Page 11 of Danny

The place where Hargrove's thumb had circled — my pulse point — Danny's thumb finds it. Not the same. Nothing like the same. Hargrove touched me like I was something he was sizing up. Danny touches me like he's memorizing where another man has been so he can erase it.

His thumb stops. He presses gently, right over my pulse.

He can feel it. I know he can, because my heart is slamming so hard it's practically visible, and his thumb is right there on top of it. His eyes come up from my wrist to my face and the look in them is not the flat, controlled look from the night we met.

This is a man barely holding the line.

The corridor hums. The space between us is filled with something I can't name and he clearly can't either, because his jaw is working like he's biting down on words, and his breathing has changed, and his fingers on my wrist have gone from careful to something else entirely. Something that holds on.

"Danny," I say. I don't know why. His name in my mouth feels new and reckless, like saying it out loud is crossing a line we've both been pretending isn't there.

He drops my wrist.

He lets go like the contact has burned him, takes a step back, and the controlled mask slams down so fast I almost hear it. Jaw set. Eyes flat. Hands at his sides, fingers flexing once before going still.

"Goodnight, Anna," he says.

And he walks away. Down the corridor, through the door to the private elevator, gone. The door swings shut behind him with a soft click that echoes off the linoleum like a gunshot.

I stand there.

My wrist is tingling. Where Danny's thumb was. Over my pulse. The ghost of it throbbing under my skin like a second heartbeat. Replacing any feeling of the slimy man who grabbed it earlier.

I press my wrist against my stomach — the same gesture I'd made after Hargrove, but for the opposite reason. Not to scrub something off. To keep something in.

I walk out into the November cold and make it my life mission to not think about gray eyes staring at me. I make it exactly four blocks before I stop on the sidewalk and press both palms over my face and say "Oh no" out loud, to nobody, to the steam rising from the subway grate, to the cold Manhattan air.

Because I know what's happening. I've known since the first night, probably — since the spill, since first night, since a man who fires people for crooked napkins told Matteo to get me a new tray instead of telling Lola to get me a box for my things. And the knowing had been easy to ignore when it was just a feeling, abstract and deniable, the kind of thing you could file under adrenaline or gratitude or you're projecting because he's handsome and powerful and your life is a mess.

But his thumb on my pulse. His eyes on my face. The way he'd dropped me — panicked, almost, the control cracking for a half second before he'd welded it back together and walked away without saying goodnight like a normal person.

That's not abstract.

That's not deniable.

I'm in trouble.

I go down the subway steps. Swipe my MetroCard. Sit on a plastic bench on the platform and press my tingling wrist against my thigh and wait for the A train.

I smile.

Can't help it.

The A train comes. I get on. And all the way home, fifteen stops, I hold my wrist against my chest like I'm cradling something precious and breakable and mine.

Danny

Isign the Hargrove paperwork at 1 a.m. and pour a whiskey I don't want and sit in my office staring at the wall.

I can still feel her pulse under my thumb. That's the problem. I’m sitting in my fucking office at 1 a.m. thinking about the inside of a woman's wrist.

I'd gone downstairs. That was the first mistake. I'd stood in the staff corridor and I'd waited for her like some kind of...

I don't have a word for it. Stalker is too strong. Concerned employer is bullshit. There isn't a word for a man who tells himself he's checking on a staff member's wellbeing and then holds her wrist for fifteen seconds longer than any definition of "checking" would cover.

I'd felt her heartbeat speed up. Under my thumb. And I'd liked it.

And then I'd dropped her hand and walked away without saying goodnight, because apparently that's who I am now — a man who does bizarre, intense things and then leaves without basic social pleasantries.