The car smelled like leather and rain, and Elias drove with both hands and did not ask me a single question.
It was the first kindness anyone had shown me all night, so I let him drive.
Elias: I have a proposition for you. You can say no in this car and never hear it again.
I laughed, because proposition was the word men used right before they asked for something.
Camille: If this is about the kiss, save it.
Elias: It isn't about the kiss. It's about the fund.
Elias: The Kessler Arts Fund is opening a city arts fund this winter. I need a co-chair.
Elias: I want you.
I stared at the wet glass instead of at him, because his face was too steady to argue with.
Camille: You want me. Tonight I held doors and fetched a blue wrap.
Elias: You ran that whole building. I watched you catch every mistake before it landed.
Elias: I want your skill, Camille. Not your pain.
Not your pain. He said it flat, like a clause in a contract, and something behind my ribs came loose.
Nobody had ever wanted the part of me that worked. Only the part that stayed.
Camille: Why me? Your board is full of people with better names than mine.
Elias: My board is full of people who want my chair. Roland Beck wants it most.
Elias: I need someone who reads a room and does not flinch. That is a very short list.
My phone lit up in my bag and buzzed against my knee. Graham. I let it buzz twice.
Then I answered, because five years had trained my thumb to answer him.
Graham: Camille. Where are you? I've been calling for an hour.
Graham: I'm sorry. You know I'm sorry. But Lila is fragile right now.
Graham: Her launch is Friday. Whatever you're thinking about doing, don't.
There it was. The apology with her name in the middle of it, like a stone baked into bread.
Camille: You're not sorry you did it. You're sorry I saw.
Graham: That isn't fair, Camille.
Camille: Fuck fair. Fuck your Friday. Fuck all of it.
I hung up and dropped the phone in my bag like it had burned me.
My hands were shaking again, but it was a different shake now.
This one was lighter and meaner, and I liked it far too much.
Elias: You want to hurt them.
Camille: Yes.
Elias: Good. Pain with no direction just sits in a woman and rots her.
He said it the way he said everything, like a man reading a weather report.
There was no pity on his face. There was something colder and better.
He was looking at me like I was a person who could hold a room, and that undid me more than kindness would have.
Being needed is not love. I had spent five years learning that at his table, in his bed, in his lobby.
But being needed by someone who also wanted my mind? That was a new kind of cold, and I wanted more of it.
Camille: What do you get out of this, Elias?
Elias: A partner who doesn't need me to lie to her.
Camille: That's a strange thing to want.
Elias: I'm a strange man, Camille.
He turned the car toward the water, and the city lights slid over his face one by one.
I thought about Graham's hands on her hips. I thought about Friday, and who would be watching.
I could go home and be the wronged wife, or I could take a chair at his table and be a problem.
Camille: One condition. I don't lie. Not to the press, not to the board, not to you.
Elias: Agreed.
Camille: Then yes. I'll co-chair your fund.
He nodded once. His hand stayed on the gear shift, an inch from mine, and it did not move.
The rain stopped somewhere on the bridge, and my phone stayed dark in my bag.
I had a title now, and a chair, and a reason to walk into a room with my chin up.
I just had to keep the knife pointed at the right people.