Chapter 9: What She Noticed

Sloane

I noticed things about him.

I had been noticing things about him since the first night and I had been filing them away in the part of my brain that I used for information I was not ready to do anything with yet. The part where I put things that complicated the clean version of a situation I needed to stay clean.

The file was getting full.

He drank his coffee black and too hot. Always. The kind of hot that should be uncomfortable but he never seemed to notice. He worked until at least midnight every night but he was always up before me in the morning which meant he was sleeping maybe five hours and doing it consistently enough that it was clearly just how he operated.

He read physical books. Not many people did that anymore. He had three going at any one time, all of them left open face down in different rooms of the penthouse the way you do when you are reading in fragments between other things. I had looked at the spines without meaning to. History mostly. One biography. Nothing that wasn't true.

He never had his phone in his hand when he was talking to someone. He put it face down or in his pocket and he looked at you. Completely. Like you were the only thing in the room that mattered. I had been in enough meetings with enough important people to know how rare that was. Most people at his level had learned to perform attention. Beckett just paid it.

He noticed things about me too.

I caught him at it sometimes. Not in an obvious way. In the way someone looks at something when they are trying to understand it rather than when they want you to know they are looking.

I did not know what to do with any of this.

So I kept filing it away and going to work and coming home and making dinner twice more that week because it turned out I liked cooking in that kitchen more than I had expected to and I was not ready to examine why.

Dara called on Wednesday morning.

I was in a cab on my way to a client meeting and I picked up and she said "I need you to explain something to me" in the voice she used when she had already formed an opinion and was looking for confirmation.

"What," I said.

"You made him dinner."

"I made dinner. He was there."

"Sloane."

"Dara."

"You made the man dinner and then you did it again two days later."

"The kitchen is well stocked and cooking is a stress response for me. That is all that is happening."

She was quiet for a second. "What did you cook."

"That is not relevant."

"What did you cook."

I looked out the cab window. "Pasta the first time. Roast chicken the second."

The silence that followed was very loud.

"You made roast chicken," she said carefully. "You have not made roast chicken for anyone since your mother's birthday three years ago."

"Dara."

"That is your comfort food. That is the thing you make for people you want to take care of."

"I am ending this call."

"Sloane you are falling in—"

I ended the call.

I sat in the cab and looked out the window at the city going past and did not think about roast chicken or what it meant that I had made it or the specific look on Beckett's face when he tasted it and said nothing for a moment and then said it was good in that flat factual way of his that I had learned meant something was more than good.

I did not think about any of that.

I thought about my client meeting.

I was extremely professional about it.

Thursday he came to pick me up from the firm.

Not because we had an event. He just showed up at six thirty in the lobby and texted me one line. Ready when you are.

I stood at my office window for a moment looking at my phone.

Then I got my coat and went downstairs.

He was standing near the door when I came out of the elevator. Dark coat. Hands in his pockets. Looking at his phone but he put it away when he saw me which was the thing he always did and which I had stopped pretending not to notice.

"You did not have to come," I said.

"I know."

"We do not have anything tonight."

"I know that too."

I looked at him. He looked back.

"Okay," I said.

We walked out together into the cold evening air. He did not explain why he had come and I did not ask and we walked two blocks to a restaurant neither of us had planned and sat at a corner table and ordered food and talked for two hours about things that had nothing to do with the arrangement or Strand or any of the complicated architecture of why we were in each other's lives.

He told me about a trip he took to Japan when he was nineteen. The only time in his life he had been somewhere completely alone with no agenda and no one who knew his name. He said it was the best two weeks of his life and he had never gone back because he did not want to find out if it was the place or just being nobody for a while.

I told him about the summer I was sixteen when I worked at a diner six days a week and saved every cent and bought myself a secondhand laptop and taught myself to type properly because I had decided I was going to be a lawyer and lawyers needed to type fast and I was not waiting for anyone to give me the tools to get there.

He listened to that in the way he listened to everything. Completely.

"You have been doing everything yourself since you were sixteen," he said.

"Since I was nine," I said. "Sixteen is just when I got practical about it."

He looked at me across the table.

"That is a long time to carry things alone," he said quietly.

I looked back at him.

"Yes," I said. "It is."

We looked at each other for a moment and neither of us said what we were both thinking which was that we were the same in that specific way and we both knew it and it was the most terrifying and the most relieving thing either of us had felt in a long time.

The check came and he paid before I could reach for my bag and I let him which was something I would not have done three weeks ago without making a point of it.

We walked back to the penthouse in the cold. Not talking much. Just walking. Close enough that our arms brushed twice and neither of us moved away.

In the elevator he stood beside me and we watched the numbers go up and I was aware of him the way you are aware of someone when your body has decided something your brain is still arguing about.

The doors opened.

We walked to the point in the hallway where it split. Him right. Me left.

I stopped.

He stopped.

I turned and looked at him.

He was looking at me already. He had been looking at me the whole time.

"Beckett," I said.

"Sloane," he said.

Just our names. That was all. But the way he said mine was different from the way anyone had ever said it before. Like it meant something specific. Like he had been thinking about it.

I took one step toward him.

He did not move back.

I put my hand on his chest. Flat. Just resting there. I could feel his heartbeat under my palm and it was not steady the way everything else about him was steady. It was fast.

He looked down at my hand. Then up at me.

"This is going to complicate everything," he said quietly.

"I know," I said.

"The arrangement. The situation with Strand. All of it."

"I know."

"And you still."

"Yes," I said. "I still."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he brought his hand up and covered mine where it rested on his chest. Not moving it. Just covering it. His hand over mine the same way mine had been over his three nights ago at the kitchen counter.

We stood there in the hallway.

Neither of us moved toward anything more than that.

Neither of us moved away.

"Goodnight Sloane," he finally said. His voice was different. Lower. Like it cost him something to say it.

"Goodnight Beckett," I said.

I took my hand back slowly.

I went to my room.

I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my hand to my own chest and felt my heartbeat which was also not steady.

Not steady at all.

And I sat there in the dark and finally admitted to myself the thing I had been filing away for three weeks in the part of my brain reserved for things I was not ready to deal with.

I was not going to be able to keep this clean.

I had known that for a while.

I just had not been ready to say it out loud yet.

Even to myself.