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The Elias-Clarke conference room on thirty-two had been redesigned twice since Andy Sachs had last sat in it as a nobody with a phone permanently welded to her ear, and both times the redesign had involved removing more furniture, as if the room's ultimate ambition was to become a single pane of glass suspended over Manhattan. Today it held a plush white leather settee with more tension than its square footage was built to hold.
Miranda Priestly, the Head of Global Content for Elias-Clark's domain had expanded, and so had her power. A title that sounded almost modest for what it actually meant: every Runway edition on four continents answered to the woman currently smoothing an invisible crease from a charcoal Chanel skirt with two fingers, silver hair cut close and sharp against a jaw that had never once, in Andy's professional or personal opinion, softened with age. She looked, if anything, more dangerous now than she had at fifty-something. Time had simply sanded away anything that wasn't essential. Sitting beside her on the plush white leather settee was Andy Sachs, Runway’s brilliant Features Editor, a Peabody nomination and a decade and a half of clawing her way back into a byline she actually wanted and she still, occasionally, caught herself sitting up straighter in this room out of pure institutional memory.
And Miranda’s girlfriend.
They were meant to be doing a joint sit-down interview for an exclusive industry profile. The camera crew was buzzing around, adjusting lavalier microphones and testing angles.
"You're doing the posture thing," Miranda said, without turning her head, voice pitched for exactly one person in a room that would shortly hold three.
"I don't have a posture thing."
"You have several. This is the one from your first year." A pause, dry as good gin. "It's not necessary anymore, Andrea. You have tenure."
"I don't think Runway has tenure."
"You have me," Miranda said, and made it sound like an HR policy, "which is considerably more binding.”
The door opened before Andy could figure out how to respond to that without smiling like an idiot, and a woman came in at the particular speed of someone who is fifty seconds behind schedule and knows it. She was a stunningly beautiful woman with wide, expressive eyes and a beaming, almost excessively radiant smile. She had the specific, gorgeous panic of a woman who had researched her subject for three weeks and was only now, in the doorway, realizing that research does not prepare you for the actual gravitational field of Miranda Priestly. "I'm Andrea Smith. But please, call me Andy! Everyone does.”
The room went very quiet for exactly one beat.
Miranda's eyebrow rose a precise quarter inch. She glanced, once, sideways — not at Andrea Smith, but at the other Andy in the room, the one who had gone very still on the settee.
"How efficient," Miranda said. "I employ one already.”
She was maybe thirty-two, dark hair beauty with a canvas tote bag over one shoulder that was visibly not weighted correctly, and a legal pad clutched to her chest like a shield. "Ms. Priestly, I am so sorry, the elevator, I—" The tote bag slid. She grabbed for it, missed, and a folder of loose printouts hit the floor in a fan of paper that would take a full ten seconds and considerable dignity to recover.
Andy watched it happen with the specific, involuntary lurch of déjà vu — a body memory rather than a thought, twenty years old and still perfectly intact.
Miranda didn't move. She simply watched the young woman scramble, with an expression Andy knew intimately and had once, a very long time ago, been on the receiving end of: not unkindness. Something closer to recognition. Faint, amused, entirely too indulgent for a woman who had fired people for smaller crimes than a dropped folder.
"Take your time," Miranda said. Which, from her, was practically a hug.
"Oh my god." Andrea Smith’s face went through three distinct colors. "Oh my god, you're — you're the Andy Sachs. From the, I mean, everyone knows the story, the Runway thing, the assistant who—" She stopped herself, visibly recalculating whether name-dropping her subject's own legend back at her, in front of said legend's boss, was a career-ending move. "I'm so sorry, that was unprofessional, I just, I've read the profile pieces on you since I was in journalism school —”
"Is that so?" Andy murmured, her voice tight. "Sit down before you lose the other folder.”
