Chương 10: A Taste of Her Presence
Leon's hand is shaking, just slightly, when he opens the small velvet box in front of four hundred guests who have no idea yet that the wedding they came to watch is about to become two, and Maeve feels the whole glittering ballroom fall away into something very small and very quiet, just his face, just his voice, just the question she already knows the answer to before he's finished asking it.
This is not the arrangement, she thinks, feeling her own pulse roar in her ears. This is the first thing in two years I get to say yes to without calculating what it will cost me first.
That was near midnight. First, there was the morning of the wedding.
She'd been awake since five, standing in the cathedral's side chapel in a headset that connected her to eleven separate vendors, watching four hundred white ranunculus centerpieces arrive in a delivery she'd triple checked herself after the last one, months ago, in a city she no longer let herself think about most days. The wedding itself, when the client's assistant had finally sent over the full brief weeks earlier, had made Maeve laugh out loud alone in her office, the particular delighted disbelief of watching a hypothetical finally become real. A luxury conglomerate's heir marrying the daughter of a longtime rival family, a merger dressed in white silk, four hundred guests and a financial press corps watching for any sign the alliance wouldn't hold.
Petra had caught her staring at the brief that afternoon, laughing quietly to herself over the coincidence, and had simply said, without needing further explanation, "You designed this exact wedding in your head once already, didn't you. In his office. Your very first morning."
"Word for word," Maeve had admitted. "I assumed it was a hypothetical."
"Herr Reinhardt does not deal in hypotheticals," Petra had said, with the particular dry certainty of someone who had worked for him long enough to know it as gospel. "He simply waits until the right version of the real thing arrives."
Sell them a witness, not a love story, she'd thought, rereading her own year old interview notes with something like fondness. Leon kept that index card. He actually kept it.
The ceremony ran exactly eleven minutes, choreographed so both bride and groom arrived at the altar in the same instant from opposite ends of the cathedral, the doves released at precisely the moment the vows threatened to feel too rehearsed to breathe. Maeve watched it unfold from the side aisle with her headset silent for the first time all morning, and felt something settle deep and satisfied in her chest, the particular pride of watching an idea survive contact with four hundred real, watching, judging faces.
It was Yoon's voice, unmistakable even filtered through a cathedral's cavernous acoustics, that made Maeve's whole careful composure crack for the first time that day. She'd known, vaguely, that the client had booked live musical talent for the reception. She had not known, until the moment the doors to the ballroom opened and a familiar, ferociously talented voice launched into the first bars of the couple's chosen song, that the talent in question would be her own two oldest friends.
"You didn't tell me," Maeve said, finding Leon at the edge of the room, her voice caught somewhere between accusation and disbelief.
"I didn't know," Leon admitted, something almost sheepish crossing his usually composed face. "My events team found them independently, through an agency, months ago, purely on merit. I only realized the connection myself two days ago, when your friend Rina called to confirm logistics and mentioned, entirely in passing, that she was looking forward to seeing you cry at your own work again." Something warmer moved behind his eyes. "I considered telling you. I decided I would rather watch your face discover it."
"You've been planning this for months," she said slowly, understanding arriving in pieces. "The booking. The timing. All of it."
"Some of it," Leon allowed. "I will confess the proposal itself required considerably more revision than any contract I have signed this year. I am told, by your friend Rina, that I rewrote the timing four separate times before she finally informed me I was overthinking a question with a rather obvious answer."
"She told you that."
"At volume," Leon said, "and with considerable confidence in her own correctness. I have decided I like her enormously."
Rina found her an hour later, mid reception, pulling Maeve into a hug fierce enough to lift her half off her heels, Yoon arriving seconds later with considerably less restraint, both of them talking over each other in the delighted, overlapping way that had defined every reunion since university.
"We flew in yesterday and didn't say a word," Rina said, pure smug satisfaction. "Do you understand how hard that was. I have never once in my life kept a secret successfully before this."
"He asked us not to ruin it," Yoon added, tipping her chin toward Leon across the room. "I liked him immediately for that. Anyone willing to bribe two working musicians into silence for your sake has already passed the only test that actually matters."
"He didn't bribe us," Rina corrected, entirely unbothered by the contradiction. "He asked, very formally, in an email with more paragraphs than strictly necessary, whether we would consider it. I said yes before I finished reading the second sentence."
