The first time he said that last one, she nearly choked on sparkling water.
Later, while a string quartet performed something tasteful near the stage, one of the same women from the previous gala approached, smiling with too many teeth.
“Maya,” she said. “You look wonderful. Whatever you’re doing, it’s clearly working.”
Maya felt Taylor shift beside her, ready. She touched his wrist lightly without looking at him and answered for herself.
“I’m alive,” she said pleasantly. “That tends to improve a person’s face.”
The woman’s smile faltered. Taylor looked down as though suppressing something dangerous. When the woman retreated, he bent closer and murmured, “I’m in love with you a little for that sentence alone.”
Maya froze.
He had said it lightly. Perhaps too lightly. But nothing about the air between them felt light.
She turned her head. “A little?”
His eyes met hers. “I’m negotiating with my pride.”
Before she could answer, someone called his name from across the room. Business. Reputation. The machinery of the life that had built him. He excused himself with visible reluctance.
“Don’t go far,” he said.
Maya watched him move into the crowd and felt something perilous bloom low and hot beneath her ribs.
It happened forty minutes later in the ladies’ lounge, because reality had a way of interrupting emotional clarity.
She had gone to sit for a moment after too much standing. The room smelled of powder and expensive hand soap. A marble countertop ran the length of one wall under gilded mirrors. Maya pressed fingertips to the cool stone and took a breath.
Too much champagne in the room. Too much heat. She had eaten, taken her medication, paced herself. Still, fatigue hit like weather sometimes—sudden and absolute.
When she stood too quickly, the floor slid.
Not a collapse this time. Not at first. But a violent wave of dizziness, then black spots, then the cold bloom of panic because panic itself could raise everything that now had to stay calm.
A woman near the sinks said, “Are you all right?”
Maya tried to answer and couldn’t.
The next minutes were blurred again by motion. Someone calling for help. A chair brought. A cloth against the back of her neck. The ballroom door opening and closing. Taylor appearing so fast it was almost frightening, kneeling in front of her in immaculate formalwear as if none of the surrounding eyes existed.
