Foe To Flame

The lock on my front door clicked open at 2:14 in the morning, and I knew it wasn't a burglar because burglars don't have keys to my apartment. Only two people did. One was my sister, who was in Lisbon for the month, and the other was the man I'd spent the last six years of my career trying to destroy.

I didn't move from the couch. I had a glass of whiskey sweating onto my thigh and a laptop open to a quarterly report I'd been pretending to read for three hours. The door swung shut. Footsteps crossed the foyer, slow and deliberate, the heel of a boot landing on hardwood like a metronome.

"You're up," Adrian said.

"I'm always up."

He appeared in the doorway of my living room, and the first thing I noticed, the way I always noticed, was the coat. Charcoal wool, tailored within an inch of its life, wet at the shoulders from the rain that had started sometime after midnight. He looked like he'd walked out of a magazine and straight into my private misery. His hair was darker when it was wet. His jaw had that shadow he got by the end of a long day, and I hated how much I liked it.

"You still have my key," I said.

"You never asked for it back."

"I'm asking now."

"No, you're not." He crossed to the kitchen like he lived there, which he never had, not officially, and pulled a glass from the cabinet above the sink. He knew which cabinet. That was the problem with enemies who'd once been something else. They remembered the layout.

I watched him pour two fingers of my whiskey without asking. The bottle was a single malt I'd bought to celebrate closing the Halberd deal, back when I still thought I'd win. Now it was half empty and I didn't remember the last time I'd drunk from a clean glass.

"You look terrible," he said.

"Thanks. You look like you're about to fire someone."

"Not tonight."

He sat in the armchair across from me, the one that faced the window, and I had to turn my head to keep him in view. That was deliberate. Adrian did everything deliberately. He'd spent the last six years proving that to me in boardrooms and conference halls and once, memorably, in the back of a hired car on the way to a merger hearing where we'd both been called to testify and neither of us had made it inside.

"You shouldn't be here," I said.

"I know."

"So why are you?"

He took a drink. The ice clinked against the glass, and I remembered the sound of it from another night, a worse night, when the city had been a different city and we'd been different people. Or maybe the same people. That was the thing I couldn't figure out.

"The board voted," he said.

I sat up. The whiskey sloshed over the rim of my glass and soaked into the cotton of my shirt, cold against my stomach. "When?"

"Four hours ago. I came straight from the office."

"You could've called."

"I wanted to see your face."

There it was. That flicker of something under his voice, something that had nothing to do with quarterly earnings or hostile takeovers. I'd heard it before, in the dark of a hotel room in Zurich, and I'd spent the years since convincing myself I'd imagined it.

"Just tell me," I said.

"They approved the acquisition. Full terms. Your division gets absorbed into mine by the end of the quarter."

The room went quiet in a way that felt physical, like a hand pressed over my mouth. Six years. Six years of late nights and leaked memos and the slow, grinding war of attrition I'd waged against his company, against him, against the version of myself that had ever wanted him. And it was over. Just like that. A vote in a room I wasn't in, and my whole life rearranged.

I set the glass down on the floor because my hand had started to shake and I didn't want him to see.

"You knew this was coming," he said.

"I knew it was possible."

"You knew it was probable. You've seen the numbers same as I have. You've been bleeding headcount for two quarters. You can't win a war with a broken army."

"Don't." The word came out sharper than I meant. "Don't sit in my apartment and talk to me like I'm a case study."

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the lamplight caught the line of his throat. "Then how should I talk to you?"

"Like a person."

"I've never been able to do that with you. You know that."

And there it was again. The thing neither of us said. The reason he had a key. The reason I'd never asked for it back, not once in four years, not even after the Zurich disaster, not even after he'd gutted my best account and I'd retaliated by poaching his head of strategy. We'd been at war so long I'd forgotten what we were fighting about. Or maybe I'd never known. Maybe the fighting was the point.

"Why are you really here, Adrian?"

He finished his whiskey in one swallow and set the glass on the side table with a click that sounded final. "Because in six years I've never once been able to stay away from you, and tonight I stopped trying to pretend otherwise."

The rain picked up against the window. I could hear it, a soft percussion on glass, and I could hear my own breathing, too loud in the small room. He was close enough now that I could smell the rain on his coat, the whiskey on his breath, the faint cedar of whatever he used on his skin. I'd memorized that smell once. I'd tried to forget it.

"You're my enemy," I said. It sounded weak. It sounded like a question.

"I've been your enemy because it was the only way I could be near you without admitting I wanted to be."

"That's a convenient excuse."

"It's not an excuse. It's the truth. You can hate me for it if you want. You probably should."

I should have told him to leave. I should have taken the key back, right then, and closed the door behind him, and gone back to my whiskey and my numbers and the slow death of everything I'd built. That's what a smart person would have done. That's what the woman who'd spent six years sharpening herself into a weapon against him would have done.

Instead I stood up. The whiskey had soaked through my shirt and I could feel the cold of it against my ribs, and I crossed the room until I was standing over him, close enough that his knee brushed my leg.

"You're an asshole," I said.

"I know."

"You've made my life hell."

"I know that too."

"And you think you can just show up here at two in the morning and tell me the truth and I'll what? Forgive you?"

He looked up at me. His eyes were the color of the whiskey, dark and warm, and for the first time in six years I let myself look back without a strategy. Without a plan. Without the armor I'd worn so long it had started to feel like skin.

"I don't want your forgiveness," he said. "I want you to stop pretending you don't feel this too."

The rain kept falling. The city kept sleeping. And somewhere in the space between us, six years of war started to collapse into something else, something I'd been running from since the first time he'd shaken my hand and held it a second too long.

I didn't answer him. I reached down and took the glass from the side table, and I set it on the floor beside mine, and when I straightened up he was already standing, and we were close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, close enough that when he spoke again his breath moved across my mouth.

"Tell me to leave," he said.

I didn't.