CHAPTER SIX: HANDS ON MY WAIST??

SILICON STRIP: Your Weekly Tech Gossip Fix

Because Someone Has To Say It!!

ROYCE DUPONT IS TAKEN AND HONESTLY, WE HAVE QUESTIONS?!

So, ROYCE DUPONT, billionaire, professional ice sculpture, man who once described human connection as “operationally non-essential” in a 2024 Forbes interview has apparently acquired a wife.

Her name is Anne Brooke, twenty four years old and has a startup. She graduated eight months ago.

EIGHT. MONTHS. AGO!

We’re not saying anything at all. We’re just saying that this man who broke up with Christiana Harmon, a woman so elegant and ethereal, has chosen someone whose LinkedIn profile picture looks like it was taken in a university corridor on a Thursday afternoon.

Funny how a pretty face and a pitch deck can accomplish marrying The Ice CEO and not our visionary, Christiana Harmon who held that man’s attention for eighteen months.

This is screaming suspicious!!

Rumors says they met some months before the NeuroPont Summit, dating quietly and privately but I call BS!.

We give it two months. Our prayers are with the startup.

The Editors (who are fine, totally fine, not at all personally offended on behalf of Christiana)

Anne read it on the bathroom floor. Not because the bathroom floor was her preferred reading location, but because her phone started ringing with notifications a hundred times as she got ready for the morning. She’d sat down on the cold tile and hadn’t gotten back up.

She called Jade.

“I’ve been described,” she said, without greeting, “as someone whose LinkedIn looks like it was taken on a Thursday.”

“It was taken on a Thursday,” Jade said.

“That’s not the point.”

“What day would have been acceptable–”

“Jade.”

“I’m reading it right now.” There was silence before she spoke again. ”‘Our prayers are with the startup’ is genuinely funny, I’m not going to lie to you–”

“They’re implying I’m a phase.”

“They’re implying you’re a mystery which is better. Anne, you’re  on the front page of TechPulse, Silicon Strip, and whatever WiredGossip is. Eight months ago forty people knew your name. Now it’s trending.”

“For the wrong reasons.”

“Honey in this industry, trending is trending. ANGEL’s site traffic went up four hundred percent overnight.”

Anne looked at the bathroom ceiling. ”…Four hundred?”

“I checked. You’re welcome.”

She sat with that for a moment.

“The part about Christiana  Harmon,” she said.

“Don’t,” Jade said immediately.

“I’m not. I’m just–“

“Don’t.”

“She’s objectively….”

“Anne.”

”….extraordinary, and I’m someone whose photo was taken on a Thursday–“

“Get off the bathroom floor,” Jade said, with the authority of someone who knew exactly where Anne was. “Wash your face. Wear the green thing. Go be extraordinary on purpose.”

Anne hung up. Looked at the tile grout for one more moment before getting up. 

Royce’s kitchen Im the morning looked exactly as it always looked white and devoid of use and it was occupied by one man in a suit reading his phone with a cold expression relaxing his back on the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee on his hand.  He looked up when she came in.

Anne held her phone with the newsletter on the screen. He took it from her and read it as he set his coffee on the counter. 

“Diana’s already on it,” he said.

“That’s your response?”

“It’s a gossip newsletter, Anne. It has eleven thousand subscribers.”

“It called me a pretty face with a pitch deck.”

“You have a pretty face,” he said, and then returned to his own phone like he didn’t say anything that sounded odd coming from him, “and a pitch deck. The characterization is incomplete, not inaccurate.”

She stared at the side of his face.

“You,” she said, “are genuinely unbelievable.”

“Board breakfast is at nine. Diana wants us there by eight-thirty.”

“We’re talking about the newsletter.”

“We’re finished talking about the newsletter.”

“Royce–!”

“Anne.” He looked up. His eyes held hers with a steady quality that she still hadn’t built a defense against. “Eleven thousand people read something this morning that doesn’t know you from a rumor page. Fourteen billion dollars of infrastructure says otherwise. Which number matters?”

