The rain over London had no ambition beyond misery. It smeared the glass facade of the Excel Centre into something between a watercolor and a migraine, grey bleeding into grey, and inside, under lights that never dimmed and never warmed, the future was being sold in ten-minute pitches.
Emily Anne Baker did not belong here. She knew it the way she knew her own name, and she had decided, with the particular stubbornness of a twenty-two-year-old who had talked her way into a press pass she wasn't supposed to have, that not belonging had never stopped her before.
She moved against the current of the crowd, oversized NASA tee sliding off one shoulder, hair scraped into a bun that had surrendered somewhere around booth forty, glasses sliding down her nose so often she'd stopped bothering to push them back up. Chaos personified, and unbothered by it. Around her, thousands of high-tech booths gleamed under artificial light, drones hummed overhead, the PA system intoned rhythmic announcements that nobody was listening to. She drank it in anyway. This is it. This is the whole world, wired and blinking and alive, and one day I'll be the one they're all here to see.
She didn't notice him until their shoulders brushed.
Sebastian Floyd Smith cut through the same crowd the way a shark cuts through shallow water, unhurried and entirely certain that the water would part for him. Charcoal bespoke suit. Savile Row tailoring that had cost more than Emily's entire degree. He was classically handsome in the specific, exhausting way of men who had been told so since birth, and his eyes, slate grey, gave away nothing at all. Dead, she would have said, if she'd had the time to look properly. She didn't. Their shoulders brushed, and her pen clattered to the floor, and the moment nearly ended there, two strangers absorbed into the noise of eleven thousand other people.
Nearly.
Sebastian paused. A micro-beat, no more, some old and buried instinct warring with the flat apathy that had carried him through every industry event of the last decade. The crowd surged. It would have been easy to let it push him forward and never think of the girl again.
He glanced down instead.
Emily was already stooping for the pen, and as she rose she caught a scent threading through the crush of bodies and drone-hum and burnt coffee: sandalwood, and beneath it, cigarette smoke worn like a habit rather than a vice. She looked up, ready to apologize, or maybe not, maybe just to see who'd been careless enough to knock into her.
There was no one there. Only a stranger in a charcoal suit, disappearing into the noise, and the faint, stubborn ghost of his cologne.
Huh, she thought, and then forgot him, because the world was too full of things to look at to spend it wondering about a suit.
❦
By night the Alchemist Bar had swallowed every trace of the exhibition hall's sterile future. Amber light lay trapped in crystal glasses. The air was thick with the haze of spirits too expensive to be drunk quickly, and a deep house bassline thudded, not loud, but hypnotic, insistent, a pulse under the floor.
Emily had shed her skin along with her badge lanyard. Burgundy slip dress. Spine exposed. Sharp fox eye liner, a slash of dark red lipstick. The glasses were gone. The nerd, she liked to think, was dead, at least for the night, and dangerously, gorgeously so.
She clinked glasses with Sophie at the bar, the two of them loud in the particular way of people who'd had exactly enough to drink to stop caring who heard them.
"I'm so sorry!" Sophie shouted over the music. "I have to go! He's waiting outside."
Emily laughed and waved her off. "Go. I'm a big girl. I'll survive."
Sophie vanished into the crowd, and Emily swiveled on her stool to face the circular bar alone, perfectly content with her own company and a gin that was mostly gin. Her gaze drifted, the way gazes do in bars, looking for something to land on, and it landed on the far corner.
Sebastian sat with his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled to reveal forearms corded with a tension that had nothing to do with the whisky in front of him. He stared into the ice as it melted, as though it held some private answer he'd been chasing for years and never quite caught.
Emily's gaze hit him. He felt it before he saw it, the specific weight of being watched, and looked up.
Contact. The air between them tightened, just perceptibly, the way a held breath tightens a room. Emily broke it first, sipping her drink to mask the flush climbing her throat. Get it together, Baker. He's just a suit.
