The Kiss

Chapter 3

The table went quiet before I got to it.

Six people, white linen, a centerpiece of white roses that cost more than my rent, and Morgan Hale at the head with his napkin already in his lap. Beside him, Lilly, in emerald, with that expression she's had since we were kids. She saw me first. She always sees me first.

"Look who came," she said, bright as a knife.

I felt the hand on my back go flat, then gone. Then the man in the coat pulled my chair out and I sat down in it without my knees giving out, which I'd been worried about since the elevator.

"Sorry we're late," I said. "Traffic."

"Traffic," Morgan repeated. He was looking past me. At the coat. At the man in it. "Mia."

"Morgan." I turned and put my hand on my date's sleeve like I'd done it a hundred times. "This is Daniel. Daniel, this is Morgan, and this is Lilly, and —" I gestured at the rest of them, the banker and his wife and the woman from the foundation — "everyone."

Daniel inclined his head. He did not shake hands. He didn't need to.

"So you're the one," Lilly said. "The Hamptons one."

"The Hamptons one," Daniel said.

"I didn't know Mia was seeing anyone."

"Neither did I," Morgan said.

The banker laughed at something that wasn't funny, and his wife looked at her bread, and the silence sat there on the linen like spilled wine.

"Four months," I said. "Four months now. Since the wedding. The one with the —" I turned to Daniel. "The one with the boat."

"The one with the boat," he agreed, and under the table his hand found my hand and closed around it, warm and certain, and every single thought in my head went out like a light.

He did the talking.

That's the thing I remember most, and it's the thing I still can't explain. He talked for forty minutes. He talked about the Hamptons and he talked about the boat and he asked the banker a question about the man's business that made the man sit up straight. He laughed in the right places. He got the wife's name right on the second try. He never once looked at Morgan, and Morgan never once stopped looking at him.

And when the foundation woman asked me how I was, and I said fine, and my voice cracked on the i — he felt it. Under the table. He squeezed my hand once, hard, and let go, and then he was telling a story about a cab driver in Rome and the whole table was laughing and I was staring at my water glass like it was the first one I'd ever seen.

Then Morgan did it.

"You know," he said, cutting into his steak, easy as anything, "I don't remember Mia mentioning any of this. Not once. In four months."

"Were you two talking in those four months?" Daniel said.

Morgan's knife stopped.

"Just asking," Daniel said. "It's a small city."

"Small enough," Morgan said. "Small enough that I know most of the people in your line of work, and I don't know you."

"You don't."

"I'd remember."

"I'd remember too," Daniel said, and smiled, and went back to his dinner, and Morgan Hale sat there with his jaw going and his steak getting cold.

Lilly laughed — a little bell of a laugh, the kind that gets a whole table to turn.

"Oh, I like him," she said. "Mia, honey, where'd you find him?"

And I don't know why I said it. I had a plan. The plan was the Hamptons. The plan had been the plan for four days.

"I hired him," I said.

The table stopped.

The banker's wife put down her fork. Morgan's head came up. Lilly's smile didn't move an inch — it just got wider, the way it does, and I understood in one second exactly what I'd handed her.

"I mean—" I said.

"No," Daniel said. He hadn't flinched. He put his napkin on the table, folded, and turned and looked at me, and the whole table watched him do it. "Say it right. You paid an agency twenty-two hundred dollars to give you a date for tonight, and they sent me, and you grabbed my sleeve in a lobby before you'd ever heard my name."

I stopped breathing.

"You want to know what I noticed first?" he said, and his voice was quiet and the whole room leaned in anyway. "The dress. You bought it for a man who wasn't going to look at you. You want to know what I noticed second?"

I couldn't answer.

"You didn't check the name on the email," he said. "You just wanted to be somebody else for four hours."

Lilly's glass came down on the table with a click.

Morgan pushed his chair back.

"You brought a paid escort to—"

"Watch your mouth," Daniel said, and he didn't raise his voice, and Morgan Hale shut his mouth.

The woman from the foundation was already standing. The banker's wife had her coat over her arm. Somebody's chair scraped. And I sat there in my expensive wrong dress and I could hear my own pulse and the waiter's shoes and the room getting quieter.

"Say it," Daniel said, to me. "Out loud. All of it."

"No."

"Then I will."

I stood up so fast my chair went back on two legs and came down hard.

"Don't," I said. "Don't you dare."

"You hired me to make him look small," Daniel said. "You didn't hire me to lie for you. Those are two different jobs, and you know which one you paid for."

"You don't know what I paid for."

"I know what it cost you," he said. "You just spent twenty-two hundred dollars to find out it didn't work."

The whole table was silent.

And then — I don't know what happened. Maybe it was the it didn't work. Maybe it was Lilly's mouth. Maybe it was Morgan pushing his chair back like I was something he needed to get away from.

I looked at Daniel and he looked at me, and I leaned in and he met me halfway before I got there, and I kissed him.

It was not a performance.

It was the opposite of a performance. My hand came up and took the lapel of his coat and his hand went to the back of my neck and he kissed me like the room had emptied out, like there was no white linen and no emerald dress and no man at the head of the table. My knees went. Somebody gasped — the banker's wife, I think, though it might have been the waiter.

It went on too long. It didn't go on long enough.

When I pulled back his eyes were open and mine were not and I had no idea what my face was doing.

"There," I said. My voice came out wrecked. "How's that. Is that what you wanted."

"That's not what I wanted," he said.

Behind me, a chair went over.

"Get her out," Morgan said. His voice was high. "Get her out of here."

But it was Lilly who moved.

She caught me at the door of the ballroom by the elbow — not hard, just enough — and turned me around so my back was to the whole room, and then she leaned in and said it loud enough for the door staff, loud enough for the two women smoking by the coat check, loud enough for Morgan.

"Does he know?" she said.

I stared at her.

"Does he know," Lilly said again, "that you brought him here for Morgan? That you're still crying in the car about a man who left you in a parking lot? Does he know you're renting him?"

"Don't."

"Because I'd hate for him to find out he's the second choice," she said. "He looks like a man who's never been second in his life."

I went cold. All the way down.

And from behind me, easy, flat, bored — a voice with a floor and no ceiling:

"She's had a night," Daniel said. "Let her cool off."

Lilly let go of my arm like it was hot.

He put his hand flat against my back, between the shoulders, and steered me through the coat check past the smoking women past the door staff — and the ballroom doors swung shut behind us so hard the frames shook.

Outside, the cold hit my face. My clutch was in both hands. My phone was dead. My eyes were burning and I was not going to cry on a sidewalk in front of a doorman.

"Car," Daniel said, to the man by the curb.

"Sir."

"You were going to leave me in there," I said. "You were going to stand up in front of all of them and tell them what I paid."

"You told them first."

"I was joking."

"You weren't," he said.

I turned on him. The doorman looked at the sky. A valet walked past us with somebody's keys and did not look at me either.

"Who are you?" I said. My voice cracked on it. Loud — loud enough that the doorman heard it, loud enough that the valet turned around, loud enough that the two women coming out of the coat check stopped walking.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he opened the back door of the car himself.

"Get in," he said.

"Answer me."

"Get in," he said, "or stand out here in a dress that isn't yours and freeze. Your call."

The valet had stopped. The doorman had his hand on the door. Everybody was watching.

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Chapter 3 Ends