What had she done wrong? She’d shown up on Saturday looking pretty put together in that emerald jumpsuit. She’d charmed Elizabeth’s colleagues. She’d navigated the surprise of Grace walking through the door by pulling Elizabeth into the garden.
She’d been, by any reasonable metric, exactly what Elizabeth had hired her to be. Better, even. Sonia had used the wordradiant. James had used the wordlucky.
Okay, but also.Kelsey shifted in the leather seat, pressing her shoulder blade against the cool window.Also, her ex-wife is getting married tonight.
Whatever Elizabeth was feeling this week, it probably wasn’t all about Kelsey. Grace was marrying Charlotte in a few hours, and Elizabeth was driving to watch it happen, and no amount of contractual fake-girlfriend armor could make that painless. The woman she’d been married to, the woman she’d built a life with, was about to stand in front of a hundred and fifty people and say vows to someone new, and Elizabeth was going to sit and witness it and pretend it didn’t reach in and pull out something vital.
That had to be why she was quiet. That had to be why the week had been a void. Elizabeth was grieving, or steeling herself, or whatever a person like Elizabeth did instead of falling apart, which was probably working eighty hours and eating lunch at her desk and pretending the upcoming Saturday was just another calendar entry.
The highway opened up ahead of them, flat and straight, and Kelsey should have been watching it.
Instead, she was watching Elizabeth’s hands.
She’d been watching Elizabeth’s hands for months across a coffee counter. The way she held a cup, the way her fingers tapped once against the lid before she turned and left. Now those same hands were wrapped around a steering wheel two feet away and Kelsey could see every detail she’d only guessed at from the other side of the register. Short clean nails. The thin silver ring on her index finger catching the light every time she adjusted the turn signal.
Last night at the party those hands had been on Kelsey’s back, five fingers pressing heat through her jumpsuit while Elizabeth introduced her to someone whose name was just gone now, completely gone, because every functioning part of Kelsey’s brain had collapsed to the warmth of that palm between her shoulder blades and stayed there. And later, in the hallway, those same fingers straightening the chain of Kelsey’s necklace, two fingertips grazing her collarbone, brief and efficient and probably meaningless. Kelsey had replayed that graze six times before she fell asleep, lying in her bed in Queens with her own fingers pressed to the spot, trying to hold the warmth there like something she could keep.
That’s not normal behavior. You know that, right.
Her eyes moved up Elizabeth’s forearm. She couldn’t stop them. Olive skin the shift of tendon when her grip changed. Elizabeth merged into a tight gap in traffic without hesitating, no frantic mirror-checking, no second-guessing, just a calm shift of her hands, the tension in her forearm visible for a second before it smoothed out, and the car slid into the lane. Kelsey’s stomach did something unhelpful.
Great. Even her driving. Even that is impossibly attractive.
Elizabeth was wearing a white linen shirt. The sleeves were rolled to the elbow. The wind through the cracked window pressed the fabric flat against her side for a second, pulling it along the line of her waist, the shape of her underneath, andKelsey tracked that with her eyes like there was going to be a test on it later. Two buttons undone at the collar. A precise V of open linen, the hollow at the base of her throat sitting right there in the center of it. A shallow dip that deepened when she swallowed.
Kelsey wanted to put her mouth on it.
Not later. Not in theory. Right now.
She wanted to lean across the console and press her lips to that spot and feel the pulse underneath and find out what Elizabeth’s skin tasted like, warm from the sun, and the thought landed so hard and so specific that heat flooded up from her chest into her face and she had to turn toward the window.
Highway. Trees. Guardrail.
Look at the road. Look at anything else. Literally anything.
She looked at Elizabeth’s profile instead because she was apparently incapable of following a single instruction her own brain gave her. The oversized sunglasses hid Elizabeth’s eyes, those eyes Kelsey knew from a hundred mornings at the register, and without them visible everything else got sharper. The line of her jaw. The angle of her cheekbone. Her dark hair was down, brushing her shoulders.
Kelsey’s fingers twitched in her lap.
Saturday night had done this. Taken the manageable, survivable crush she’d been carrying since October and blown it wide open. Because Saturday night Elizabeth had laughed at something Kelsey said, and the sound had been so unguarded, so completely different from her usual control, that Kelsey had felt something shift in her chest and not shift back.
Later she’d watched from across the room while Elizabeth talked to James Harrington. Taking in the way Elizabeth changed when she was in her element. Taller. Her voice low and precise. One hand moving, the other holding her glass still. Completely certain. Completely herself. And Kelsey had stoodthere with a drink she’d forgotten she was holding and the thought had come through clean and cold:I want her so much it’s making me stupid and this weekend is going to ruin me.
The GPS said something about staying left. Elizabeth adjusted the wheel with two fingers. The silver ring caught the light again.
This was Kelsey’s last day. Tonight was the wedding. Tomorrow was the brunch. And then the drive home, and the contract would be fulfilled, and Kelsey would go back to 72 & Brew, and Elizabeth would either come back as a customer or she wouldn’t, and either way the thing that existed between them right now, this strange, charged, contractual intimacy, would be over.
A few more hours. That was all Kelsey had left of this version of them, the version where she was allowed to sit close to her, where she could watch Elizabeth’s hands on the steering wheel and pretend it meant something, where the wordgirlfriendapplied to her even if it was fictional.
She was going to lose this. She could feel it already, the anticipatory grief of it, settling into her bones like a low-grade fever. By tomorrow afternoon she’d be back in her apartment in Astoria with a garment bag and a check for five thousand dollars and the memory of what it felt like to hold Elizabeth Moretti’s hand, and that memory would have to be enough, because it was all she was going to get.
Her reflection in the passenger window looked back at her. Flushed. Glassy-eyed. Completely obvious. She angled her face away before Elizabeth could glance over and see it.
You signed a contract. She’s paying you. You are being paid to hold this woman’s hand and look at her like you’re in love with her for one weekend and the problem, the actual problem, is that you’ve been doing it for free since October. You didn’tneed the contract. You didn’t need the money. You just needed her to ask.
Elizabeth’s jaw worked once, a small tension at the hinge, the muscle moving beneath her skin, and Kelsey watched it and thought, not for the first time, not for the fiftieth time:God, you’re beautiful, and I’m never going to have you.
15