Andrea Smith sat. Recovered, marginally. Uncapped a pen with the over-firm grip of someone determined to look composed. Leaning forward in her director's chair. She aimed her megawatt smile squarely at Miranda, her eyes sparkling with unhidden admiration. "Ms. Priestly, I have to say, it is an absolute honor. You look breathtaking. That jacket is... well, it’s beyond words.”
"You are too kind," Miranda replied softly, her tone cool but polite.
And that was when it started, not with anything dramatic, nothing a stranger watching through the glass would have clocked as anything but a good interview. It started small. It started with the tilt of Miranda's head, three degrees more engaged than her usual professional register, when Andrea Smith asked her second question.
"You've overseen the digital transition of eleven international editions in under four years," Andrea said, finding her footing now, pen moving fast. "Critics said it couldn't be done without gutting the print entirely. How did you prove them wrong?"
"By understanding, before they did, that the two were never actually in competition," Miranda said. "Print sells permanence. Digital sells immediacy. Only a fool tries to make one apologize for the other." A beat, and then, to Andy's very precise internal alarm — something that was almost warmth. "You've done your reading. Most of your generation hasn't.”
"I read everything you've ever put your name on," Andrea Smith said, and flushed again, and Andy watched Miranda's mouth curve at the corner in a way that was, technically, nothing. Technically professional. Technically the exact same courtesy Miranda extended to anyone competent enough not to bore her.
It did not feel technical from eleven inches away.
"And you," Andrea said, turning, pen aimed now at Andy like a spotlight swinging across a stage, "you're the reason half the industry believes the ladder still exists. Assistant to Features Editor in — what would you say, fifteen years?"
"Something like that." Andy heard herself say it flatly, and hated it, and couldn't quite locate the door back to warm.
The interviewer's gaze quickly drifted back to the fashion mogul. "Features Editor. Such an impressive climb. But Miranda, I want to talk about your new role. Taking over Global Content... you’re practically running the world now. How do you manage it all while looking like an absolute goddess?"
Andy’s jaw locked. She watched as Andrea Smith leaned in a little too close, crossing her long legs and resting her chin on her hand, looking at Miranda like she was the only woman in the room.
A sharp spike of possessive jealousy flared in Andy’s chest. She knew Miranda belonged to her, knew it intimately from the way Miranda had kissed her sleep-warm lips that very morning but seeing this bubbly, beautiful woman batting her eyelashes and using her name was grating on her last nerve.
Without breaking her gaze from the interviewer, Andy shifted on the sofa. She casually, yet deliberately, slid her arm along the back of the settee behind Miranda, her fingertips lightly brushing the nape of Miranda’s neck.
Miranda’s breath hitched microscopically, a faint smirk playing at the corner of her ruby-painted lips. She knew exactly what her girlfriend was doing. She found it utterly intoxicating.
"I manage it," Miranda answered, her voice dropping into that soft, imperious purr that always made everyone in the room lean in, "by surrounding myself with excellence. And by having the most brilliant Features Editor in the industry at my side.”
Andrea Smith laughed, a bright, chiming sound. "Oh, absolutely! You know, we Andreas just have a way of understanding things, don’t we? We’re very intuitive."
Andy felt a muscle feather in her cheek. We Andreas.
"Actually," Andy interrupted, her voice dropping an octave, rich and dangerously smooth. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, closing the distance between herself and Miranda, leaving no space for the camera to capture them as anything other than a singular unit. "I prefer Andrea in professional settings. Only the people closest to me call me Andy. Isn't that right, Miranda?”
Miranda’s eyes danced with suppressed amusement. She turned her head, her gaze sweeping over Andy’s flushed cheeks and the territorial fire burning in her large brown eyes. Miranda reached out, her manicured fingers resting lightly but firmly on Andy’s thigh, right where the camera could see it.
"Indeed," Miranda murmured, her thumb stroking a slow, sensual line over the fabric of Andy’s trousers. "There is only one Andrèa in my life. And she is quite... irreplaceable."
