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i.
The meeting with Miranda had been scheduled for eleven.
Emily sat in the back of the town car, scrolling through her phone with one thumb. The driver took the turn onto Fifth too wide and she didn't look up. New York still did this to her sometimes — the particular density of it, the way the city pressed in from all sides like a crowd at a party she hadn't been invited to but had somehow ended up at anyway. Twelve years and it still felt that way. She'd learnt to stop noticing, mostly. Mostly.
The Dior offices were on the thirty-second floor of a building that smelled, in the lobby, of polished marble and someone's expensive cologne. Emily stepped out of the elevator and the receptionist looked up and said, "Ms. Priestly's party is already—"
"I know," Emily said. "Thank you."
She walked the corridor with the particular stride she'd spent years perfecting: not rushed, not leisurely. Purposeful. The kind of walk that said I belong here and I have somewhere to be and you are not it. She'd learned it at Runway. She'd learned most things at Runway.
The conference room doors were glass, and through them she could see Miranda already seated — pale blue, impeccable, legs crossed at the ankle — and Nigel beside her, leaning back in his chair with that performative ease he wore like a second skin. Two assistants flanked Miranda's end of the table with water and papers and the particular nervous stillness of people who had been told, very clearly, not to move.
Emily pushed the door open.
"—and the spring editorial is frankly embarrassing, I don't know what they're thinking—" Nigel was saying, and then he saw her and stopped, and Miranda's eyes lifted, slow, from the tablet in front of her.
"Emily," Miranda said. Not a question. Not a greeting, exactly. Something in between.
"Miranda." Emily nodded. Pulled out a chair. Sat. Crossed her own ankles. "Nigel."
"Darling," Nigel said, and smiled his wide, performative smile, and Emily almost smiled back.
The meeting went as meetings with Miranda went: Miranda talked, rarely, and when she did everyone listened. Nigel filled the silences with the kind of industry gossip that sounded casual but was, Emily knew, carefully curated. Emily contributed when asked and not before. She had spent enough years in Miranda Priestly's orbit to know that speaking out of turn was a kind of death.
It was near the end, when the agenda had shifted to logistics — travel arrangements, the Paris trip, the boat, all of it — that Miranda said, almost as an afterthought:
"We'll need to meet the new features editor at Runway. Apparently she's — what's the word — promising."
Emily said nothing. Nigel said, "Mmm," in a way that meant he already knew who it was and what it meant and was enjoying the fact that Emily didn't.
"She's coming to Dior tomorrow," Miranda continued, consulting her tablet. "Something about a collaboration.”
"Who is it?" Emily asked, because she was not in the habit of not knowing things.
Miranda looked up. Considered her. "Andrea something."
Emily's hand, which had been resting on the table, went very still.
—
She did not think about it on the way back to the office. She thought about it in the elevator, briefly, and then she pushed it down — the way one pushes down a feeling that is too large and too inconvenient to look at directly — and she thought about the Dior spring line instead, and the placement of the new Valentino pieces, and the call she had to make to Milan before three.
She thought about it again at half six, standing in the lift of her apartment building, watching the numbers tick up. Andrea. Andrea something. As though Miranda hadn't known her name. As though Andrea had been — what? A smudge. A minor inconvenience in the grand machinery of Runway, easily forgotten once the machine had moved on.
Emily remembered.
She remembered quite a lot, actually, though she would not have said so if asked. She remembered the way Andrea had shown up — all wide eyes and wrong shoes and that particular brand of American earnestness that Emily had found, at the time, almost physically painful to witness. She remembered the lunch. The coffee. The way Andrea had looked at her sometimes, across the bullpen, with an expression that Emily had categorised, at the time, as gratitude and left it at that.
She remembered Paris.
She did not think about Paris.
ii.
The Dior showroom was on the ground floor, a vast white space with rail after rail of garments hanging in careful sequence, and Emily moved through it the way she moved through all rooms: as though she owned it, because in a very real sense, she did. Executive Vice President. The title still sat strangely on her, sometimes — not because it didn't fit, but because it fit too well, and there was something unsettling about arriving, finally, at a place you'd been driving toward for years and finding it exactly as you'd imagined.
She was standing near the back, near the fitting rooms, reviewing a rack of structured jackets with Margaux — her second assistant, the competent one — when the call came through.
"Ms. Charlton, the Runway party is here."
"Send them down," Emily said, without looking up. She slid a jacket sideways on the rail, considered the one beneath it. "And tell Lena to have the Valentino pieces moved to the east window. We discussed this yesterday."
"Yes, Ms. Charlton."
Margaux disappeared. Emily finished with the rack, checked her watch. Quarter to two. She had forty minutes before the next appointment, which was plenty of time to —
She heard them before she saw them. The particular click of Miranda's shoes on marble, a sound Emily knew the way some people knew birdsong: instantly, instinctively, with a kind of low-grade alertness that never fully switched off. And then the softer footsteps behind, and the murmur of someone speaking — Nigel, probably, doing his thing — and Emily straightened, smoothed the front of her blazer, and turned.
