Chapter 10: Silk and Danger

The boxes arrived the next morning.

Not one box. Not two. Seven of them, stacked neatly outside my apartment door in the narrow hallway of my building where they looked so aggressively out of place against the peeling wallpaper and the flickering corridor light that my neighbor Mrs. Patterson opened her door, looked at them, looked at me, and then closed her door again without a word like she had decided whatever was happening was above her pay grade.

I stood in my doorway in my sleep shirt and stared at them.

Each box was cream colored with a single ribbon in a shade of dark green that probably had a French name I would never know. No logos. No branding. The kind of packaging that was so understated it communicated more about price than any logo could have.

There was a card tucked beneath the ribbon of the top box.

I picked it up.

Nine days. You said you had appropriate clothes. I decided not to argue. D.

I stood there holding the card and doing battle with the two completely contradictory things happening inside me simultaneously. The first was an indignation that was entirely genuine. I was not a woman who could be managed. I was not someone who could be handled and arranged and dressed like a doll by a man who had decided he knew better regardless of how much money he had or how his voice sounded at its lowest register in a quiet room.

The second thing was considerably less dignified and involved the fact that he had thought about me enough to do this. Had sat somewhere last night, in that apartment with the sketchpad and the books with broken spines, and had thought specifically about me and what I would wear and had made this happen before I had even had my morning coffee.

I brought the boxes inside.

I told myself I was only opening them to assess what I was dealing with. To make an informed decision about whether to send them back.

I opened the first box.

The dress inside was the color of midnight. Deep blue, almost black, in a fabric that moved between my fingers like water, like something that had been made from the idea of luxury rather than the reality of it. I held it up in the light from my kitchen window and it caught the pale morning sun and did something complicated and beautiful with it.

I sat down on my kitchen floor holding it.

Not because I was overcome. I was a practical woman and I did not get overcome by clothing. I sat down because my legs made the decision and the rest of me followed and I sat there on the cold linoleum of my Bronx apartment kitchen surrounded by cream colored boxes and held a dress that cost more than three months of my rent and thought about a man sitting alone in his apartment drawing pictures of his son.

I opened the rest of the boxes on the floor.

Three more dresses. Two pairs of shoes that fit perfectly which meant he had somehow obtained my size and I was going to think about that later. A coat in soft camel wool that I put on immediately over my sleep shirt and stood in my bathroom mirror looking at because it transformed me in a way that was almost unsettling. And at the bottom of the last box, wrapped in tissue paper, something that was not a dress or a shoe.

A scarf. Pale gold. Simple and soft and so clearly chosen by someone who had been thinking about a specific person rather than a general concept of a person that I had to put it down and walk to my kitchen and stand at the window looking at the street below for a full minute before I trusted myself to pick it back up.

I called him.

He answered on the second ring.

“The boxes arrived,” I said.

“I assumed they would,” he said. His voice was morning again. That slightly unassembled version I was going to have to stop cataloguing.

“I told you I had clothes.”

“You did.”

“So you understand why I’m calling to tell you to send them back.”

A pause. “Are you going to send them back?”

I looked at the midnight blue dress laid across my kitchen table.

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“Mia.”

“Stop saying my name like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like you already know what I’m going to do before I do it.”

A silence that was warm somehow. The kind of silence that had texture to it.

“Keep the clothes,” he said. “The first dinner is in eight days. My assistant will send the details this afternoon.”

“I haven’t decided to keep them yet.”

“Yes you have,” he said simply.

He was right and we both knew it and the fact that he was right and knew it and said so without any arrogance, just a quiet certainty that was somehow more devastating than arrogance would have been, made me grip the phone slightly harder than necessary.

“How did you know my size,” I said.

“Your apron,” he said. “When you untied it in the restaurant. I noticed.”

I stood in my kitchen and said nothing for a moment because there was nothing to say to that. The man had looked at me untying an apron and filed away information my own mother would not have known without asking and had then used it to choose clothes that fit me perfectly and I needed to sit with how deeply uncomfortable that made me feel and how completely it failed to make me feel uncomfortable at all.

“Eight days,” I said finally.

“Eight days,” he confirmed.

He hung up without goodbye again and I stood there with my dead phone against my ear and the camel wool coat still on over my sleep shirt and made myself a promise that I was going to be professional and composed and completely in control of myself for the next twelve weeks.

Eight days later I believed not one word of that promise.

