Chapter Four: Primera

Layla’s POV

Three months earlier

“Lay.”

I ignored it.

“Layla.”

Still ignored it.

“Lay-lay.”

I spun around in my chair.

Hailey was standing at the entrance of the bedroom in our Manhattan suite, leaning against the doorframe with the particular expression she wore when she had already decided something and was waiting for me to catch up. Her dark hair was down, her makeup was still perfect despite the fact that we had been in back-to-back conference sessions since nine in the morning, and she was wearing the look of a woman who was profoundly, existentially bored.

“What,” I said.

“I’m bored.”

“So?”

I turned back to my laptop.

“So.” She pushed off the doorframe and crossed to the vanity table, leaning against it with her arms folded. “It’s our last night in Manhattan. We have been in this suite and in conference rooms for three days straight. I want to go to the club.”

“No.”

“Layla—”

“We have an early flight tomorrow, Hailey.”

“Which is exactly why tonight is our last chance to actually live.” She came toward me — and before I could stop her she reached out and closed my laptop with one decisive motion, sliding it off my lap and onto the bed beside her.

“Hailey.”

“When was the last time you went out?” She looked at me with those eyes — the wide, earnest, entirely manufactured eyes that she deployed specifically for situations where she wanted something I had not agreed to yet. “You are always working. You talk about wanting to find love but you never go anywhere where love could find you. You just bury yourself in spreadsheets and tell yourself you are living.”

“I am living.”

“You are existing.” She held out her hand. “Come out with me. One night. Manhattan. We go back tomorrow and it’s back to boardrooms and Thompson Jewelry and your grandfather’s face at breakfast.” She wiggled her fingers. “Come on.”

I looked at her hand.

“Who knows,” she said, with the smile of someone who knew exactly what she was doing, “maybe you’ll meet your Prince Charming tonight.”

I took her hand.

She screamed.

Primera was one of those Manhattan clubs that didn’t need to advertise because the people who went there already knew about it and the people who didn’t know about it were not the intended audience. It occupied the ground floor of a building in Midtown that looked, from the outside, like nothing in particular — a dark entrance, two bouncers who assessed you with the practiced efficiency of people who had seen everything and were impressed by very little, a line that moved quickly for the right people.

Hailey walked past the bouncers like she had a standing reservation. I followed.

Inside, the club was a cathedral of sound and low light. The ceiling was high and dark, strung with suspended fixtures that cast everything in shades of amber and deep blue. The bar stretched the full length of one wall — backlit bottles arranged like an installation, bartenders moving with the focused grace of people who were very good at a thing and knew it. A DJ booth elevated above the dance floor sent music through the floor itself, through the walls, through your chest cavity.

The VIP section was a series of private booths separated from the main floor by frosted glass and velvet — visible but separate, the kind of space that said we are here but not quite among you. Hailey navigated to one without hesitation and we settled in, the noise wrapping around us like a second skin.

I hated this. I hated the noise and the press of people and the particular vulnerability of being in a public space where anything could happen and I would have very little control over any of it.

I also hated hangovers with a passion that was almost spiritual.

But Hailey was already flagging down the bartender with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting for this moment all week, and when she turned to me with that bright, unstoppable smile, I found — as I always found — that I did not have the specific combination of words required to disappoint her.

Our drinks came.

I picked up my glass and drank it in one long, committed movement.

“Layla.” Hailey stared at me. “We have a six AM flight. You and hangovers are natural enemies.”

“I’m aware.”

“Are you though—”

“Do you want to dance?” She asked.

“I’ll stay here.”

She was already standing. “Don’t move.” She pointed at me. “I mean it. Stay.”

She disappeared into the crowd with the ease of a person entirely in her element, and I was alone in the booth with the music and the low light and the particular feeling of being somewhere I hadn’t chosen, surrounded by people I didn’t know, wondering what exactly I was supposed to do with myself.

I went to the bar.

The bartender appeared immediately — these were the perks of a VIP wristband — and I motioned for another drink. He poured. I picked it up.

And then I saw him.

I almost didn’t, at first. The bar was crowded and the lighting was doing its careful work and I was not looking for anyone in particular. But something made me look left — instinct, or chance, or whatever unnamed sense occasionally redirected your attention without asking permission.

Ian Lawson.

I recognised him the way you recognised someone you had seen a hundred times in photographs without ever being in the same room with them — the recognition landing a beat before the understanding, the face resolving out of the crowd with that particular clarity of someone who was precisely who you thought they were.

He was taller in person. That was the first thing. The Forbes covers and the business magazines had not adequately communicated the height, or the way he moved — unhurried, unbothered, with the easy confidence of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether he belonged somewhere. Dark brown hair, slightly pushed back. Thick eyebrows. A jawline that the photographers had gotten right, at least. And the tattoos — I could see them where his shirt was rolled to the elbows, the ink dark against his skin, disappearing upward in patterns I couldn’t fully make out from where I was standing.