They came around the corner of the showroom wall — Miranda first, then Nigel a half-step behind, already scanning the room with those quick, cataloguing eyes. And behind them—
Emily stopped.
The woman walking toward her was not the Andrea she remembered.
Or rather: she was, and she wasn't. The face was the same — the same particular warmth to it, the same mouth, slightly too wide for conventional beauty but somehow more interesting for it. But everything else had shifted. She carried herself differently. There was a straightness to her spine that hadn't been there before, a kind of settled confidence that showed not in how she held her shoulders but in how she held her ground.
Behind Emily, two assistants trailed like ducklings, tablets in hand, but Andrea didn't glance at them. She was looking at Emily.
The change was immediate — a flicker across the face, something bright and unguarded, and then Andrea's mouth opened and she smiled, and it was the same smile, the exact same smile, the one that had once made Emily feel like she was being looked at by someone who actually saw her, and Emily had not liked it then and she did not like it now and —
"Am I having a hallucination?" Emily said.
It came out before she'd decided to say it. She heard her own voice — clipped, incredulous, very slightly too loud — and felt, distantly, embarrassed by it, the way one feels embarrassed by a reflex.
Andrea laughed. Actually laughed — not the polite, social kind, but the real kind, the one that crinkled her eyes and made her lean forward slightly, and Emily thought: Christ.
"Hi, Emily!" Andrea said.
She said it with such — such ease. Such warmth. As though they were old friends bumping into each other at a party, as though the years between them were nothing, as though Emily hadn't spent a not-insignificant amount of time not thinking about her.
Miranda, who had been looking between the two of them with an expression of faint, intellectual curiosity — the way one might look at an unexpected stain on an otherwise immaculate tablecloth — said:
"You also know her?"
It was directed at Andrea. Andrea turned, still smiling, still nodding
"We were at Runway at the same time, Miranda," Emily said, and she didn't mean it to come out sharp but it did, a little, and she saw Nigel's eyebrows do a thing. She scoffed. Quietly. Controlled. "Really."
Miranda looked at her. The look was brief — a flicker of something, assessment or recollection or neither — and then Miranda said, with perfect, devastating neutrality:
"Really? Where was I?”
Andrea gave a small wave. Awkward, sweet, slightly too much. The kind of gesture that should have been embarrassing but wasn't, somehow.
Emily looked away first.
iii.
The tour of the showroom took forty minutes. Emily conducted it herself — she always did, for important visitors, and Miranda Priestly was, if nothing else, important. She moved through the racks with the ease of long familiarity, pulling pieces out, holding them up, narrating the season's direction with the precise, unhurried confidence of someone who had spent years learning exactly how to be in a room like this.
Andrea walked beside her.
Not behind. Beside. Emily noticed this the first time and then noticed herself noticing it and then — with some effort — stopped noticing it, or tried to. Andrea kept pace with her without seeming to hurry, asked questions at the right moments — not too many, not too few — and listened to the answers with an attention that felt, to Emily, almost physical. Like being looked at through a lens.
"This is gorgeous," Andrea said, at one point, reaching out toward a dress on the rail — a midnight blue silk, cut on the bias, with a neckline that dipped just low enough to be interesting — and then stopped, hand hovering, and looked at Emily as though to check whether touching was permitted.
"You can touch it," Emily said. "It's not a museum."
Andrea touched it. Ran her fingers along the fabric, lightly, the way one might touch something that surprised you. Her mouth did a small thing — not quite a smile, more like the beginning of one — and Emily looked away, back to the rail, and said something about the cut of the silk that she couldn't quite remember saying afterwards.
Miranda, across the room, was examining a row of handbags with Nigel. She had not looked up in several minutes. This was either a very good sign or a very bad one, and Emily had long since stopped being able to tell the difference.
They broke for coffee. Emily's assistant had set up in the small reception area off the main showroom — good coffee, the kind that mattered, in cups that were simple and white and cost more than most people's mugs. Emily took hers black. Miranda took hers with oat milk and no sugar and said nothing about it. Nigel took his with too much cream and made a small, appreciative sound that he probably didn't mean anyone to hear.
Andrea took hers and held it in both hands and looked around the room — at the white walls, the soft light, the careful arrangement of furniture that was designed to look effortless — and said, quietly, to Emily:
"You did all this?"
"Most of it," Emily said. "Dior had a... direction. I redirected it."
"It suits you," Andrea said. And then, as though she'd said something more intimate than she'd meant to, she looked down at her coffee and took a sip.
Emily watched her for a moment.
Then Miranda said something about the spring campaign and Emily turned, and the moment closed, the way moments do.
iv.
The boat.
The boat was Nigel's idea, or rather, Nigel's suggestion, which was a different thing entirely. Nigel's suggestions always had the quality of having been inevitable all along — as though the idea had simply existed in the air and Nigel had merely been the one to notice it.
"There's a dinner," he said, at the end of the showroom meeting, leaning back in his chair with that particular ease. "Saturday. On the water. Miranda's already confirmed — it's a charity thing, very hush-hush, very exclusive." He looked at Emily. "You should come."
