternoon, and Stephen never calls twice.

"It has to be you," he'd said, in the careful voice he used when he'd already decided something and was waiting for me to catch up. "Halloran wants the founder in the room or there's no room. You built this thing, Aiden. They don't want my face. They want yours."

My face. That was the part nobody said out loud — that the firm had been built quietly on a name people recognized from somewhere else, a name that used to mean something with a helmet attached to it, and that the recognition still opened doors I'd have rather left closed. Two years out of the car and people still looked at me like they were waiting for me to