Two things happened in the same week.
Graham bought me a suit.
He brought it up Monday morning. I was at my desk and he came by with the outside coffee and leaned on the edge, our usual configuration, him and the corner of my desk, and said, "There's an investor meeting Thursday. Bigger than the dinner. More formal. What are you planning to wear?"
I looked down at myself. One of the button-downs from before; tie, khakis ... the same they bought me before. "This," I said, because I didn't have anything else and we both knew it. The implication of his question was that it wasn't enough.
He looked at the shirt. Looked at the tie. Not cruelly. Just the way a person who wears good suits looks at a person who doesn't. With clarity.
I began to calculate how many frozen burritos an actual suit would cost me. Then, he said: "Come with me at lunch."
My heart skipped ... Lunch! The first time he'd invited me.
He drove me to a store on Madison I'd never been inside, I'd just walked past it. Everyone walks past stores like that. The windows had one jacket on display, no price tag, which tells you everything you need to know: It's either free, or it's stupidly expensive. And we all know it wasn't free.
Inside, the store smelled like good fabric and leather and the kind of air freshener that doesn't smell like air freshener, like they had some sort of wood and leather oil in the back they subtley pump through the HVAC. The associate – not salesperson, associate – was a tall woman with short hair and a measuring tape around her neck, and she said with a nod, "Graham. Good to see you."
Graham. First name. Because of course.
"He needs a suit," Graham said, gesturing at me. "Something that fits him properly."
"I can't afford this," I said, quietly, hoping the associate didn't hear. I'd lost count after my head got up to two months' worth of frozen burritos.
"Business expense. The firm needs you presentable for client-facing events." He said it in the voice he'd used to close deals at the dinner, the one that didn't invite discussion. I didn't discuss it, I just gulped, and looked at the associate.
I tried on three suits. The associate pulled them from racks with a confidence that suggested she could size a person from across the room, which she probably could. The first was charcoal and too boxy. The second was navy and fine – I love blue. The third was dark gray, almost the same shade as the charcoal but with something different in the cut ... slimmer, more deliberate, and when I put it on and the associate pinned the shoulders and the waist and I looked in the mirror, I saw someone I didn't recognize. Someone who could sit at a table with Catherine and the gold-cufflink guy and not be the youngest, poorest person in the room.
I almost felt like I should be singing "The Rain in Spain," and my heart fluttered, skipping ahead to whether I'd be singing "I Could Have Danced All Night."
Graham was behind me. I could see him in the mirror. He was sitting in a leather chair the store had for this purpose, for men who brought other people to be dressed, and he was watching me in the mirror. Not the suit. Me. My reflection. His legs were crossed and his arm was along the armrest and there was nothing casual about how still he was. He was absorbing this. The way I looked. What he'd done to me.
I was looking at his reflection looking at mine and for a few seconds nobody spoke. He stood. And he walked over to me and stood not right behind me, but slightly to the side. Both hands landed on my shoulders, and his face betrayed nothing while my knees struggled to stay firm.
"This one," he said. Quiet. Like he was saying something else.
The associate smiled. She knew. I don't know how but she knew. Something about the way she looked between us when she brought the shirts, a flick of the eyes that was knowing without being judgmental. She'd dressed men in this store before, for the men sitting in that chair, and she recognized the arrangement.
We got the suit, two shirts, a tie. Real silk. The associate boxed everything. The total was on a screen I didn't look at because I didn't want to know. Graham paid with a card and signed something and we left with the bags and I carried them to the Audi and I didn't know what I felt. Grateful. Uncomfortable. Owned? Something about being chosen and fitted and watched in a mirror by a man whose opinion of how I looked mattered to me more than my own.
Thursday came. The meeting.
I changed in the office bathroom. I hung my shirt on the hook on the back of the stall door and put on the new suit piece by piece. But when I was taking things out, I saw a few more items. Graham must've slipped them to the associate when I was looking away: Three silk underwear. One boxers, one briefs, and one ... did that store even sell those? I looked again. Was it really a thong? He must've slipped it in the bag from somewhere else. And if he did, what did that mean?
I put on the boxers, the pants, then the shirt. The shirt was white and crisp and fit my shoulders exactly. The jacket. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror under the fluorescent lights, and even with bad lighting I looked different. I looked like someone who worked here. I looked like someone Graham would want next to him at the office, for business work.
And without thinking, my eyes glanced down to the bag, and I rearranged things so my old clothes were on top ... I looked like someone Graham would want next to him in bed. That had to be it. This wasn't me spiraling, this was clear as day, clear as the package that tiny piece of fabric was in.