"I'm aware of the dinner," Emily said. She was. It was in her calendar. It had been in her calendar for three weeks.
"Wonderful," Nigel said, and smiled, and that was that.
What Nigel did not say — what was understood, in the way that things are understood in certain rooms, by certain people — was that Andrea would also be there. Of course she would. She was the new features editor at Runway. She was Miranda's. These things moved in orbits, and the orbits intersected, and Emily knew this and had always known this and had, nonetheless, agreed to come.
Saturday was grey. Not raining — not yet — but the kind of grey that promised rain, the low, close kind that pressed against the windows of Emily's apartment and made the light inside feel soft and slightly underwater.
The boat was moored at a marina in the lower part of Manhattan, a long, sleek thing, white and chrome, with twinkling lights strung along the deck in a way that was meant to look casual but was, Emily knew, extremely deliberate. She arrived at half seven. There were already people on board — the usual crowd, the kind of people who attended these things not because they cared about the charity but because being seen caring about the charity was its own currency.
Emily took a glass of champagne from a passing tray and went to the railing.
Andrea found her there, ten minutes later.
She didn't announce herself. She simply appeared — at Emily's elbow, close but not too close, with her own glass of something — and stood, for a moment, looking out at the water the way Emily had been looking at it, as though the view were something they were sharing rather than something they had each arrived at separately.
"It's beautiful," Andrea said.
"Mm," Emily said.
Emily had not expected this. She had expected — what? The old Andrea. The one who filled silences with nervous chatter, who asked too many questions, who looked at people as though she were trying to solve them. But this Andrea was quieter. This Andrea could simply be in a space without needing to justify her presence in it.
Emily found this, against her will, extremely attractive.
"So," Andrea said, after a while. "Dior."
"So," Emily said. "Runway."
Andrea laughed — that same laugh, the real one — and turned to look at her, and the light from the city caught the side of her face, and Emily thought: there it is.
There it was.
v.
The evening moved the way evenings like this moved: in layers. Dinner was served below deck — round tables, white linen, too many forks — and Emily sat between a venture capitalist whose name she forgot immediately and a magazine editor whose name she knew but whose presence she found deeply tedious.
Andrea was across the table, two seats down, next to Nigel, and Emily did not look at her. She looked at her plate, at the wine in her glass, at the tedious magazine editor's mouth moving as he said something about print versus digital that Emily had heard a hundred times before.
At one point — halfway through the main course, the boat rocking gently beneath them — Andrea said something to Nigel that made him laugh, properly laugh, and Nigel's laughter was rare enough that even Miranda, two tables away, glanced up. Emily watched this happen. She watched Nigel lean toward Andrea, still laughing, and say something back, and Andrea's face do that thing — that open, bright thing, the thing that had once made Emily feel like the ground was slightly less solid than she'd assumed.
She looked back at her plate.
The venture capitalist said something. Emily said, "How interesting," and meant none of it.
After dinner they went back up on deck. The night had turned cool — not cold, but the kind of cool that makes you aware of your own skin, the air against the backs of your hands, the place where your collar doesn't quite meet your neck. Emily had brought a wrap — cashmere, dark grey, because she was not an amateur — and she pulled it tighter around her shoulders and went back to the railing.
Andrea came back.
"I keep coming back here," Andrea said.
"To the railing?"
"To where you are."
Emily turned her head. Andrea was looking at the water, not at her. Her expression was — what? Thoughtful. A little amused, maybe. As though she'd said something slightly braver than she'd meant to and was watching to see what happened next.
"Well," Emily said, finally. "I am very good company."
Andrea laughed. Turned to look at her. And there it was again — that look, the one that saw, the one that Emily had spent years telling herself she didn't need and had spent other years, quieter ones, missing without quite admitting it.
"Yeah," Andrea said. "You are."
vi.
They did not kiss that night. Not on the boat, not after. Emily went home in a car and Andrea went home in a different car and they said goodbye at the gangplank in a way that was — careful.
"It was good to see you, Emily," Andrea said.
"It was," Emily said. And meant it, which was the annoying part.
The weeks that followed were ordinary. Emily went to work. She went to fittings and meetings and dinners and the gym and the dry cleaner and all the small, unremarkable rituals that made up a life lived in New York in the fashion industry. She did not think about Andrea, except when she did, which was more often than she would have admitted to anyone, and even then it was not thinking exactly — it was more like catching a scent, something brief and involuntary, a flash of dark hair and a laugh.
She saw Andrea three more times in those weeks. Once at a reception at the Met — a brief exchange, champagne in hand, Miranda nearby, the usual social choreography. Once at a lunch that Nigel had organised — a long table, too many people, Andrea at the far end, laughing at something Emily couldn't hear.
Once, by accident, in a coffee shop on Lexington, where they saw each other at the same moment and Emily felt something lurch in her chest — a small, stupid, physical thing — and Andrea smiled and said "Fancy seeing you here" and Emily said "New York is enormous, isn't it”
vii.