A shout cut through the moment before it could become anything more. At a nearby VIP table, a knot of young men laughed too loudly, and the tallest of them, Dustin, twenty-three and delighted with himself, raised a hand.
"Emily! It's you, right? Westminster summer school, same team. Remember?"
She turned, half shocked, half amused. "Yes, that's me. I can't believe you recognised me."
"I nearly didn't." He grinned, glanced back over his shoulder at the table where his friends were watching with open curiosity, one of them already raising a glass. "I'm here with a few friends. Come join us."
She shrugged, grabbed her drink, and sauntered over, and if some small part of her noticed that the stranger at the bar had gone back to staring at his whisky, she didn't let herself dwell on it.
❦
An hour and several empty bottles later, the VIP table had descended into Truth or Dare, and Dustin, smug and loose limbed, pointed a finger across the circle at her.
"Dare. Give your number to a random stranger. But here's the catch: you can't say a word."
The group cheered. Emily squinted, scanning the room for a suitable victim, and her eyes drifted, unbidden, back to the bar. Back to him.
"Gimme a pen," she said, smirking, and snatched a Sharpie off a passing waiter's tray. She stood. The floor tilted, gently, the particular tilt of four drinks in an evening, and she corrected her stride without missing a beat. "Watch and learn."
She crossed the room like a woman with nothing to lose, because she had, tonight, decided she had nothing to lose. Sebastian sensed the intrusion before he saw it. He didn't turn. A hand, soft, warm, closed around his wrist, and only then did he look.
She was right there. In his space. A floral perfume assaulted the careful architecture of his composure, and she said nothing at all, only pulled his left hand toward her, calm as anything, and he let her, watching her eyes the whole time. Bold. Provocative. Nothing at all like the exhausted women who usually approached him at these things, all calculation and careful hair.
Interesting, he thought, and hated that he thought it.
The Sharpie squeaked against his skin. Wet ink on warm flesh. A messy string of digits bloomed across the back of his hand, and he watched every stroke of it with an intensity that surprised him. She finished. Capped the pen. Looked up through her lashes, and the look said, louder than any words could have managed, call me.
She turned. Her hair whipped his shoulder as she walked away, and Sebastian looked down at the ink, a stain, a genuine stain, on the otherwise flawless surface of his evening. He downed the rest of his drink in one go.
The burn feels good, he thought, and did not examine that thought any further than he had to.
❦
The beat dropped on the dance floor an hour later, sweat and strobe light turning the whole room into something feral. Emily danced with her new friends, if you could call people she'd known for forty minutes friends, laughing, loose, alive in the particular way she only ever felt after a fourth drink and a stranger's number inked onto her palm in her own handwriting.
A man she didn't know ground up against her from behind. Too close. His hands wandering somewhere they hadn't been invited.
"You've got some moves, sweetheart," he said, breath hot against her ear.
"Back off." She shouted it, sharp, but he didn't move, and for a half second something cold slid down her spine, the specific fear of a woman alone in a crowd who has just realized how alone she actually is.
Then a hand clamped onto the stranger's shoulder. Vise-like.
Sebastian loomed over him, and whatever the stranger saw in his eyes made him retreat without another word.
"She's with me," Sebastian said.
Emily looked at her would-be savior, entirely unimpressed. "I got it. Don't need a knight in shining armor. If you wanted to dance with me, you should have just said so."
She hooked a finger into his shirt and yanked him close, and Sebastian let her pull him into the crush of bodies, standing rigid while she flowed around him like water around a rock that had decided, against all its instincts, to let itself be moved.
In the strobe light her breath was inches from his. He looked down at her, and the soft scent of flowers sparked something unfamiliar and maddening in the vicinity of his heart, an itch he had no name for and no interest in naming.
Then, abruptly, Emily went green.
"I... I think I'm gonna puke," she said, hand flying to her mouth.
