Page 5 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“You are the real host running this party.” His voice is gravelly low and unhurried, and there’s a formality under the American in it. He looks at the stain again, then at me, and something shifts behind the pale eyes. “You can clean me up. In my room. Now.”

The party continues without us. The quartet is still playing, the fountain is still burbling, four hundred people are still grinding crumbs into marble, and this man has just said that and turned toward the terrace-side elevators. He gestures once, two fingers, without checking whether or not I’ll follow.

I’m supposed to handle him. Those are my instructions from my boss, the CEO. And what this man wants, apparently, is stain removal.

I follow him. I mean, really, what choice do I have?

The elevator has mirrors on three sides, which means I ride twelve floors with extra copies of myself, and all of us are wearing the face of a woman making a decision she’s decided not to look at directly. He stands beside me, hands loose at his sides, watching the numbers climb.

Someone should say something. Statistically, that someone is me.

“So… Are you in town for business?”

A pause opens up, long enough to hold a federal holiday. “Yes.”

“That’s nice. Business.” The numbers climb. Four. Five. “I’m local. Queens. Well, from Pennsylvania originally, but Queens now. You know what they say, you’re not a real New Yorker until you’ve cried on three different subway lines.” I’m usually better at small talk than this. It’s a part of my job. But I’m in an elevator with a stranger, a super-hot silver fox I’ve embarrassed, and I cannot shut up. “I don’t say things like that normally,” I add. “The subway thing. That was the wine talking.”

He turns his head and considers me. Those blue eyes of his might as well be two frozen ponds. His face gives me nothing. No smile, no frown, not even the polite dead-eyed nod that strangers deploy in elevators. He examines me the way he examined the stain, patiently, and I cannot tell if he hates me or if he’s into me. “The wine has been talking all evening, hasn’t it?”

Seven. Eight.

I open my mouth to speak, but what is there to say? He’s not wrong. I just told him that. Also, the corner of his mouth has moved. Not a smile. A rumor of one, suppressed fast, and my stomach does something unprofessional. I didn’t know a granite face like his could smile or even hint at smiling.

“Max,” he says.

“What?”

“You’ll want something to call me. Max is sufficient.”

“Thea.” The doors open on twelve.

The hallway is hushed and carpeted and expensive, and he leads me to the end of it. The penthouse, because, of course, it’s the penthouse. I priced this penthouse last spring for a visiting board member and was told to find something more reasonable.

The lock reads his card. He pushes one door open and holds it for me to walk through, and for a moment, the narrator in my head questions whether I’m sure about this.

We are not sure. We are going in anyway. Handle him. That’s the job.

Inside, the city fills a wall of glass, and the room is dim and enormous. Gold-flowered wallpaper line the opposite walls. A subtle pattern. Above us, a gold and pearl chandelier set to glow. The plush carpet isn’t white, like in a cheap hotel. It’s warm, a shade darker than ivory.

The room is inviting, but it appears he didn’t reply to the invitation.

One garment bag over a chair. A closed laptop on the desk, squared to the edge. A watch case. No suitcase in sight, no shoes by the door, none of the debris a normal person sheds into a room within an hour of holding a key. Either he lives off nothing, or the rest of his life arrives separately.

He doesn’t inhabit the space. He’s merely here.

“The bathroom is there.” He nods toward a door, already shrugging out of the ruined jacket. “There will be cloths.”

“Right.” I detour into a bathroom bigger than my kitchen, collect two washcloths, and grab the club soda off the minibar on my way back.

He has his back to the window, unbuttoning the shirt, matter-of-fact about it, a man dealing with damaged equipment. Then the shirt comes off, and I stop in the middle of the room and recalibrate.

I had registered that he was fit, distantly, the way you register that a bridge is load bearing. Up close is different. He’s broad and hard-built, silver dusting his chest, and there’s ink across his shoulder and down his ribs, dark work with a star in it, blurred at the edges by time.

Oh, and there are scars.

A pale seam along his side. A round, puckered mark below his collarbone that my brain identifies before I can veto the identification, because I grew up around my uncle’s hunting rifles, and I know what bullet holes look like.

Whatever this man does in business, I don’t think it’s consulting.