It was a Thursday when it happened.
Emily had been at the office since eight — a long day, the kind that left the backs of her eyes feeling tight and dry. There had been a crisis with the Chanel spring show, something about fabric dye lots, and she'd spent most of the afternoon on the phone with Milan, her voice going very flat and very calm in the way it did when she was angry, which was the way she'd learned, years ago, to be angry: quietly, precisely, in a way that made people listen.
By six she was exhausted. She closed her laptop, put on her coat, and took the elevator down to the lobby. The evening was warm and she decided, on a whim, to walk. It was only twenty minutes to her apartment. She could use the air.
She was halfway there when she saw Andrea.
Andrea was sitting on the steps of a brownstone, legs tucked up, phone in one hand, a takeaway coffee balanced on the step beside her. She was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and a leather jacket that was slightly too big for her and she looked — relaxed. Happy. The kind of quietly, simply happy that people look when they think no one is watching.
Emily stopped. Andrea looked up. Their eyes met.
"This is becoming a pattern," Emily said.
Andrea smiled. Pulled her legs down. Stood up. "Maybe New York isn't as enormous as you thought."
"Don't push it," Emily said, but she was smiling too, and she knew Andrea could see it, and she didn't care, and that — that was the thing
Andrea picked up her coffee. Fell into step beside her. They walked.
They walked until Emily's building. They stopped. Andrea turned to her.
"Do you want to—" Andrea started, and then stopped. Looked at her. Something shifted in her expression — something more serious, more searching. "I don't know. Something. Anything. I don't want this to end."
This. The word hung there. Emily looked at her — at the line of her jaw, the way the light caught the side of her face, the slight parting of her mouth — and felt, very clearly, the edge of something.
viii.
Emily's apartment was the kind of space that looked, to most people, like a magazine spread: all clean lines and careful neutrals, everything in its place, nothing extraneous. She had designed it that way deliberately, the way one designs a room when one has spent too many years in rooms designed by other people. It was hers. It was quiet. It was controlled.
Andrea walked into it and said, "Oh," and looked around, and the look on her face was — not impressed, exactly. Something else. Recognition, maybe. As though she were seeing something she'd always imagined and was surprised to find it was real.
Emily made tea. She didn't ask if Andrea wanted tea; she simply made it, because it was something to do with her hands, and because the alternative — standing in the middle of her living room with nothing between them but air — felt, in that moment, too much.
Andrea sat on the sofa. Tucked one leg underneath her. Held the cup Emily handed her in both hands, the way she always did, and looked at Emily over the rim of it.
"So," Andrea said.
"So," Emily said. She sat on the other end of the sofa. There was a cushion between them. She did not move it.
They talked. About work — about Runway, about Dior, about the industry and its absurdities and the strange, circuitous ways in which careers moved and people ended up where they ended up. About New York, and London, and Paris. About Miranda — carefully, the way one talks about Miranda, with a kind of reverent caution that neither of them questioned. About the years in between, the ones they hadn't shared, the ones that had made them into the people they were now, sitting here, on this sofa, in this quiet room.
Andrea told her about the book she'd written — a novel, actually, which Emily had not known about and which surprised her more than she let on. About the journalism, the travel, the slow, unglamorous grind of building something from nothing. About the way she'd felt, when the Runway job had come back around — not the first time, that had been chaos, that had been survival — but this time, the new role, the features editorship. How it had felt like coming back to a place she'd left in the middle of a sentence.
"And Miranda?" Emily asked. "She's — what? Fine with it?"
Andrea considered this. "She seemed pleased. I think — I think she likes the idea of having chosen well. Of having been right about someone, years ago, even if she didn't know it at the time."
"Miranda doesn't like being wrong," Emily said.
"No," Andrea agreed. "She really doesn’t."
—
It was Andrea who moved first.
Not dramatically. Not with any of the grand, sweeping gestures that Emily had seen in films and found, always, slightly embarrassing. Andrea simply shifted — closed the distance on the sofa, not all at once but in one fluid motion, until her knee was touching Emily's, and then her hand was on the cushion between them, and then her hand was not on the cushion but on Emily's thigh, resting there, warm and steady, and Emily looked down at it and then looked up at Andrea's face and Andrea was watching her with that look — the searching one, the serious one, the one that said I see you — and waited.
Emily felt her breath change. A small, involuntary thing — a tightening, a quickening. She felt it in her chest and in her throat and in the place where Andrea's hand was, warm through the fabric of her trousers.
"Andrea," she said.
"Yeah," Andrea said. Quietly. Almost a whisper.
"If you're going to do something," Emily said, "do it properly."
Andrea smiled. It was not the wide, bright, giddy smile from the showroom. It was— something slower, something that knew exactly what it was doing.
She leaned in.
The kiss was not gentle. Emily had not expected it to be — had not wanted it to be, though she hadn't known that until it was happening. Andrea kissed her the way she did everything else now: with confidence, with intention, with a kind of quiet sureness that made Emily feel, for the first time in years, like she was not the one in control of the room.