❦
He held her hair back with one hand and rubbed slow circles on her back with the other while she retched over a toilet in the men's room, and there was nothing clinical about it despite how carefully he tried to make it look that way. No disgust. Only a strange, careful gentleness that he would have denied, under oath, having any capacity for.
She flushed. Slumped back against the cold tile, eyes closed.
"Kill me now," she groaned. "This is humiliating."
He produced a pristine handkerchief from somewhere, because of course he had one, and wiped the corner of her mouth with it.
"You'll live," he said.
Her stomach growled, loud and unrepentant. "I'm starving!"
A laugh barked out of him before he could stop it, surprise lighting up a face that had apparently forgotten how. "Come on. I know a place."
❦
The late night diner smelled of grease and fluorescent light and something that might have been comfort, and Emily annihilated a burger with the single-minded focus of a woman who had just emptied her stomach of everything else. Sebastian picked at a plate of fries, watching her with something like anthropological fascination, as though she were a species he'd read about but never actually encountered in the wild.
She eats like she means it, he thought. Everyone I know eats like they're being watched. She isn't watching anyone.
The check came. He reached for his wallet. She blocked his hand with hers.
"Split it," she said. "I don't do damsel in distress."
He studied her for a long moment, surprised, and then nodded, something that looked almost like respect settling into the line of his mouth.
Outside, the post-rain streets had gone silent, wind whistling between buildings that seemed, for once, to have nothing to say. Emily shivered, arms crossed over her chest, and Sebastian shrugged out of his suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders without asking. The weight of it settled on her like something she hadn't known she needed.
She stopped, sat down on a church step, and he lowered himself beside her, unfolding long legs that had spent the whole night rigid with a tension she was only now starting to unwind.
"Thanks," she said, awkward now that the adrenaline of the night was fading, "for earlier. I swear I can usually handle my drink better than that."
He nodded, and something in his eyes had gone soft in a way she hadn't seen all night. The wind blew a lock of hair across her face, and before she could brush it away herself, his fingers found it first, tucking the strand behind her ear with a touch so light it barely qualified as contact at all.
Don't, she thought, even as her whole body leaned, infinitesimally, toward his hand. Don't be the kind of good that ruins a good time.
"What do I call you?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Shh. Don't ask. Names make it real. Let's keep it a mystery." She looked up, street light catching in her eyes, and something reckless and bright moved behind them. "Just call me M."
"Fair enough, M," he said. "I'm S."
The distance between them closed, gravity doing what gravity does, pulling two bodies toward each other until the space between them stopped meaning anything at all. He looked at her mouth. He wanted, with a hunger that frightened him, to devour her.
He pulled back instead.
Not here. Not yet. Not like this, he told himself, though he could not have said, if pressed, exactly what he was protecting, or from whom.
His evasion only deepened her curiosity, the way evasion always does with people who have spent their whole lives being told yes.
They walked again, Emily barefoot now, heels dangling from two fingers, the cold pavement biting at the soles of her feet. Sebastian glanced down, and something in him that had been carefully arranged for thirty-three years cracked, just slightly, at the sight of her bare skin against the freezing concrete. Careless, he thought. Reckless. Alive. His brows knit together, a flicker of genuine, unguarded shock breaking through his usual cool.
She stopped at a corner and nodded toward a grand, illuminated Victorian building looming out of the mist.
"My carriage awaits," she said. "The Langham. My father insists it's the only place in London with acceptable water pressure."
He paused, looked at the hotel, then back at her, a flicker of dry irony crossing his face as he checked his watch.
"It is also the official partner hotel for the Tech Expo," he said.
"Let me guess." She smirked. "You're on the corporate floor?"
"It seems we are walking in the same direction, M."
He gestured for her to lead the way, and Emily's stomach did something complicated and unfamiliar as she did.
"Lucky me," she said. "Or unlucky you?"
"The jury is still out."