The car arrived at seven. I was ready at six forty five which I would never admit to anyone. I was wearing the midnight blue dress and the camel coat and one of the pairs of shoes which fit so perfectly I had forgiven him for knowing my size somewhere around day three.

Rosa had come over to do my hair and had spent forty minutes on it and then stepped back and looked at me and said absolutely nothing for five seconds which was the most meaningful thing she had ever communicated to me.

In the car I sat with my hands folded in my lap and watched the city slide past and told myself I was prepared. I had googled the guest list his assistant had sent. Twelve people. Old money and new money and the particular hybrid of both that appeared in New York when industries intersected. I had looked up topics. I had practiced the easy confidence that Rosa insisted I had naturally and only suppressed out of habit.

I was prepared.

The car stopped.

The driver opened my door and I stepped out onto the pavement and looked up at the building and felt my prepared confidence make a quiet exit.

And then the lobby doors opened and Damien walked out.

He had clearly come down to meet me, which was not something I had expected, and the sight of him walking toward me in a dark suit with his eyes finding me immediately and doing that thing they did where they moved across my face like they were reading something written specifically for him made every prepared thought I had exit my mind in an orderly single file line.

He stopped in front of me.

For a moment he said nothing. Just looked at me in the midnight blue dress with an expression that was composed and controlled and underneath the composure was something that was neither of those things at all. Something that moved behind his eyes like heat behind glass.

“You look,” he said, and then stopped.

I waited.

“You look like you belong here,” he said finally.

It was not what he had started to say. We both knew it. The word he had stopped himself from saying sat in the air between us unspoken and somehow louder than anything he had actually said.

He offered me his arm.

I took it.

And the moment my hand settled into the crook of his elbow and I felt the warmth of him through the dark fabric and he looked down at me with those steady eyes and said quietly, just for me, “stay close,” something shifted between us that I understood with absolute clarity could not be unshifted.

We walked inside.

The dinner was elegant and warm and the other guests were exactly what the research had prepared me for. I held conversations. I laughed at the right moments. I felt Damien beside me all evening, not hovering, not managing, just present in that particular gravitational way of his that made me constantly aware of exactly where he was in the room even when I was not looking at him.

He touched me twice.

Once, his hand at the small of my back guiding me through a narrow doorway between rooms. Brief and light and gone in a second but my entire nervous system registered it like a current.

The second time we were standing with two other guests and someone said something that made me laugh genuinely and he turned to look at me and without seeming to think about it he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

The conversation continued around us.

But his fingers lingered at my jaw for one breath longer than the gesture required.

And when he lowered his hand his eyes met mine and what was in them was not the careful composed expression he gave to everything else.

It was hunger. Clean and direct and very deliberately not hidden.

Later, in the car home, we sat in the warm dark leather quiet of the backseat and the city moved past the windows and neither of us spoke for a long time.

Then his hand found mine in the dark between us on the seat.

Not reaching. Not dramatic. Just his hand covering mine with a warmth that was gentle and certain and asked nothing.

I did not move away.

I looked out the window at the city lights blurring past and felt the weight of his hand over mine and the warmth of him beside me in the dark and understood that somewhere between a rainy street in the Bronx and a midnight blue dress and a man who drew his sleeping son in a sketchpad, I had stopped pretending that this was only business.

The car stopped outside my building.

I turned to look at him.

He was already looking at me. In the dim light of the car his eyes were very dark and very close and the hunger I had seen at the dinner table had not gone anywhere. It was right there, steady and patient and waiting with the particular quality of someone who had decided on something and was simply allowing time to confirm it.

“Goodnight Damien,” I said. My voice came out softer than I intended.

He raised my hand from the seat between us. Slowly. And pressed his lips to my knuckles with a deliberateness that made my breath stop completely. Warm and unhurried and devastating in its simplicity.

He lowered my hand.

“Goodnight Mia,” he said.

I got out of the car.

I made it through my building lobby and into the elevator and all the way to my apartment door before my back found the wall and I stood there in the midnight blue dress with my hand pressed against my chest feeling my own heartbeat hammering wild and fast beneath my palm.

My knuckles were still warm where his mouth had been.

I stood there for a long time.

And then my phone buzzed in my clutch and I pulled it out expecting Rosa demanding a full report.

It was not Rosa.

It was a photograph. Sent from a number I did not recognize. A photograph of me and Damien in the lobby of the building tonight, taken from outside through the glass, grainy and slightly blurred the way photographs taken in secret always were.

Beneath it, four words.

I warned you. Leave.