Andrea's hand moved from her thigh to her waist, firm, and her other hand came up to the side of Emily's neck — not grabbing, not pulling, just holding — and Emily made a sound she didn't entirely intend to make and Andrea kissed her harder.
Emily kissed her back. She kissed her back with twelve years of not-thinking-about-it behind her, twelve years of almost and not-quite and Christ, Andrea in the quiet hours, and it came out of her fast and fierce and a little angry — angry at the time, angry at the distance, angry at herself for not having done this sooner, years ago, in her hospital bed, in some corridor at Runway, anywhere, anywhere but here, so late, so stupidly late.
Andrea laughed against her mouth — a small, breathless sound — and pulled back just enough to look at her, and her eyes were bright and her mouth was swollen and she said:
"There you are."
Emily looked at her.
“Oh, Shut up.” Emily said, and kissed her again.
Andrea kissed like she meant it. Like she had thought about it — not obsessively, not desperately, but with the same quiet, careful attention she brought to everything else now. The way she'd touched the silk dress in the showroom. The way she'd listened.
Emily felt the press of Andrea's tongue against her lower lip — and opened her mouth without deciding to, and then Andrea was inside her mouth, slow, unhurried, tasting her, and Emily's hand came up to grip the front of Andrea's jacket without her permission.
Andrea smiled. Emily felt it — the curve of her mouth, the shift of it against her own lips — and it was insufferable. It was the smile of someone who knew. Who knew what she was doing, knew what it was doing, knew the exact shape of the effect and was enjoying it, quietly, thoroughly, the way one enjoys a thing that has been a long time coming.
Emily pulled back. Looked at her. Andrea's face was very close — close enough that Emily could see the flecks of gold in her eyes, the slight unevenness of her breathing. She looked pleased with herself. Not smug. Pleased.
"You're enjoying this," Emily said.
"Obviously," Andrea said.
"It's disgusting."
"Mm." Andrea's thumb moved along the line of Emily's jaw — a small, idle motion, almost casual, and Emily felt it everywhere. "You're enjoying it too."
She pulled Andrea back in by the jacket and kissed her again, harder this time, and Andrea made a sound — low, quiet, pleased — and shifted closer, and the cushion between them was gone now, had fallen somewhere, and there was nothing between them but the thin layers of fabric and the particular heat of Andrea's body pressed against hers.
Andrea's hands were steady. That was the thing Emily noticed — kept noticing, each time they moved, each time they settled somewhere new. Steady and sure and purposeful, the way Andrea herself was purposeful now, the way she moved through rooms and conversations and the small, complicated choreography of being alive. Her hand slid from Emily's neck down to her shoulder, found the edge of her blazer, pushed it back. Emily let it fall. It slid off her arms and pooled somewhere behind her on the sofa and she didn't look at where it went.
"This blouse," Andrea said, fingertips brushing the collar of it — the cream silk, the one Emily had chosen that morning with an extra beat of consideration. "Is this Prada?”
She was teasing.
"No," Emily scoffed. "It's—"
"It doesn't matter," Andrea said, and kissed her again, and Emily forgot what it was.
The devastating way she moved closer, always closer, as though the distance between them were something she had decided, a long time ago, to close, and was only now getting around to it.
Emily felt herself tipping back into the sofa, felt Andrea follow her down, felt the weight of her — not heavy, not crushing, just present, warm and solid and real — and something in Emily's chest did a thing she hadn't felt in years.
Andrea pulled back. Not far. Just enough to look at her. Her hair had come loose from where it had been tucked behind her ear and it fell across her face, and she didn't push it back. She just looked at Emily, with that look — the open one, the one that saw — and smiled.
"Stop it," Emily said.
"Stop what?"
"Being like that."
"Like what?"
Emily looked at her. Andrea's mouth twitched. She knew exactly what Emily meant and she was not going to say it and Emily was not going to say it either and they both knew this and it was — fine. It was fine. It was, in fact, better than fine.
Emily reached up and tucked Andrea's hair behind her ear. It was a small gesture. Gentle. The kind of thing she didn't do — the kind of thing that didn't fit the shape of who she was, or who she'd been, or who she'd spent years convincing herself she needed to be. She did it anyway. Andrea's eyes moved to hers, and something in them shifted — something surprised, something soft —
It happened fast — faster than the sofa, faster than the careful, unhurried thing that had been building all evening. Andrea's hand tightened on her waist and she kissed her deep and purposeful and Emily felt something crack open in her chest, something that had been sealed shut for years, and what came out of it was not tenderness.
It was not patience. It was not the slow, quiet, appreciative thing she'd been feeling all night.
It was spite.
It landed in her like a slap — sudden, sharp, a little ugly. She can't do this. The thought arrived fully formed, bright and furious. She can't kiss like that. She can't make those sounds. She can't sit there looking like that, like she's not trying, like it's easy, like this is just — something she does, something she can just — do —
Andrea made a sound against her mouth. Small. Involuntary. A little breathless. And Emily felt it in her teeth.
