Trapped In The Wrong Arms

"Some things you do without deciding. The deciding comes after, when it's too late to matter."

The Other Side Of The Room

Diane Cross had been on his contact list for two years before he called her for something like this. Juno explained it'd be better for him to attend the event with a plus one, preferably a lady.

She ran client relations for a property firm that intersected with Mercer Logistics on three separate contracts. When he'd called she'd listened to what he needed, named her rate for the evening, and shown up at his door at seven thirty in a dress that said she understood the assignment completely.

"You're doing that thing," Diane said beside him now, champagne in hand, eyes forward, voice low enough that only he could hear.

"What thing."

"The thing where you're in the room but you're not in the room." She took a small sip. "You've been doing it since we arrived."

"I'm here."

"Physically." She glanced at him sideways. "Someone important?"

He didn't answer. Diane nodded once, the nod of a woman filing something away without making it a conversation, and turned to greet someone approaching from their left. She was very good at this. He was glad he'd called her.

He kept his eyes forward.

Across the ballroom, in a black dress with her hair pinned the way he remembered from years he wasn't supposed to be counting, Selene Hale smiled at something a man in a grey suit said and looked, to every person in this room, completely fine.

He watched the smile.

Mrs Alderton brought her over at half nine and he was ready for it. He was composed, and they acted like strangers. No one would know she's woman he had once known better than anyone.

He kept looking at her, she was smiling at something someone was saying, but something was off about the smile. Had been since she'd walked back from wherever she'd disappeared to twenty minutes ago.

He knew that stillness. He'd worn it himself for five years.

He looked away.

Diane appeared at his elbow. "I'm going to find the ladies room," she said pleasantly. "Back in five."

He nodded. She moved away.

He stood alone for a few seconds, Then he set his glass down and went to find her.

She wasn't at the bar anymore.

He found her in the corridor off the east wing. She was standing with her back against the wall and her eyes closed and her champagne glass held in both hands like it was the only thing keeping her upright. She hadn't heard him coming. That alone told him something, Selene is quite sensitive and hear everything..

He stopped a few feet away.

"Hey," he said.

She opened her eyes.

She stared at him for a long time and finally said. "You shouldn't be back here,"

"Probably not."

She looked away. Something moved across her jaw, a tightening, a decision being made and unmade. "I'm fine," she said. "Go back to your evening."

"You're not fine."

"Cade......"

"You walked back into that ballroom twenty minutes ago and something was different." He kept his voice low. Even. "I don't know what happened. But I know your face."

She laughed a small, hollow sound that had nothing to do with amusement. "You knew my face. Five years ago."

"Some things don't change."

She looked at him then. Really looked, the way she hadn't let herself all evening, and he looked back and neither of them said anything for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.

"He was kissing someone," she said quietly. "In the car park. I went to find him and he was...." She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters."

"It doesn't change anything." Her voice was steady. He hated how steady it was. "Nothing about tonight changes anything."

"Selene....."

"Don't." The word came out sharp. Exhausted. "Don't say my name like that. Don't look at me like that. I can't....." She stopped again. Set the champagne glass down on the narrow ledge beside her.

He closed the distance between them.

Not all of it. Just enough.

"Tell me to go back," he said. Low. "Tell me and I'll go."

She didn't tell him to go back.

She looked up at him, at his jaw, his mouth, his eyes... Like she was deciding hard to make a decision she already knows the cost of, and then something in her broke open just enough, just a fraction, like a crack in someone who has been holding everything together all at once.

He kissed her.

Or she kissed him.

Afterward he couldn't have said which it was. Only that it happened the way necessary things happened, with the particular gravity of something that had been waiting five years for a corridor and a moment of weakness and a woman who forgot, just briefly, to keep her walls up.

She kissed him back.

Both hands in his jacket. Her mouth urgent and furious and achingly familiar and he pulled her closer because he was done being reasonable.

She broke away.

Hands flat against his chest. Eyes closed. Breathing.

He waited.

"I'm married," she said. Not to him. To herself. Like a thing she needed to hear in her own voice.

"I know."

"This can't......" She stopped. Opened her eyes. And the fury in them was something he wasn't prepared for. Not at him, not exactly, but at everything, at the whole architecture of the situation she was standing in, and underneath the fury something so raw and so honest that it cost him something just to look at it. "It can't happen again," she said.

He said nothing.

She picked up her champagne glass. Straightened her dress. Looked at him once more, then she walked away.

He stood alone in the corridor and listened to the sound of the gala continuing without him and thought about the way she'd kissed him, furious and desperate, and the way she'd walked away from it like it was something she could put down.

She'd walked away from him before.

He'd let her, last time.

He was not entirely sure he was going to let her again.