Page 53 of Hostile

“One drink. The bar downstairs.” He held my gaze. “Not a negotiation. Not a board meeting. Just a drink.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

Just a drink.

“One,” I said.

The bar was quiet at this hour—a Monday evening, the after-work crowd thinning toward the comfortable emptiness that made conversation easy. We took a corner table without discussing it, the same instinct guiding both of us. I ordered club soda because I needed my head clear, and he ordered Scotch neat because, apparently, some things hadn’t changed.

We didn’t talk about the symposium. We didn’t talk about the acquisition, the board, Blair’s fourteen million dollars, or any of the architecture that had dominated every professional interaction we’d had over the last six weeks.

We talked like we used to.

That was the thing I hadn’t planned for. Not the drink. I’d agreed to the drink with my eyes open, aware of the risk and calculating it manageable. What I hadn’t planned for was how quickly the professional distance collapsed once the corporate context was removed. How fast we found the old frequency, the one that had been running between us since a parking lot in Savannah, the one I’d spent ten years insisting I’d turned off.

He told me about the Charleston project. Not the financials—the real thing. The mixed-use development, the neighborhood it was meant to serve, and the specific problem it was designed to solve for a community that had been overlooked by every developer who’d come before. He talked about it the way he’d talked about contract law in a Cambridge café—with the focused enthusiasm of someone who had finally found what they were truly interested in and couldn’t quite contain it.

I asked questions. Real ones. The kind that required him to go deeper, to think beyond the presentation version to the substance beneath.

He answered all of them.

At some point, one club soda became a second, and his Scotch became a second, and the bar grew quieter around us, and neither of us mentioned leaving.

“You never asked me why I transferred,” he said.

I looked at him. “I assumed.”

“What did you assume?”

“That it wasn’t an accident.”

He held my gaze. “It wasn’t.” He paused before continuing. “I transferred because you were there. I told my father I wanted a different program and let him believe the reasons he wanted to believe. I transferred because you were there, and I wasn’t ready to let the parking lot be our whole story. Two years of watching you from across that lot in Savannah, never once finding the nerve to cross it. I wasn’t going to let that be all we got.”

The bar was very quiet.

“That’s—” I stopped.

“I know.” He turned his glass a quarter rotation. “I know it’s a lot to put on someone who hadn’t agreed to any of it. I’m not saying it to—” He stopped, looked at the table. “I just never said it out loud. I thought you should know.”

I looked at him across the small table in the quiet bar, at the man who had transferred colleges to follow a girl from a parking lot and had spent thirty years of his life being exactly who he seemed, and felt something in my chest shift in a way I hadn’t budgeted for.

Don’t, I told myself.

I didn’t listen.

We left together when the bar closed, which was later than I’d planned, stepping out into a December night that had turned wet while we were inside. Not heavy rain—the thin, persistent kind, the sort that got into everything without announcing itself. The kind that had been falling the night he kissed me outside my dorm for the first time.

I noticed that. I wish I hadn’t.

We stood under the hotel awning for a moment, the city moving past in the rain, and I became aware that we were standing very close, that neither of us was moving toward a cab, that the evening had altered the professional distance I’d been maintaining, and that I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened or how to reconstruct it quickly enough.

“Walk with me,” he said.

“It’s raining.”

“I know.” He looked at me. “Walk with me anyway.”

I should have said no. I had a very good reason to say no—several of them, the same reasons I always had, stacked and ready. I said nothing instead, which was its own kind of answer. We stepped out from under the awning into the rain and walked.