The room got very still.
"You attached your name to a file you know is wrong," I went on, "and you did it in the one format that makes the wrongness expensive for someone else to raise. That isn’t loyalty and it isn’t sentiment. That’s the best work anyone did in this room today and I’m the only person who’s going to say it out loud, because your mother is going to call you tonight and ask you what you were thinking."
Petra Lang did not cry. I want to be clear about that, because whatever happened to her face was not that. Her eyes went glassy for about a second and a half and then she got it back under management, and the effort of getting it back was more naked than the slip.
"She’ll call at nine," she said. "She always calls at nine on Fridays."
"What are you going to tell her?"
"That her daughter negotiated an observation agreement with her own agency of record and got favorable terms." The words came out steady and then the last three cracked in the middle, and she heard it happen, and her ears went from pink to something closer to arterial. "Which is true."
"It’s true."
"It’s not the whole answer."
"No."
She set the page down on the table. Squared it with the edge, which was the tell, because she squares things when she wants her hands occupied.
"You were supposed to let Fitzgerald run the language." Her voice found its footing again, and with the footing came the edge. "That was the arrangement. You were also supposed to arrive early, which you did, and wear a collar, which you did, and then you spent forty minutes being disarmingly honest at a woman who came here specifically to determine whether you were coached, and it worked, and I hate that it worked."
"You hate that it worked or you hate that I did it without asking you."
"Naturally I hate both. They aren’t mutually exclusive."
"Then say the second one."
"I’m not doing this with you." She came off the window and walked toward the table, heeled boots hitting the floor like punctuation, and she stopped closer than the conversation required. Close enough that I got the botanical cleanser she uses and had to make a decision about my own posture. "You do this. You take a sentence I’ve said and you turn it over and hand it back with the ugly side facing up and then you look at me like you’re waiting for me to thank you for it."
"I’m not waiting for anything."
"You are waiting. That’s the entire technique."
I stood up. Slow, so it read as standing and not as anything else, and she did not step back, which was information.
"Here’s what I actually came up here for." I kept it at conversational volume, because volume is imprecision and because she leans in when I go quiet, and I have known that about her since Building C. "You asked me Wednesday to stop the distance and the tone and the specificity. I said no. I said I’d keep it out of the conference room."
Her breath went shallow. "We’re in the conference room."
"We’re in the conference room after the meeting."
"That’s semantics."
"That’s a loophole. I like loopholes, I’m registered under one."
She made a sound in the back of her throat that she did not authorize. Small, caught, humiliated on arrival. Her hand came up to my chest, flat, the way you brace a door, and stayed there without pushing.
"I loathe you," she informed me.
"You’ve mentioned."
"You’re arrogant and manipulative and you weaponize sincerity, and the worst part, the genuinely intolerable part, is that the sincerity is real, which means there’s nothing to accuse you of." Her fingers curled into my shirt. Not much. Enough. "Every time I decide what you are you become something else. Do you know how inconvenient that is for a person who organizes her entire life around accurate assessment."
"Petra."
"Don’t."
"Petra."
Her eyes came up and whatever framework she had been holding together since eleven at night on Wednesday came apart at the seams, and she kissed me.
It was not graceful. She came up on her toes and got my jaw with her free hand and pulled, and our mouths landed slightly wrong, teeth grazing, a sharp little mmph against my lips that she absolutely did not mean to make. Then she corrected the angle with the same ruthlessness she brings to everything, and the second attempt was so much better that my hands moved before I decided anything.
I got her waist. She got both hands in my hair and pulled hard enough to sting.
"Mm. Mmnn." She broke off half an inch, breathing through her mouth, flush spreading down her throat and disappearing under the collar. "You’ve done this more than I have."
"That’s not a question."
"It wasn’t. I’m noting it for the record. Shut up."
I walked her backward two steps until the edge of the conference table caught her at the hips, and she made a startled little ah when it did, and then she was sitting on it with her hands fisted in my shirt and her knees coming apart to bring me in. The blazer went first. She shrugged out of it herself, threw it somewhere behind her without looking, and the regulation white shirt underneath had already lost the top button in the transaction.
Her mouth found my throat. Teeth. Deliberately over the collar line where nobody would see, which was the most Petra Lang thing that had happened all day.
"Nnh. God." Her voice had dropped into a register I had never heard from her, thick and unmanaged, and it hit somewhere in my spine. "Your pulse is at a hundred and twelve."
"You counting."
"I count everything." Her hips rolled forward against me, once, involuntary, and she froze when she felt what she’d found. Then she did it again on purpose, slow, and a whimper came out of her that she tried to bite down on halfway through. "Mmf. Oh."