No.
She grabbed Andrea's jaw — not hard, but firm, firmer than she'd been all night — and tilted her face back and looked at her and Andrea's eyes were half-closed and her lips were wet and she looked — Christ, she looked wrecked, already, barely touched, and Emily hadn't even —
Emily kissed her like a punishment.
She didn't mean to. Or she did mean to, exactly, in the way that spite means things: not planned, not premeditated, just felt, hot and immediate and blindingly clear. She kissed Andrea hard and deep and with all the sharp, restless, angry energy that had been coiling in her all evening — all week, all these weeks, all these almost-moments and not-quite-touchings and the particular, maddening way Andrea had of existing in a room — and Andrea's breath hitched and her hand flew up to the back of Emily's neck and gripped and Emily thought: good.
Good. Let her grip. Let her feel it.
Andrea's jacket came off first. Emily pulled it — not gently — and Andrea laughed, actually laughed, breathless and surprised and delighted by it, and that was worse. That was so much worse. Because Andrea liked it. Andrea liked the roughness, liked the teeth of it, liked being pulled and gripped and kissed like Emily wanted to take something from her, and she wasn't afraid of it, wasn't even slightly afraid, and Emily had spent years being the one people were afraid of and here was Andrea, underneath her hands, smiling.
"You're angry,"
"I'm not angry," Emily said.
"You are," Andrea said. "It's okay."
Emily's hand was on Andrea's collarbone. She could feel her pulse there — fast, faster than her voice suggested, faster than the calm expression on her face — and the discrepancy between the two did something to Emily that she couldn't name. Andrea's body was saying one thing and her face was saying another and both of them were saying yes and Emily wanted —
She wanted. That was the thing. She wanted, badly, and she hadn't wanted in a long time, not like this, not with this particular sharpness to it, and the wanting felt almost aggressive, almost unkind, and she didn't care.
She kissed Andrea's neck. Found the place just below her ear where the skin was thin and warm and pressed her mouth there and felt Andrea's breath change — a small, involuntary shudder, the kind the body does when something lands exactly where it's supposed to — and Emily bit, lightly, and Andrea said her name.
Emily.
She said it quiet. Almost under her breath. And the sound of it — her own name, in Andrea's mouth, like that — hit Emily somewhere low and central and blunt, and she pulled back and looked at Andrea and thought: she can't do that. She can't say it like that. She can't —
They moved. Not to the bedroom — not yet. The sofa first, and then the floor, Andrea's back against the base of it, Emily on top of her, and the angle was wrong and the carpet was too rough and neither of them cared.
Andrea's hands were everywhere — on Emily's hips, her ribs, the small of her back, sliding under the hem of her blouse with a confidence that was almost maddening, almost unbearable, the way she touched her like she already knew. Like she'd already mapped this. Like Emily's body was something she'd been reading for years and had finally, finally, got her hands on the text.
Emily caught her wrist. Held it. Andrea looked up at her — from underneath, from the floor, hair spread out behind her, mouth swollen, eyes dark and bright at the same time — and the look on her face was not submission. It was not surrender. It was something much worse.
It was enjoyment.
"You like this," Emily said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant it to.
"Yes," Andrea said. Simply. Easily. Like it was obvious. Like Emily was stupid for not seeing it.
And she did — she liked it. She liked the grip and the roughness and the way Emily was looking at her like she wanted to devour her and was furious about it. She liked all of it, and she was not embarrassed by it, and she was not trying to hide it.
Andrea's blouse went. Emily pulled it open — not carefully, not the way one handles things that cost money — and Andrea didn't flinch, didn't look down at the buttons, just kept looking at Emily with that look.
Emily put her mouth on the skin of Andrea's shoulder and felt the warmth of her, the particular give of it, and Andrea's hand came up and tangled in her hair — loose, now, the pin gone, she didn't know when — and held her there, gently, and Emily pressed harder, bit harder, and Andrea breathed out slow and long and said, very quietly:
“You’re so sweet, Em.”
The words landed wrong. Or right. Emily didn't know. and something in her chest lurched, she lifted her head and looked at Andrea and Andrea was looking back at her and the expression on her face was —
Tender. It was tender.
She can't look like that, Emily thought. She can't. She can't be like this. She can't do this to me.
But Andrea could. Andrea could and Andrea was, and Andrea kissed her back and laughed against her mouth and said:
“Emily. Emily. Emily.”
"Shut up," Emily groaned.
Andrea smiled. Pulled her down. And Emily went.
Andrea knew what she was doing. Andrea had always known, Emily was beginning to understand. Had known long before tonight. Had known, maybe, since before Emily had.
Emily kissed her and Andrea opened her mouth and let her, and then Andrea's tongue slid across Emily's lower lip — slow, deliberate, the kind of thing that should have been embarrassing but wasn't, not from Andrea, not like this — and Emily felt the wet drag of it and made a sound she didn't sanction and Andrea hummed, low in her throat, pleased.