"I said yes because the fee was obscene," Yoon said cheerfully, "and because watching Mae's face just now was worth every hour of flight delay Frankfurt airport apparently specializes in."
Maeve laughed, real and unguarded, and found herself, for the length of one bright, ordinary moment, simply a woman surrounded by the people who loved her best, in a city she'd once landed in alone with nothing but a resignation email and a one way ticket. She thought of the version of herself standing in that parking garage, certain she was walking toward nothing but uncertainty, and wished, briefly and fiercely, that she could reach back through the last two years and tell that woman exactly how thoroughly this particular gamble was going to pay out.
"Don't cry yet," Rina warned, already reaching for a napkin in anticipation. "Save it. I have a feeling tonight isn't finished handing you reasons to."
Maeve didn't ask what she meant. Something in the knowing look Rina exchanged with Yoon told her the answer would arrive on its own soon enough, and she found, for once, that she didn't need to manage the timing of a single thing that was about to happen to her.
She didn't see Wyatt until much later, and even then, only secondhand, a single grainy photograph Rina forwarded near midnight with no caption at all, taken from a gossip account that had apparently staked out the cathedral steps hoping for exactly this. Wyatt, standing across the street behind a police barrier meant for ordinary onlookers, watching through the cathedral's tall windows as the reception glittered on without him, no camera crew of his own left to stage the moment into something flattering. Beside him, close enough to suggest the arrangement had reformed out of pure mutual convenience rather than anything warmer, stood Jules, both of them looking, in the unforgiving light of someone else's phone camera, considerably smaller than either had ever managed to look on a red carpet.
Neither of them was invited, Maeve thought, studying the photo once before deleting the app entirely. They came anyway, to watch from outside a window, because some part of both of them still needs to witness whatever they can't have. I used to think that was devotion. It's just hunger wearing a nicer coat.
There was a time, not so long ago, when that photograph would have cost her an entire evening, replaying every angle of it, wondering what she owed a man who had never once wondered the same about her. Tonight it cost her exactly the ten seconds it took to delete the app, and nothing further at all, and she found the absence of feeling considerably more satisfying than any triumph she could have manufactured in its place.
She set the phone away and didn't think of it again, because Leon was already crossing the ballroom toward her, something in his bearing different tonight, deliberate in a way that had nothing to do with business.
"Walk with me," he said, and led her out onto the terrace overlooking the cathedral gardens, the reception's noise and light fading behind them into something distant and unimportant, the cold night air sharp and clean after months of careful, controlled rooms.
"You've been strange all evening," Maeve said, watching him more than the view.
"I have been considering something for several weeks," Leon said, "and attempting, with considerably less success than I would like to admit, to find a moment worthy of it." He turned to face her fully, and for the first time since the interview, she watched every careful, guarded composure fall away from him entirely, nothing left standing between them at all. "I built an office with no walls to hide behind because I could not trust myself to see betrayal coming otherwise. I have not, since that year, built anything without first calculating exactly how much it would cost me to lose it. And then you arrived, furious and precise, refusing to let anyone else write your next chapter for you, and I found I no longer wanted to calculate the cost at all. I simply wanted you."
He reached into his coat, and the small velvet box that emerged caught the garden lights exactly the way she suspected he'd planned it to.
"Marry me," Leon said, simply, without performance, the same plain, unhurried certainty he brought to everything that actually mattered to him. "Not because it is efficient, or because our names look well together in a press release. Because you are the only room I have ever wanted to leave every door in unlocked."
He's not asking a question, Maeve thought, feeling her whole chest go warm and unsteady at once. He already knows the answer. He's simply giving me the chance to say it out loud.
"Yes," she said, and the word came easier than any word had in two years.
He kissed her then, and it was nothing like the careful, deliberate control he brought to every boardroom, nothing measured about it at all, one hand fisting gently in her hair and the other pulling her flush against him as though he'd spent weeks rationing exactly how much of himself he was allowed to show her and had finally, completely, run out of patience for rationing anything. Maeve kissed him back with everything she'd spent two years learning to hold in reserve, her fingers curling into his lapels, the cold night air forgotten entirely between the heat of his mouth and the low, rough sound he made against her lips, and for one long, breathless moment the entire glittering wedding behind them, the ring warm in her palm, the whole enormous architecture of the life she was about to build, narrowed down to nothing but this, his hands, her name against his mouth, the particular reckless certainty of finally choosing something without once counting what it might cost her.