He had arrived with a friend, and the two of them settled at the bar with the ease of regulars. He talked the way he moved — smooth, unhurried, leaning slightly toward his companion with the casual authority of someone who had never had to raise his voice to be heard.

Hailey is going to lose her mind when I tell her, I thought.

I stopped staring.

I drank my drink. I watched the dance floor for Hailey and didn’t find her. I let the music exist around me and tried to feel, if not exactly at ease, then at least present. The night moved forward in the way nights in loud places did — in fragments, moments, the sense of time passing differently than it did in daylight.

Men approached. I declined. Several times. With varying degrees of patience depending on how they received the first decline.

Ian Lawson, across the bar, did not look at me once.

Not that I wanted him to. That was not the point. The point was simply that he existed in the same space with complete unawareness of anyone in his immediate vicinity who was not directly relevant to whatever he was doing — which I found, somehow, both entirely unsurprising and faintly irritating.

By the time the room had begun to tilt in the particular way that meant I had had enough, I had still not found Hailey. I paid my tab, gathered myself carefully, and headed for the exit.

The Manhattan night air hit me the moment I pushed through the doors — cool and sharp and welcome, the city noise a different register from the club’s noise, somehow easier to exist within.

I was looking for the car. We had arranged a pickup but I could not, in my current state, remember exactly where. I moved along the pavement outside the club entrance, squinting at my phone, and the city moved around me with its usual total indifference.

I was not paying attention to where I was walking.

Neither, apparently, was the person I walked directly into.

The impact was solid. I stumbled, my phone slipping in my hand, and grabbed for something to steady myself. My hand found an arm — someone’s arm, warm and solid — and I gripped it.

“Watch where the hell you’re going.”

The voice was low and sharp and entirely without patience.

I looked up.

Ian Lawson was looking down at me.

Up close, the ocean blue of his eyes was striking in a way that photographs had not quite captured — clear and cold and currently directed at me with an expression somewhere between irritation and contempt. His jaw was exactly as sharp as advertised. The tattoos climbed his neck in patterns I could now see clearly.

He was, objectively, the most attractive man I had ever stood this close to.

He was also, in this moment, yanking his arm away from my grip with the swift, decisive motion of someone removing their hand from something unpleasant.

The movement was sudden enough that I had no time to compensate.

I fell.

Flat on the Manhattan pavement, my dress, my phone, my remaining dignity — all of it meeting the ground with the particular gracelessness of someone who had been holding themselves together through sheer effort and had just run out of it.

I got up.

My hands were scraped. My dress was intact, barely. My phone had survived. And something in my chest — something that had been building through three days of conferences and one night of noise and too many drinks and too many men and Hailey nowhere to be found — had reached a temperature that had nothing to do with alcohol.

“Move,” he said.

I looked at him.

I was about to — I was genuinely about to step aside and let this man continue his evening and remove myself from this situation entirely — when a voice came from behind him.

A woman. Red hair, expensive dress, the particular expression of someone who believed proximity to power was the same as possessing it.

“He asked you to move,” she said.

Something crystallised.

My hand moved before the rest of me had fully decided.

The slap connected with his cheek with a sound that was, if nothing else, entirely clear.

“That,” I said, “is for throwing me on the floor.”

He turned to me slowly. His hand had gone to his face. His eyes — those cold, striking blue eyes — were now looking at me with an expression I had not seen before on anyone’s face and hoped never to provoke again.

“Are you insane?”

“No,” I said. “Are you? A simple excuse me, you’re in my way would have been enough. Instead you yanked your hand back and let me fall on the pavement like I was something you’d accidentally touched. So no. I’m not the insane one here.”

“It’s obvious,” he said, his voice very low and very controlled and somehow more frightening for it, “that your mother never taught you not to put your hands on strangers.”

The words hit me somewhere specific. Somewhere that had nothing to do with tonight.

I looked at him.

“I pity your mother,” I said, “for raising someone like you.”

Something moved across his face. Fast, gone before I could fully read it — but there. Something that had been touched.

He took a step toward me.

His friend appeared at his shoulder — hand on his arm, something said low and quick into his ear, the practiced intervention of someone who had done this before.

Ian Lawson stopped.

He looked at me for one long moment — with those blue eyes that gave nothing away and somehow communicated everything — and then he turned and walked away. His friend beside him. The red-haired woman trailing after them with a backward glare that I declined to acknowledge.

“Fuck you, Ian Lawson,” I said, loudly enough that the departing back of him could not possibly have missed it.

He didn’t turn around.

I stood on the Manhattan pavement and looked at the space where he had been and felt the anger still running through me — bright and hot and entirely awake, cutting through the alcohol like something had been switched on.

Every woman in New York was losing sleep over that man.

Hailey had his picture saved on her phone.

I thought about what I would say to her when I found her inside.

Then I turned around and went back in to look for my best friend — who had gotten me into this mess in the first place and was going to hear about it at considerable length.

*******

Thank you for reading. Please like, comment, vote and add to library. Your support means everything.

— Ruthie ❤️