A string of saliva stretched between them when Andrea pulled back. Thin, silver, catching the low light from the city outside. Andrea looked at it. Looked at Emily. Smiled and licked it clean, her tongue running slow across Emily's mouth, collecting it, and Emily's hand tightened on Andrea's shoulder hard enough to leave a mark and she thought: this is obscene. This is absolutely obscene and I have never wanted anything more in my life.
Emily's blouse was open. She couldn't remember who had opened it — Andrea, probably, — and the air was cool against her skin and Andrea's mouth was not. Andrea kissed the hollow of her throat, the place where her collarbone met her neck, the inside of her wrist when Emily reached up to touch her face.
"Andrea," Emily said. Her voice did something she didn't like — something unsteady, something stripped back.
Andrea looked up at her. Half-lidded. Eyes dark. Her mouth was wet and swollen and slightly open and there was a shine to her lips, a gloss, and Emily stared at it and felt something in her go very, very still.
"Mm," Andrea said. Just that. Just the sound.
Emily's hand slid down.
Andrea looked at her. Through her lashes. "Don't stop," Andrea said. Quiet. Not a demand. Something closer to a request. Something that trusted Emily to hear it and do the right thing with it.
Emily didn't stop.
She watched Andrea's face as she moved her hand, watched the way the expressions crossed it — pleasure, surprise, something deeper — and each one was like a door opening, one after another, into rooms Emily hadn't known were there.
It was, Emily thought it was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done for her.
Andrea's breath came faster. Her fingers tightened. Her mouth fell open and a sound came out of it — low, breathy, slightly broken — and Emily leaned down and caught it, pressed her mouth to Andrea's and swallowed the sound and felt it vibrate against her lips and thought: this is mine. This is mine now.
Andrea came with her eyes open. Looking at Emily. Not past her, not at the ceiling, not anywhere else. At her. The look on her face was — struck. Like something had hit her, something large and sudden, and she was still in the middle of feeling it arrive.
Her lips were parted and her lashes were wet, just slightly, and her chest was rising and falling fast, and Emily kissed her — gently this time, very gently, the gentleness surprising even herself — and Andrea made a small sound against her mouth. Not a word. Just a breath. Just a yes.
They stayed like that for a while. Andrea's hand loosened on Emily's neck but didn't let go. Their foreheads were close, almost touching. Andrea's eyes drifted shut, then opened again, slow, like surfacing from water.
Emily was smiling. She couldn't help it. It came out of her before she could stop it, small and real and unguarded, and Andrea saw it and her own smile widened and she reached up and touched the corner of Emily's mouth with one finger, light as anything, tracing the shape of it.
Emily caught her hand. Pressed her lips to Andrea's fingertips. Held them there.
—
The thing with secretly liking Andrea Sachs was that you liked Andrea Sachs.
Not a version of her. Not the idea of her, or the memory, or the carefully edited highlight reel that Emily had, without realising it, been curating in the back of her mind for years. All of it. The whole thing. The awkward giddy wave in the Dior showroom and the way she held her coffee and the way she kissed and the way she looked at Emily afterwards, dazed and sweet and completely unashamed of it. The past and the now. The girl who had shown up at Runway in the wrong shoes and the woman who had shown up at Emily's door in a leather jacket that was slightly too big and kissed her like she'd been thinking about it.
You liked all of it. And that was the problem.
—
Emily woke at six.
The light was thin and grey, the early morning kind, and for a moment she didn't know where she was — which was absurd, it was her own flat, she'd lived here for four years — and then she felt the warmth beside her and remembered, and the remembering hit her somewhere behind the sternum.
Andrea was asleep.
She was on her side, facing Emily, one arm tucked under the pillow and the other resting on the mattress between them, palm up, fingers slightly curled. Her hair was everywhere — across the pillow, across her face, tangled from last night in a way that suggested she hadn't thought to fix it before falling asleep, which was the kind of detail that Emily found, against all reason, almost painfully endearing. Her mouth was slightly open.
Emily looked at her for longer than was strictly necessary.
Then she got up, carefully, the way one gets up when the person beside them is sleeping and you don't want to wake them, and padded barefoot into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood there, in the thin grey light, waiting for it to boil, and thought: well.
Well.
The thing about Andrea Sachs — the past Andrea, the Runway Andrea, the one who had existed in Emily's life for a brief, chaotic, transformative stretch of time and then disappeared into the larger world — was that Emily had liked her then too. Had liked her without meaning to, without wanting to, in the way that one likes someone who is fundamentally incompatible with the life you are trying to build.
Andrea had been messy. Andrea had been feeling things, loudly, constantly, in a way that made the air around her feel charged and slightly unpredictable. Andrea had cried in the bathroom and laughed too hard at things and looked at Emily sometimes with an expression so open and so earnest that Emily had wanted, simultaneously, to shake her and to hold her very still and keep her exactly as she was.
