Beautiful Secret

Making last night the first step proved to be a bit more complicated than I’d hoped. It seemed Niall Stella was going to go out of his way to keep things exceedingly, frustratingly normal between us. He’d gone in early, and was packing up his laptop for a meeting when I arrived, head down and phone pressed to his ear. He acknowledged me with a small nod, a smile, and then he stepped out past me, into the hall for privacy.

In the handful of seconds it took me to walk around his chair and reach my own, I came up with at least twelve different ways to translate his small smile and semi-avoidance, each more insane than the last.

It was one thing to dissect everything he said in a meeting or to a colleague when there was zero chance it had anything to do with me, but this? There was no way he wasn’t also thinking about what we did last night. Everything had a meaning today.

I heard him talking, still just outside our office door. Was he waiting for me? He’d looked like he was packing up to leave; was he coming back in first?

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said into the receiver, his posh accent the only thing keeping his words from sounding clipped or flat-out annoyed. “The timeline we were given for estimated completion was a full six months before the date you’re giving me today. The alternative is unacceptable.”

My ears perked at this; I’d never seen or heard him sound angry before.

He was silent while he listened to the person on the other end of the line, and I had the strangest sense of his eyes on me. I unwrapped my scarf, slipped out of my coat, and hung it on the hook behind the door. His attention pressed on my skin and I shook my head, careful to let my hair fall forward and hide the warmth I could feel blooming in my cheeks.

“Tony, I’m not leading the Diamond Square project to be a yes man, I’m leading it because I know what the bloody hell I’m talking about. Tell them that, or better yet, let me. I won’t have any problem setting them straight,” he said, followed by the distinct sound of his exasperated sigh.

Tony. Gross.

I grabbed my notebook and turned to join him. “Everything okay?”

He nodded, but shoved his phone into his pocket, not bothering to elaborate about the call. “Aside from a meeting with some of the MTA engineers this morning, I’d like to visit some of the stations, see for myself a few of the proposed floodgate sites.” He gave me another polite smile.

Niall was back in his shell.

Nodding to the stairs, he asked, “Would you care to accompany me?”

The South Ferry station was one of the hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy. With a street-level entrance of only one hundred feet above sea level, the tunnel was flooded in minutes. The seawater destroyed practically everything in its path, damaging wiring and equipment and filling caverns deep enough for workers to swim through. This was why we were here, to think ahead of Mother Nature and design a system that would prevent catastrophic damage like this from happening again.

Traffic whizzed by as I followed Niall down into the newly reopened station, my eyes on his broad shoulders as he descended the stairs in front of me. He looked Serious Business today. His expression had remained neutral throughout our cab ride to the station, conversation kept to a minimum. He wore a dark suit and darker overcoat, his brown cashmere scarf continually escaping the lapels of his coat and trailing over his shoulder behind him. There was purpose when Niall Stella walked.

A handful of engineers was there to meet us, and Niall introduced us both, taking the time to get each person’s name, and listening attentively as they took us from one end of the tunnel to the other. It was dizzying to see him like this—so knowledgeable and completely in his element—while simultaneously remembering what he’d looked like last night. In six months I’d amassed a catalog of Niall Stella memories, and the few unguarded ones I’d made since coming to New York seemed to eclipse them all.

Niall called me over to stand next to him, and I watched as he crouched down, took measurements, and inspected one of the proposed entrances. My brain was a mess of focus and inattention: I wanted to absorb everything around me, but having him so close after last night turned me into a complete mental maniac. Was he thinking about it? Was he pretending it didn’t happen?

A horrifying thought occurred to me: Was it even possible he didn’t remember?

He called out numbers or various notes while he worked, but it was noisy, the sound of trains and people making it difficult to hear him. I had to stay close, so close that his shoulder would occasionally brush against the side of my leg.

I assumed it was accidental, and tried not to react as goose bumps spread along my skin. But by the second and third time, I began to wonder.