He shadowed her back toward the hotel, hands hovering inches from her waist the whole way, a reflex he hadn't asked for, ready to catch her the moment gravity finally won.
❦
They bypassed the main lobby through a side gate into the gardens, and the outdoor pool glowed turquoise ahead of them, steam rising off the heated water like something ghostly and deserted at this hour. Emily stopped abruptly, staring at it. The exhaustion of the night, the noise, the alcohol, the small relentless pretense of being someone other than herself, seemed all at once to settle heavy on her shoulders.
She turned, locking eyes with him. No words. Just a long, heavy stare that pulled him in, and she dropped her shoes without looking away.
"God," she said. "It looks warm."
"Don't even think about it," Sebastian said. "CCTV is everywhere. I have no desire to explain myself to the manager at three in the morning."
"Do you always live by so many rules? Or are you just scared?"
"Rules keep things from breaking."
She stepped closer, something reckless lighting up her whole face. "Some rules are meant to be broken."
Without warning, she jumped. The splash sprayed water across the deck, and she sank, then surfaced, pushing wet hair back from her face, the fabric of her dress gone translucent and clinging. She treaded water, looking up at him, a siren calling a sailor who had spent thirty-three years pretending he couldn't hear singing at all.
Sebastian stood on the edge and looked at her. Then at his own reflection in the glass of the gym building opposite. The stiff posture. The perfect shirt. The whole careful architecture of a man who never, ever broke his own rules.
He loosened his tie. A silent surrender. He kicked off his shoes and jumped in fully clothed.
The water came up to his chest. He waded through its resistance until he stood near her, and she looked at him, eyes widening slightly.
"You're mad," she said, teeth chattering. "You're actually mad."
She splashed him, and he laughed, a real, jagged sound that seemed to surprise him as much as it did her. Tonight, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he was just a man allowed one moment of madness.
"I'm merely ensuring you don't drown on my watch," he said. "Liability, and all that."
It was a lie, and they both knew it. He was looking at her with a raw intensity that terrified him more than any boardroom ever had.
Thunder cracked overhead. Rain began to hammer down, dimpling the surface of the pool around them.
"Inside," he said, yelling now over the rain. "Now. Before we freeze to death."
He grabbed her hand, and they ran.
❦
They tumbled into the elevator dripping, drying slowly onto the carpet as the doors slid shut. He let go of her hand. They didn't touch. They didn't have to. The air between them had gone electric, charged with everything neither of them had said, and somewhere beneath the hum of the elevator, two hearts kept the same frantic rhythm.
The doors opened on his floor. He stepped out, then turned back.
Emily stood there. She didn't press the button for her own floor.
The tension snapped.
He didn't wait. He grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall, and the door slammed shut behind them, silence rushing in so total it felt like its own kind of sound.
Sebastian looked at her. Mascara running. Wet silk clinging to her skin. Beautiful wreckage, and something in him simply broke.
He pinned her against the door. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and the kiss that followed was violent, desperate, months or years of some hunger neither of them had known they were carrying finally given somewhere to go. They stumbled toward the sofa and crashed down onto it, and Emily gasped.
And then Sebastian stopped.
He pulled back, moved away instantly, some last surviving fragment of discipline screaming at him that if he kept going now he would not stop, not for anything, not for CCTV or boardrooms or the life he had built so carefully around never wanting anything this much. He gently untangled her arms from around his neck. A polite rejection, if there was such a thing.
The moment, whatever it had been, was over.
He strode to the bathroom and returned with a massive white bath sheet, wrapping it around her, rubbing her arms with rough, deliberately practical friction, the kind of touch designed to mean nothing at all even as it meant everything.
"Sit," he said. "I'll get you some clean clothes."
He crossed to the closet, pulled out a white t-shirt and sweatpants, set them on the bed, careful, so careful, not to look at her again.
"Get in the shower," he said, voice low. "You're shivering."