She had done neither. She had been brisk. She had been efficient. She had been, in all the ways that mattered at Runway, exactly what was required of her: sharp, fast, unfeeling. And Andrea had left, eventually, the way Andrea had left — all at once, spectacularly, in a way that had briefly made Emily's life significantly more complicated and then, just as quickly, didn't matter at all, because Miranda had moved on and so Emily had moved on and that was how it worked. That was how it always worked.
Except.
Except she hadn't, quite. Moved on. Not entirely. There had been a place in Emily — small, quiet, tucked away in the back of things — where Andrea had stayed. Not consciously. Not in any way Emily would have examined or admitted to. But there: a residue.
And now Andrea was here. In her flat. Asleep in her bed. With her hair across the pillow and her mouth slightly open and the marks Emily had left on her neck still visible, faint purple, in the pale morning light that came through the window.
The kettle clicked. Emily made tea. She made two cups, without thinking, and then looked at the second one and carried them both back to the bedroom.
Andrea woke slowly. Her eyes opened. Blinked. Found Emily, sitting on the edge of the bed with the tea, and the smile that crossed her face was — immediate. Unguarded. The giddy kind. The kind that had no business being as attractive as it was at six fifteen in the morning with sleep still on her face and yesterday's mascara smudged faintly under one eye.
"Morning," Andrea said. Her voice was rough with sleep.
"Tea," Emily said, and handed her the cup.
Andrea sat up. Pulled the duvet around her shoulders and took the cup in both hands and held it close to her face and breathed in, and the gesture was so Andrea.
"Thank you," Andrea said, and looked at her over the rim of the cup, and smiled again. That smile, that Emily had been, in various forms, trying not to think about for twenty years.
Emily looked at her. At the sleep-mussed hair and the smudged mascara and the marks on her neck and the way she held the cup and the way she was looking at Emily right now.
You like her, said something inside Emily. Clearly. Plainly. Without any of the usual hedging or deflection or careful, rational distance.
You like her and you have liked her and you are going to keep liking her and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Emily took a sip of her own tea. Said nothing. Looked out the window at the grey New York morning and felt, underneath the terror of it, something that was very close to relief.
The thing about the now Andrea — the Dior-showroom Andrea, the boat-railing Andrea, the Andrea who kissed like she meant it and smiled like she meant it and touched Emily like she meant every single part of it — was that she put people to shame.
Not deliberately. That was the thing. It wasn't a performance. It wasn't the kind of confidence that announced itself, that demanded to be noticed.
Andrea moved through rooms now the way water moves through a landscape: finding its own level, taking up exactly the space it needed, not more, not less, and doing it so naturally that you didn't notice until you looked back and saw how much ground it had covered.
Emily had watched her do it, over the past weeks. At the reception at the Met, at Nigel's lunch, in the coffee shop on Lexington. Watched the way Andrea talked to people — really talked, really listened, with her whole attention, the kind of attention that made you feel like the only person in the room — and watched the way people responded to it. Opened up. Leaned in. Stayed longer than they meant to.
It was, Emily thought, a kind of power. A different kind from Miranda's, from Nigel's, from the kind Emily had spent years cultivating — the sharp, efficient, slightly frightening kind that kept people at a distance and made them work harder. Andrea's power was the opposite. It drew people in. It made them want to be near her, to be seen by her, to be the person she was looking at with that particular, devastating attention.
It put people to shame. It put Emily to shame, sometimes, in quiet moments, when she caught herself being less than Andrea was — less open, less kind, less willing to let things in.
She didn't mind. Or she minded, and she was learning not to. Which was, perhaps, the same thing.
Andrea finished her tea and set the cup down and turned to Emily and said, very matter-of-factly:
"I want to kiss you again."
She said it the way she said most things now: plainly, directly, without preamble or apology. She said it and she meant it and she was not embarrassed by meaning it and she looked at Emily while she said it with those half-lidded, knowing eyes and that mouth — that mouth, Christ, that mouth — and Emily thought: deadly.
It was deadly. All of it. The confidence and the sweetness and the way she could look at Emily like that — like Emily was something worth looking at, something worth wanting, something worth the trouble of all this.
It was deadly and it was devastating and it was, Emily was beginning to understand, not going anywhere.
"Come here, then," Emily said.
Andrea smiled. The one that crinkled her eyes and made her look, for just a second, like the girl she'd been — the one who'd shown up at Runway all those years ago with the wrong shoes and the right instincts and a way of seeing people that Emily had spent years trying to forget and had never, not once, actually managed to.
Andrea leaned in. Her hand found Emily's jaw — warm, steady, sure — and she kissed her, and it was slow this time, unhurried, the kind of kiss that had nowhere to be and no one to perform for. Emily closed her eyes. Felt Andrea's mouth against hers, felt the press of it, the warmth, the particular way Andrea kissed like she had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
She pulled back. Just slightly. Looked at Emily.
"Yeah," Andrea said, quietly. "This is good."
Emily looked at her. At the morning light on her face, the sleep still in her hair, the smile that was already forming again — that smile, the one that saw, the one that knew — and thought:
The thing with secretly liking Andrea Sachs is that you like Andrea Sachs.
And you always have.