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Shiv doesn’t remember picking him out of the crowd as much as she remembers him towering above it, his big smile, his gentle blue eyes sparkling in the distance. She remembers bringing her cosmopolitan to her mouth, shooting a question to her companion about who, exactly, was that guy.
“Tom…. Something. He’s Waystar!” yikes , she thinks, but tries to keep her face smooth despite how tell-all her eyes can be. “Something to do with their parks, pretty big shot there apparently. On the rise. He’s single, apparently.”
She tries not to linger on how little she knows about the company these days, it was her choice to leave— their response was to cut her out. That’s how it worked: you leave something, you lose something. Her idea was: she’d only return if she had a plan to win.
“And how do you know that?” Shiv asked, quick to wonder.
“One of my friends went on a date with him sometime ago. Didn’t go far, but he got a rave review, if you know what I mean.”
She hummed a response, sounds like a good enough night . It’s not like she’s had the heart for much more than that.
His eyes glowed with recognition at her approach, but he didn’t cower. How could he ever do that with those shoulders, she couldn’t guess, but there were other things she wanted to find out about them.
The party was loud enough that she found it easy to ask him if he’d like to step outside (yes), what brought him to DC (work), what he did for fun (increasingly less). They didn’t mention Waystar Royco, or the Parks even though Shiv had spent so much of her youth in those rides to the point of boredom with friends who grew increasingly bored of her.
He didn’t ask about Gill, or any other president, her father included, aside from Mondale, whom he named his dog after. Instead, he regaled her with stories of his beloved St. Paul that he preferred as a memory rather than a place he could actually live in; his college friends and their usual youthful proclivities, stories that sounded a little old, and like he enjoyed them in that glass box of memory.
More recent was his interest in restaurants and they discussed dinner spots in town without him pushing for a date in any one of them. If he had, she would have to turn him down and end the chatter, which she was enjoying more than she knew why. He was funny, weird without being off putting or pretentious. Normal . He had a voice she could listen to for hours. She still had a curiosity about how broad he really was under that coat.
The people started milling out of the club to whatever was next and they looked at the doors closing and opening with a sense that their time together was quickly running out. She felt an urgency inside and fished a cigarette from her purse, offered him one he did not take.
She lit it up, waved it dismissively and explained: “Just came back from Paris.”
His brows knit together, “Going back soon?”
She nodded. “Next week.”
His face looked a little more serious then, despite how boyish his charm was, “I think I’ll regret not asking you to come over tonight, then.”
“Why live with regret?” she proposed with a smile.
“We’re all adults here,” he agreed.
They hailed down a cab, staving off the feeling of their time coming to an end too soon for a little while longer. It took many months for Shiv to realize they weren’t pushing off the inevitable end then; that night was, rather, how everything began.