Page 40

"Take it or- wait what?"

"Oh, I'm taking it, baby. I took it before you finished the sentence."

Something in her shoulders drops. Tension leaving her body as she looks down at her hands and laughs — small, shaky, relieved.

"That was easier than I thought."

"You expected a negotiation?"

"I expected a Danny. A 'the situation required immediate action' speech. Bullet points. Maybe a slide."

"I considered the speech. I had forty minutes. I had drafts and everything."

"Oh yeah? What happened to them?"

"You walked through the door."

She goes still and looks up at me.

"Danny."

"I'm in love with you, Anna."

The words fall out of my mouth raw with no preamble, no draft, no structure — just out, into the empty club.

"I've known for a while. Since the corridor, maybe. Definitely since the receipt — I wrote eight words on the back of a receipt and drafted them in my phone four times, who fucking does that. I'm in love with you and I've been managing it like a project because that's the only way I know how to hold anything. But I don't want to manage it anymore. So. There it is. Unmanaged."

Silence.

Anna stares at me. Her mouth opens. Closes.

"You rewrote the receipt four times," she says.

"That's your takeaway?"

"There were drafts of the receipt?"

"Anna."

"I'm in love with you too, you absolute lunatic, obviously."

And then she's out of her chair.

She comes around the table and I'm standing as she grabs my shirt and kisses me, and it's nothing like the bar or the corridor or the Gala. Those had a wall in them somewhere. A held-back thing. This has nothing held back. She kisses me like the conversation broke a dam and I kiss her back the same way, my hands in her hair, wrecking it, her body pressing me into the edge of the table hard enough that the Yamazaki wobbles.

I reach back blind and move the glass.

"Priorities," she breathes against my mouth, laughing.

"It's a twenty-five-year-old whiskey."

"Shut up." She pulls my shirt out of my waistband. Her hands go under it, flat against my stomach, cold from the night air, and I hiss and she grins against my jaw like she's won something. "We're in the middle of the club."

"Club's closed."

"There are cameras."

"I'll wipe the footage."