Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
“You wanted to talk,” he tells me.
I’m standing in the centre of his living room. My hands are clasped in front of me. My cardigan is still buttoned to the throat because I buttoned it in the lift, a small, stupid act of armour that means nothing and comforts me anyway. I can feel my pulse in my wrists and my neck and behind my eyes, and the espresso from the coffee shop is sour in my empty stomach, and I’m about to tell this man the truth and he isn’t going to believe me.
I start talking.
“Blythe told me about the firm.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. I clear my throat and try again. “She told me what Keyes is. What the women do. What paralegal means to the clients who come through the door.”
His expression doesn’t change. The glass turns in his fingers. He is listening completely, with his whole body, cataloguing every word and every micro-movement of my face.
“She told me that Kaye—my aunt—told you I was willing. That I understood the arrangement. That I was bright and eager and—” My voice catches. I breathe through it. “And comfortable with the terms.”
A beat. His eyes on mine.
“I didn’t know.”
Three words. I push them out of my chest like stones. They fall between us on the polished floor and lie there, small and heavy, and his face gives me nothing.
“I didn’t know what the firm was. I didn’t know what Kaye implied. I didn’t know why you offered me an arrangement at that restaurant, and when you did, I thought you were—” I stop. I press my nails into my palms. “I thought you were a man who saw a girl from Idaho and assumed she was for sale because she was young and new and didn’t know any better. I thought it came from you. I didn’t know it came from her.”
He takes a drink. The amber liquid catches the lamplight. His throat moves when he swallows and I can see the tension in his neck, the tendons pulled taut, and I push forward because if I stop now I will never start again.
“The kiss on the balcony was real.” My voice is shaking. I let it shake. “It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t me playing a role for a client. It was me. Just me. Kissing you because I wanted to and hating myself for wanting to and not being able to stop.”
I’m trembling. My whole body, from my clasped hands to my ankles, is trembling, and I can’t hide it and I’m not trying to. I’m standing in his penthouse with my cardigan buttoned to my throat and my espresso-sour stomach and my shaking hands and I am telling this man the truth with everything I have.
He sets his glass down.
He crosses the room. Three steps. He stops in front of me and he is close, close enough that I can smell the whisky and the cedar and the warmth underneath, and his face is above mine and his eyes are grey and searching and something in them is working, calculating, running the numbers on every tremor and every crack in my voice.
He lifts his hand. His palm cups my cheek. The touch is warm and gentle and devastatingly kind, and his thumb traces the skin beneath my eye where I haven’t cried but where the almost-crying has left its mark, and his voice when it comes is soft. So soft.
“You’re remarkable.”
My heart does something complicated.
“I’ve never seen anyone commit to a story this completely.”
The room empties.
Not the furniture, not the lamps, not the harbour through the glass. Me. I empty. The hope I carried into this penthouse, the brave, stupid, Idaho-girl hope that I could stand in front of a man who reads people for a living and make him see me, drains out of my body through the soles of my feet and into his polished floor and what’s left is a shell in a cardigan with her hands still clasped and her face still tilted up toward his palm.
He thinks I’m performing. He thinks the trembling is technique. He thinks the balcony kiss was strategy and the coffee I threw away was a gambit and the tears I didn’t cry were discipline, and he is cupping my face and calling me remarkable and what he means is: you’re the best liar I’ve ever met.
I try one more time.
“Anton.” His name in my mouth. It costs me everything. “I’m telling you the truth.”
His eyes hold mine. His thumb is still on my cheek. His expression is tender and certain and immovable, the expression of a man who has already decided and whose decision is reinforced by every word I speak, because in his world the more passionately someone insists they’re innocent, the more skilled the deception.