Page 29 of The CEO’s Assistant

It wasn't ruined. Wren knew nothing about wine, but she could still tell that much. She drank it and didn't ask about the bottle or what Eleanor had been saving it for. They ate at the same corner of the long dining table since the rest of it was still covered under the many files. Cordelia asked about Mildred, and Wren told her about the ferrets. There had been two of them, and her grandmother had named them after senators.

Cordelia laughed so suddenly that she put a hand over her mouth. "Why senators?"

"She said they had the faces for it."

"That's slander."

"She was ninety-one, and she said whatever she liked. It was the best thing about her."

Cordelia turned her glass on the table. "What was the second best?"

"She never asked me why I was there."

Wren hadn't meant to say it. She heard it land. Cordelia stopped turning the glass and looked at her. Wren wasn’t sure if the torrential rain had suddenly increased its fervor or if it just sounded louder in their silence.

"Wren?"

"Yes?"

When Cordelia opened her mouth, the lights flickered then winked out. They came back a few minutes later, dimmed and then fully bright. The refrigerator shuddered on again, and the wind came across the headland and something on the porch went over.

Despite there being a dishwasher, they cleaned the dishes by hand—Cordelia washed, Wren dried. Cordelia had her sleeves shoved past the elbow and her forearms submerged in the water, and the steam came up off the water into the loose part of her hair at the temple. She pushed the hair back with her shoulder. Wren dried a plate and set it in the rack and took the next one, feeling the heat off Cordelia’s arm and the wet cotton of her shirt where it had soaked through at the front.

"You didn't eat much," Cordelia said.

"I ate."

"You moved it around the plate." She handed over a glass to Wren.

Their fingers brushed against each other on the stem and neither of them made anything of it. It happened again on the next one. The third time, Cordelia's fingers stayed where they were a moment past the point of the handover and then let go. Wren dried that glass very slowly and set it down without looking at her. The wind took something on the porch and rolled it the length of the boards. Neither of them looked up.

Wren became aware, somewhere in the quiet, that the pan in the sink had already been washed. She had watched it go in. Cordelia was doing it again, unhurried, running the sponge over the same clean surface, her head down. She wasn't going to look over at Wren.

"Cordelia."

She stopped. For a second, nothing happened at all, only the water running and the rain slanting hard against the window. Then Cordelia set the pan down in the sink, gently, and left her hands where they were, under the surface of the water, and said, "Wren."

"I'm here." Her voice came out quieter than she had planned.

She turned her head, just enough that Wren could see the side of her face, and it was there, whatever it had been all night, at the table and at the wine rack and over the plates. It was right there and it was enormous and she was trying to get it out.

Ask her.

It had been sitting in Wren since the afternoon, and she could have said it in one breath. What am I building? Who is it for?

But she didn't. Cordelia had chosen her because she was the woman who did the work without asking questions. That was what she was in this house. If she asked, she'd stop being who Cordelia needed her to be. Wren put the dish towel down on the counter and let the urge pass. Eventually, it did.

"I didn't bring you up here for the file," Cordelia said.

"I know."

"You're not surprised?"

"No."

Cordelia lifted her hands out of the water. She dried them badly on the towel over her shoulder without fully turning around. Wren looked at the back of her neck, at the two inches of skin below her hair and above the collar, and she was close enough to put her mouth on it. The desire was overwhelming. She closed the last of the distance and stopped near enough that the heat came through the back of Cordelia's shirt, near enough to feel Cordelia inhale then hold it without exhaling.

Neither of them moved. The tap was still running, and Cordelia reached over and shut it off. The kitchen went quiet enough that Wren could hear the rain on the roof two floors up, and then Cordelia turned around. Her eyes roved over Wren's face like she was looking for something she'd lost there, and her mouth was open a little, and she was breathing wrong. Then she brought her hand up and put it along Wren's jaw. Wren closed her eyes against the physical contact, and she focused all of her sensory attention to that one spot where Cordelia touched her. She could feel the water on Cordelia's skin cooling against her own. She could feel her pulse where the fingers were.