Somewhere behind them, faint through the terrace doors, Rina's voice rose in a delighted shriek that could only mean she'd spotted the ring already, and Maeve laughed against Leon's mouth, feeling, for the first time in longer than she could properly measure, entirely and permanently present in her own life.
Inside, the reception glittered on without them for a while longer, Yoon already composing, loudly, an entirely new song for the occasion, and somewhere far beyond the cathedral's tall windows, two figures who had once believed themselves the center of every story worth telling stood outside in the cold, watching a life continue on brilliantly without either of them in it, condemned to nothing more dramatic than the ordinary, permanent weight of her absence.
Rina, for her part, noticed none of that particular drama unfolding beyond the windows, having been thoroughly distracted the moment a tall, unfairly composed stranger in an usher's boutonniere had appeared at her elbow with two glasses of champagne and an accent she couldn't immediately place, introducing himself only as a cousin of the groom with, he claimed, absolutely no talent for music and an unusually specific interest in hers. Maeve caught the exchange from across the terrace doors just long enough to see Rina's carefully cultivated indifference falter for exactly one unguarded second, and made a private, delighted note to ask about it later, certain, somehow, that this particular thread of the evening was very far from finished.
---
After Credit: The Honeymoon
The villa Leon had chosen overlooked a stretch of Amalfi coastline so blue it looked artificial, and Maeve had spent exactly one full day pretending she intended to leave their bedroom before either of them admitted the pretense wasn't fooling anyone.
She woke on the second morning to the warm weight of his mouth trailing slow, unhurried heat along her spine, and arched back into him without fully surfacing from sleep first, already familiar enough with this particular greeting to know exactly where it led.
"You are supposed to be resting," she murmured, voice still rough with sleep.
"I am resting," Leon said against her shoulder, low and amused, his hand sliding beneath the sheet to splay warm across her stomach. "This is simply a more thorough definition of the word than you are accustomed to."
She turned in his arms to face him properly, morning light gilding the sharp lines of his face, and felt the low, insistent want that had been building steadily since the wedding, since the proposal, since two days of a honeymoon spent mostly forgetting the outside world existed at all. "Show me your definition, then."
He didn't need telling twice. He kissed her slow and thorough, unhurried in a way that made her whole body arch toward him for more, and when he finally drew the sheet away entirely, his gaze moved over her with the same unhurried, deliberate attention he brought to everything he actually wanted, as though committing every inch of her to memory all over again.
"Mine," he said quietly, more admission than claim, and lowered his mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, taking his time in a way that made her hips lift restlessly beneath him, seeking friction he withheld just long enough to make her ache for it properly.
"Leon." His name came out half plea, half warning, her fingers threading into his hair.
"I have you," he murmured against her skin, and finally, finally, gave her what she was asking for, his fingers finding her slick and ready, working her slow and precise until she was trembling, until her back arched clean off the mattress and his name tore out of her in something closer to a sob than a word. He didn't let her recover before settling between her thighs, watching her face with an intensity that made the moment feel less like sex and more like a vow being renewed, and when he finally pushed into her, slow and deep, they both went still for a moment, foreheads pressed together, breath mingling, the sheer fullness of him drawing a low, helpless sound from her throat.
"Look at me," he said roughly, and she did, holding his gaze as he began to move, unhurried at first, deep and deliberate, then faster as her hips rose to meet every thrust, her nails dragging down his back, his name breaking apart into something wordless against her mouth. He fucked her thoroughly, without a shred of the careful restraint he wore for the rest of the world, murmuring filthy, worshipful things against her ear in a mix of English and low, rough German she'd finally learned enough of to understand, until the coil low in her belly snapped all at once, pleasure crashing through her in long, shuddering waves that dragged him over the edge only moments later, his own release breaking through him with her name on his lips like the answer to every question he'd spent three hundred careful, guarded years refusing to ask anyone else.
Afterward, tangled together with the Mediterranean morning spilling gold across the sheets, Leon pressed a slow kiss to her temple, and Maeve let herself, fully and without reservation, simply be exactly as present as she had promised herself, at the crossroads of her own life, she would finally allow herself to be.