❦
Later, in the living area, Emily emerged from the bathroom swallowed by his oversized t-shirt, legs bare beneath the hem. Sebastian stood behind the sofa where she sat, the hairdryer whirring to life in his hands, working through her damp hair with a clumsiness that surprised her, gentle despite it, his fingers lifting the heavy, wet strands until they dried soft under his hands. His knuckles brushed the nape of her neck.
Her breath hitched. She looked up. Their eyes met in the mirror across the room, and Sebastian froze, hand tangled in her hair, the sound of the dryer seeming to fade into nothing at all.
He switched it off.
Silence rushed back in.
Slowly, he pulled his hand away.
"Take the bed," he said. "I'll take the sofa."
"You don't have to..."
"Yes." Sharp now. "I do. You are drunk, M."
He turned and walked toward the door, and killed the light behind him.
❦
Grey dawn light filtered through the curtains the next morning, and Emily woke in a bed too vast and too empty, and crept out into the living area, a soft smile already forming at the sight of him.
Sebastian was asleep on the sofa, legs curled up against the cushions, a blanket he'd apparently kicked off sometime in the night pooled on the floor. She picked it up, moved quietly to cover him, and leaned close, her gaze drifting over the rise and fall of his chest.
To his left hand.
The ring. A plain gold wedding band glinted in the grey morning light.
The air left the room. The smile vanished from her face.
She stared at the ring, then at his peaceful, sleeping face, and the warmth that had been building in her chest all night turned, in an instant, to ice. Horror washed over her in a slow, sickening wave. Married. He's married. I slept in a married man's bed. I let him touch my hair like I mattered and he has a wife somewhere who thinks he's at a conference.
She backed away. One step. Two. Her breath trembling in her chest.
She grabbed her heels from the floor and, without looking back, bolted out the door.
The click of the latch echoed through the quiet apartment, and on the sofa, Sebastian didn't stir, only shifted in his sleep, pulling a throw pillow tighter against his chest.
An hour later, he woke without any sudden movement, no gasp, no start, simply opening his eyes to a room gone cold, the hum of the air conditioning suddenly, unbearably loud.
He sat up abruptly. The blanket, the one she'd laid over him, slid to the floor.
"M?"
Silence answered him. He looked toward the bedroom door, ajar, and something in his chest went very still.
He walked in. The bed was empty, sheets thrown back on the side where she'd slept. He crossed to it, placed a hand on the indented pillow. Cold.
Something caught his eye.
A single long, dark hair lay across the white pillowcase, and beneath it, the faint ghost of flowers and rain. His expression cracked, a microscopic fissure in thirty-three years of carefully maintained armor. Then he dropped the hair into the bin, because that was what a man like him did with things he could not afford to keep.
He glanced at the nightstand. The notepad lay blank.
She didn't leave a note, he thought. Of course she didn't.
❦
In the bathroom, he stood before the mirror and did not recognize what looked back. Shirt wrinkled. Stubble darkening along his jaw. Eyes bloodshot in a way no amount of money had ever been able to prevent.
He gripped the edge of the marble sink and looked down at his own left hand.
The numbers were still there. An invitation, black ink on skin, smudged now but still legible. He pulled out his phone, and the screen lit the gloom of the bathroom as his thumb hovered over the keypad. He typed. Zero. Seven. Four.
He stopped. His eyes drifted from the mirror to the number and back again, and a long, suffocating beat of silence stretched between one heartbeat and the next.
His jaw tightened. The muscle in his cheek twitched once. He exhaled.
Then, one by one, he deleted the digits. Tap. Tap. Tap. The screen went black, and he set the phone down on the marble counter with the particular finality of a man closing a door he had only just discovered he wanted to walk through.
He turned on the tap. Cold water. He worked the soap into his palm and washed the ink from his skin, watching the black swirls turn grey and vanish down the drain, and told himself, as the last trace of her disappeared, that this was exactly what he had wanted all along.
He almost believed it.