That thought landed and I let it sit there.
I was done pretending it wasn't what this was.
When I came out, Graham was in the hallway. He was heading toward the conference room and he stopped. Full stop. Looked at me. His eyes went from my face down to the suit and back up and something crossed his face that he didn't hide fast enough. Want. That's what it was. I'd been studying this man for weeks and I knew his expressions like I knew the mitten stain and the bus schedule and the smell of his office. That was want.
"Come here," he said.
I went to him. Fourteen steps down the hallway.
He reached for my tie. His hands were at my throat ... no, not on my throat, at the knot of the tie, adjusting. Pulling the silk through to straighten it. His fingers were careful and specific. He knew how to do this. He'd done this for himself 10,000 times, every morning, tie and collar and knot, but he was doing it for me now, standing in the hallway of his firm with the conference room twenty feet away and people inside waiting.
He smoothed the collar. His fingertips moved from the tie to the collar and then they were on my neck. On the skin below my ear. Again. Not light this time. Deliberate. His thumb found the same spot it had found behind my desk that night, the nape, and pressed. His other fingers were on the side of my throat and I could feel my pulse against his hand and he could feel it too. There was no way he couldn't feel it racing.
"You clean up well," he said. Low. Just for me. His eyes were on my mouth again, the same way they'd been in the Morrison doorway, except this time he wasn't checking if I was hurt. He was looking because he wanted to look. And I was letting him because I wanted to be looked at.
My body froze, while my brain sung. "I'll never know what made it so exciting / Why all at once my heart took flight."
It wasn't the way I'd frozen before, not the headlights freeze. This was different. This was standing completely still because if I moved I was going to close the tiny gap between us and kiss him in the hallway of his firm and I knew that and he knew that I knew that he knew that ... and his hand was on my neck and neither of us was pretending this was about the tie.
He read it. Whatever he saw on my face – the want, the fear, the fact that I was vibrating in place with the effort of not moving – he read it. And after a second his hand dropped. He stepped back. His expression reset to professional so smoothly it was like a door closing. Like, he'd had practice?
"There," he said. "Let's go. They're waiting."
He walked toward the conference room. I stood in the hallway for another second. Then I followed. Because what else was there? What else is there when a man touches your neck and you stand there wanting him so badly your teeth ache and then he walks away and you're in a hallway in a suit he bought you and your skin is still burning where his fingers were.
I don't remember the meeting. I sat in a chair. I held a pen. I had a legal pad, and I'm sure notes were taken. But all I had was the ghost of his fingers and the look on his face before he'd covered it and the certain, undeniable knowledge that Graham Mercer wanted me the same way I wanted him, and we were both standing at the edge of something and neither of us had stepped off yet.
That was the first thing.
The second thing was Jett.
I'd noticed him around since the first day. The jaw, the haircut, the shoes. He worked in project coordination and he was good at it, from what I could tell. People treated him with the casual respect you give someone who's competent and knows it. We'd been nodding at each other in the kitchen for weeks. Polite. Nothing.
But after the tie, I caught him watching. Not me directly. The space between me and Graham. Watching. His face was doing something complicated when he looked at Graham's office, and then at me, and then back. I couldn't read it. I filed it under "office politics" and moved on. Above my paygrade.
He was in the kitchen when I went for water. I was still in the suit. Probably looked different enough from my normal self that it was noticeable. To people who notice clothes. He was leaning against the counter with a protein shake in a branded cup from some place that probably charged $12 for blended kale with grass clippings.
"Nice suit," he said. "That's new."
"Yeah."
"Graham pick that out for you?"
Something was under the words. I couldn't identify it exactly. In hindsight, it was like a hook in the water. A thing that was shaped like a question but was actually a statement.
"It's for the meeting," I said.
"Sure." He smiled. But it wasn't really a smile. It had the shape of one, the muscles doing the right thing, but none of the temperature. Like a photograph of a smile instead of the real thing. "Graham's very generous with his favorites."
He pushed off the counter and walked out.
It was one sentence. But that one sentence had shattered something inside.
I stood in the kitchen holding a paper cup of water. Something cold and heavy settled in my stomach. I didn't know what had just happened. Not specifically. But I knew the feeling of being warned, and I knew the feeling of someone who was angry about something they couldn't control, and Jett was both of those things.
I went back to my desk. I took off the jacket and loosened the tie, they were strangling.
I didn't look at Graham's office.
For the first time in weeks, I didn't look.
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