Chapter 61: Sophia And Liam.
Vanessa’s apartment was quiet at this hour.
Penina had gone to bed forty minutes ago, her bedroom door shut, the faint sound of her white noise machine running underneath the silence. Vanessa sat at her vanity in her room with her laptop open and her phone face up on the desk beside it, doing what she had been telling herself for the past hour she was not doing.
She was looking at his profile.
Liam’s Instagram was clean and infrequent — the kind of account maintained by someone who understood its social function without being consumed by it. She hated that he only had a single photo because she would have liked to see a glimpse of his life outside of the norm.
She told herself she was doing research.
She had been doing research for forty-five minutes.
The memory of his apartment came back the way it kept coming back, which was against her will and in detail. The ease of him. The way he hadn’t reacted to her the way men reacted to her, which should have been insulting and was instead — she didn’t have the right word for it. Interesting. Inconvenient. The way he’d sat there while she was practically in his lap and kept those blue eyes on her face like it was the most natural discipline in the world.
And then there was the other thing.
She had felt it when she’d pressed against him — unavoidable, impossible to misread, a fact about Liam that had introduced itself without anyone’s permission and had been living in the back of her mind rent-free since she walked out of his apartment.
"His cock was so fucking big...!"
She closed the thought firmly, "Don’t be creepy."
"Stop it," she told herself.
But did she stop? No.
Her thumb moved without full authorisation and the screen shifted and before the signal completed its journey from her brain to her hand the button had been pressed and Instagram had processed it and Vanessa was now following Liam and there was absolutely nothing she could do about the past three seconds.
She stared at the screen.
The notification had already gone out. She knew how it worked — he’d get an alert, her name and photo, the small digital announcement that she had been looking long enough to commit. She could unfollow immediately. She reached for the button but stopped.
Instagram would notify him of the follow regardless of whether she reversed it. The alert was already sitting in his queue. Unfollowing now would just add a second data point — she followed and then immediately unfollowed, which told a more specific story than simply following in the first place as it would tell Liam she was stalking him.
She set the phone down.
Picked it up.
Set it down again.
"Wing it," she said to herself, in the quiet of her room, with the energy of a woman making peace with something she couldn’t undo.
Penina had said it over takeout two nights ago with the casual certainty she applied to most things.
"You like him."
"I don’t like him. He’s a professional contact."
"You came home flustered. You never come home flustered."
"I was frustrated. Different thing."
"Vanessa."
"Yes?"
"You’re allowed to like someone."
She had changed the subject. But the thing about Penina was that she didn’t need to win an argument to be right, and Vanessa knew it, and that was the part that stayed.
She looked at his photo one more time.
His offer sat alongside everything else in her head — the firm, the partnership, working alongside him if he ever got the practice off the ground. She had looked into it professionally, told herself that was the only reason she was looking. The logic was sound. He was talented. His record was unambiguous. If he built something real, being in at the ground level made career sense.
That was the professional reason.
Then there was the other reason, which lived two floors below the professional reason and involved a desk and a closed door and thoughts that Vanessa had the self-awareness to recognise as completely inappropriate and the basic human right to think anyway. It was straight out of a dark romance novel.
A girl was allowed a fantasy.
-
The entrance to Opus at the Sound required a reservation and the quiet confidence to walk through it like you’d been there before.
Liam had the reservation.
Sophia had the confidence.
She walked in on his arm with the particular ease of a woman who had spent enough years being looked at to have made her peace with it. Not performance — just presence. Her chin was level, her shoulders settled, the grey dress moving with her the way good clothes move when the person wearing them has stopped thinking about them.
The men at the adjacent tables noticed.
Not obviously, nor in a creepy wayo. Just the small involuntary realization that happens when someone worth looking at enters a room — a gaze that lifts from a menu, a pause mid-sentence, a glass held slightly longer than necessary before being set down.
Liam noticed the noticing.
He pulled her chair and she sat, settling into the room with the ease of someone who had decided before they arrived that she belonged here. The candles were low and warm, the table linen impeccable, the view through the floor-to-ceiling windows showing Seattle’s waterfront lit up and doing its best work.
"Okay," Sophia said quietly, looking at the room. "This is beautiful."
"You sound surprised. Nothing but the best for mi lady."
"I’m not surprised. I’m—" She looked at him. "Impressed. Again, it’s becoming a habit, you keep surprising me."
Liam opened his menu. "I’ll try not to let it go to my head."
"Too late." She opened hers, looked at the first page, and her expression moved briefly through something she recovered from quickly. He had seen the same thing on Rachel’s face at Canlis — the momentary recognition of prices that existed in a different register from daily life, processed and tossed aside in under two seconds.
"Order what you want," Liam said, without looking up from his menu.
"I always do," Sophia said, which was exactly the right response.
The waiter came. They ordered. The wine arrived first and they settled into the particular ease of two people who had spent a full day together and found they still had things to say.
But while they were having fun, Liam’s phone buzzed against the table.
He glanced down from instinct.
[Mrs. Harriet.]
He kept his expression level and read it once. Short, precise, the economy of language belonging to someone who chose every word deliberately.
[I’ve given your proposal further thought. I’d like to meet. This week if possible. Come alone.]
Two words at the end doing considerable weight.
[Come alone.]
Liam set the phone face down on the table.
Across from him, Sophia was saying something about the menu, tilting it slightly toward the candlelight. She looked up when he didn’t respond.
"You okay?"
"Fine," he said. He picked up his wine glass. "You were saying?"
She studied him for exactly one second — the brief, quiet assessment of a woman who noticed things — then let it go and continued.
Liam listened. He laughed when she said something worth laughing at. He was present and engaged and entirely at the table.
But underneath all of it, Mrs. Harriet’s two words sat quietly in the back of his mind because Liam knew this meeting would change everything in terms of his goals.