“We fucked up,” Ari admitted.
“Yep,” I agreed. “We were off this week.”
“I know why we’re off. I guess we should talk about our kiss,” Ari said in a low voice.
I moved from the table and sat in the chair next to her, staring straight ahead. “I tried. But you didn’t want to hear me out.”
“I know.”
“Ari, do you think us kissing was wrong? Because I don’t. Do you—”
“It wasn’t wrong,” said Ari, cutting me off. “It was amazing. Mind-blowing. I can’t stop thinking about it. But it can’t happen again. For several reasons.”
“Several reasons? Like what? Also, don’t think I’m going to skip over the fact that you said our kiss was mind-blowing.” I smirked, trying to contain my pride in my kissing abilities. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Porter, be serious.” Ari turned to look down at me with soft, rueful brown eyes. “We need to keep things professional. We work great together. Do you really want the office gossip to be that you’re banging the new girl?”
I laughed. “Who’s going to gossip? Ms. Gayle? I don’t care about office gossip, Ari. That’s silly. We’re adults.”
Ari’s face grew serious. “It isn’t silly. Gossip can kill any chance of you becoming partner or me having a career here. You have no idea! It’s happened once, it can happen again!”
Again?
I needed an explanation. “Ari, what are you talking about?”
Ari took a seat next to me. “Porter, we need to talk.”
The seriousness in her voice made me reach out for Ari’s hand. She pulled her hand back, looking into my eyes. She looked afraid, damn near terrified.
“Be real with me. Is it me? Am I being an asshole about all of this?”
“No, Porter. That’s not it,” she assured me. “Remember how I said I hated Chicago, and I had to leave?”
“Yeah, because your dad died. Right?”
“Yes, but that’s not entirely true.”
Confused, I leaned against the arm of my chair. “It’s not?”
Ari took a deep breath. “No. It’s not. Chicago was…tough.”
She rubbed her hands against the fabric of her slacks, rough and unsteady. I placed my hand on top of hers. “Ari? Talk to me. What happened in Chicago?”
I could see the tears well up in her eyes as she searched for the words to say. Fuck. Had she screwed up an account? Forgot something major in a design? Whatever it was, it was a memory bad enough to elicit tears.
Ari cleared her throat, her voice shaky. “I had been at Leland for four years. I was killing it. I’d gotten some extensive projects under my belt. The respect of the old boys’ club in the firm. I really felt like my star was on the rise.”
She stopped to look at me. I searched her eyes, and silently urged her to continue. “Well, in my fifth year, they tasked me with mentoring a new hire. Maurice. I was so excited because in that whitewashed sea, here was another Black person. He was smart, creative, had a real intelligent way of using space in his designs. We worked well together. And eventually, we got close…”
“Oh,” I exclaimed. “Close as in?”
Ari nodded. “Close, as in that kind of close. We started seeing each other. We kept it on the low for months. I really liked him, and I thought he liked me too. He kept saying when the time was right, we’d go to HR and do the right thing. He told me he loved me, that he thought the world of me. That is, until the firm was chosen for an enormous project, and they wanted me to lead it. It was a game changer. A state-of-the-art high-rise that would be on Lakeshore Drive. A Black architect with a building there would have catapulted them to stardom. Name in the papers. Maybe even a feature in Architectural Digest. Or the Tribune. All that jazz.”
Ari wiped the tears pooling in the corner of her eyes. I handed her my pocket square. I smiled reassuringly as Ari carefully dabbed her eyes, trying to avoid getting mascara on the silk fabric. I didn’t care. She could ruin all my handkerchiefs if she wanted to.
Ari folded the silken square in her lap. “My design was amazing. I mean, if you think what I’m doing with the stadium is dope, that high-rise would have made you jealous. Well, the day of my presentation, my thumb drive wouldn’t work. It was corrupted. I was like, well, that’s cool. I had backed it up on the office cloud. I always backed my stuff up on the cloud. But it wasn’t there either. I searched high and low, trying to see if I had copies of anything. It was as if it had vanished. Months of work gone.”