She held his gaze. The kitchen was very quiet. Gerald the cactus sat on the windowsill behind her, saying nothing, looking smug as usual.

“The fourteen billion,” she answered 

“Then get dressed.”

She turned toward the hallway. Stopped.

“For the record,” she said, without turning around, “ Christiania Harmon sounds terrifying and I refuse to compete with terrifying. Should I be worried?”

“No and you're not competing with anyone.”

“Tell the newsletter that.”

“Anne.”

She turned. He was looking at her with an expression she didn’t have a name for yet something quiet and direct that lived below the usual cool register of him, something that pressed against the surface without breaking it.

“Wear the blue,” he said. “The midnight one.”

She felt it a step in her chest, the flutter she kept filing under irrelevant and that kept refusing the category.

###

The board breakfast was at DuPont Tower on the twentieth floor in a room called “The Meridian Room.” A long table sat in the middle of the room the chandeliers above gave the room a golden glow. Eight board members and tgeir spouses sat on their stipulated seat. Marcus stood near the door with his notebook and face docile. 

Anne had learned names from Royce’s briefing document. She ran them now, quietly, like, Harlan Dale silver haired sitting at the far end of the table, already watching the door and her with a knowing smile. She decided she didn’t like him.

The others stared at her in interest.

Royce’s hand found the small of her back as they walked in.

She didn’t stumble. She was proud of this. Because his hand was warm through the fabric of the dress and the touch was light barely a  pressure, just presence and it moved through her like a current, her stomach fluttering. 

He guided her forward with that hand into the room. 

She gave them what she calls “I see you and I know you see me” kinda smile. 

Everyone in the room smiled back, because Anne Brooke had the particular gift of making rooms feel like they’d been waiting for her.

Harlan Dale rose first. He was everything Royce’s file had prepared her for, polished, warm on the surface, the specific warmth of someone who had practiced it long enough that the performance had become the person. He took her hand in both of his.

“Anne,” he said exaggeratingly like he was mocking her. “We’ve heard so much.”

“All of it strategically managed, I hope,” she replied pleasantly

He laughed. The laugh reached his eyes, which surprised her. “Royce, she’s charming. Where have you been hiding her?”

“I wasn’t hiding her,” Royce said, beside her. “She doesn’t particularly hide.”

She looked up at him. He was looking at Voss, the corner of his mouth rising in an almost there smile. 

Forty minutes in, she was deep in conversation with Eleanor Dale, Harlan’s wife, a retired structural engineer who had opinions about her start-up that were, genuinely, fascinating  when she felt Royce’s hand again.

Not the small of her back this time.

Her waist.

His arm came around her from behind as he leaned in to say something to the man on her left, and his hand settled at her side warm, deliberate, the particular weight of something that knew exactly where it was.

She kept talking to Eleanor Dale about distributed computing frameworks.

His thumb moved. Just once, just slightly, tracing the edge of her ribcage through the fabric of her dress, not a caress exactly, more like a question with no intention of waiting for the answer  and she heard herself say something coherent about server architecture, which was frankly remarkable, because the part of her that understood server architecture had gone completely offline.

Eleanor agreed enthusiastically.

She smiled at Eleanor. He said something to the man on her left, his voice easy, unhurried, the voice of a man with nothing on his mind whatsoever. She almost hated him for it. She wanted to turn and look at his face, to see if he knew what he was doing like some fault line, some tell  but she didn’t turn, because turning would be seeing something that may confuse her, and she had exactly enough composure left to not turn.

His hand didn’t move again. It didn’t have to.

The conversation shifted around them. She tracked Eleanor’s words with the surface part of her attention and beneath that, nothing but the warm, unmoving fact of his hand, and the specific effort of pretending it wasn’t rewriting everything she’d planned to feel about this evening.

Stay professional, she told herself.

She had been telling herself that since she pitched to him. She was getting worse at it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​