His alarm hadn't fired yet. He woke to the smell of coffee coming from his kitchen, and the small domestic sounds of someone moving carefully in an unfamiliar space, the soft thud of a cabinet, the particular rattle of his percolator, water running briefly, and then stopping. For two full seconds, he lay in his bed in the gray early morning dark, and let the strangeness of it wash over him. This was not a sound he had heard in this apartment in a very long time. The apartment had been quiet in the mornings for 3 years.
Ever since Kesha left, ever since it became just him and Amara and the particular kind of quiet that a small child and a tired man make together, he swung his legs over the side of the bed. He walked down the short hallway. He stopped in the kitchen doorway. Victoria Langford, though he did not know her last name yet, did not know she was worth $400 million or that her face had been on the cover of Forbes twice before she turned 26. Did not know that in approximately nine hours she would be named to a national business leadership panel and her publicist would be losing his mind.
Trying to locate her was standing at his kitchen stove in his navy work shirt barefoot, hair still loose from the night before attempting to make coffee in his percolator. She was doing it completely wrong. She had the heat up too high and the lid off and she was stirring it like it was a pot of soup and the coffee was beginning to produce a dark ominous smoke that suggested it would taste like scorched rubber. Darius stood in the doorway. He should have said something immediately.
He knew that the polite thing, the sensible thing was to announce himself so she didn't feel watched. He didn't. He stood there in the doorway of his tiny Chicago kitchen in his undershirt and his sweatpants, and he watched Victoria Langford barefoot, messyhaired, wearing his work shirt stand at his stove and destroy his morning coffee with complete focused seriousness. And something happened in his chest that he didn't have a clean word for. It wasn't attraction or it wasn't only attraction.
It was something older and more complicated than that of recognition. Maybe the way you recognize something you hadn't known you were missing until you suddenly saw it right in front of you. He let himself have exactly 3 seconds of it. Then she turned and she caught him standing there and the most extraordinary thing happened. The controlled, precise, boardroom ready face of Victoria Langford cracked open into something entirely different.
Not embarrassment, she was past embarrassment, but mischief. Pure, warm, completely unexpected mischief. She tilted her head. She looked at him like she'd been expecting him to be there all along. Were you watching me, Mr.
Cole? The way she said it, Mr. Cole, formal and teasing at the same time. That little smile playing at the corner of her mouth, entirely at ease in his apartment and his shirt and his morning made something short circuit in Darius's brain. He looked at the stove.
He looked at the coffee situation. He looked back at her. I was watching you destroy my coffee, he said. She laughed. Not a polite laugh, not a social laugh.
A real one. Sudden and unguarded and surprised out of her. The kind of laugh that happens before a person can decide whether they want to laugh or not. It filled his small kitchen completely and then was gone. And she looked slightly startled by it herself, like she'd forgotten what that felt like.
It's not destroyed, she said, recovering. I'm refining it. The smoke suggests otherwise. I work better under pressure. The coffee is just coffee.