The heavy, intimate silence that descended on the room caused Andrea Smith to falter. She cleared her throat, her cheeks turning a light shade of pink as she realized the palpable, electric chemistry between the two women was not just a rumor.
"R-right. Well," the interviewer stammered, shuffling her cue cards. "Let’s talk about your dynamic. It must be so difficult, navigating a high-stakes corporate environment with your... partner. How do you separate the romance from the runway?"
Andy’s gaze locked onto the other woman, her chin tilted up in a gesture she had unconsciously absorbed from Miranda over the years. Her hand moved from the back of the sofa to rest gently on Miranda’s waist, her thumb pressing possessively into the curve of her hip.
"We don't," Andy stated, her voice unwavering. "Runway is our life, but Miranda is my heart. There is no line to draw. When she succeeds, I succeed. When she needs me, I am there. We don't separate it because our passion for our work and our passion for each other are one and the same."
The camera continued to roll, but for a moment, the entire room seemed to hold its breath.
Miranda turned to look at Andy, the icy facade of the Snow Queen melting completely under the heat of Andy’s fierce, protective love. The cameras, the lights, and the flustered interviewer named Andrea Smith faded into absolute insignificance.
"Beautifully said, my love," Miranda whispered, her voice husky. She lifted her hand from Andy's thigh to cup her cheek, her thumb tracing the line of Andy's jaw, entirely unbothered by the rolling cameras.
Andrea Smith coughed delicately into her hand. "Wow. That is... that’s really something. Okay, let's move on to the September issue..."
For the rest of the interview, Andy remained close, her posture relaxed but her presence undeniable, her hand securely intertwined with Miranda's. The interviewer kept her questions strictly professional, her starstruck gaze now carefully averted.
The camera clicked off at the twenty-nine-minute mark — Miranda, apparently, had decided to be generous. Andrea Smith gathered her papers with significantly more competence than she'd arrived with, thanked them both twice and had been "genuinely the best interview of my career, thank you, truly," and left in a cloud of gratitude and a tacky perfume that dissipated approximately four seconds after the door closed behind her.
When the cameras finally stopped rolling and the crew began to pack up, Miranda leaned in, her lips brushing just below Andy’s ear.
"You were ferociously territorial today, darling," Miranda murmured, a teasing lilt in her velvety voice. "Did you feel threatened by the other 'Andy'?"
Andy turned her head, capturing Miranda’s gaze. She let out a soft huff, a reluctant smile tugging at her lips. "She was practically drooling on your Chanel, Miranda. I was just reminding everyone whose it is.”
"You were jealous," Miranda said, and there was no cruelty in it, only a kind of clinical delight, "of a thirty-two-year-old who dropped her own paperwork in front of me and referred to you as a legend."
"I wasn't jealous of her."
"No," Miranda agreed, closing more distance between them with unhurried certainty. "You were jealous that I looked at her the way I once looked at you. Chaotic. Underprepared. Entirely too eager." Her hand came up, tucked a strand of hair back from Andy's face with two fingers, deliberate as everything she did. "It's an extremely specific kind of vanity, Andrea, to be jealous of your own origin story.”
"That's — " Andy exhaled, some of the fight going out of her at the touch. "That's insulting and also probably accurate, which is worse."
"I find myself charmed by incompetence exactly once per interview cycle," Miranda said. "It is a professional courtesy, not a courtship. You, meanwhile —" her thumb traced along Andy's jaw, unhurried, proprietary, the private version of a gesture the public version of this woman would never be caught making in a conference room with the blinds still open "— are the only person alive I have spent twenty years failing to get bored of. That is not adequate. That is not sharp questions. That is considerably more than I have ever offered anyone with a legal pad."
"You're very good at making jealousy sound like an insult to your taste."
"It is," Miranda said, "a little bit."
Andy laughed, real, low, the tension finally breaking loose from her shoulders and Miranda used the moment to close the last of the distance, kissing her slow and certain with the blinds still open on thirty-two floors of Manhattan, one hand fisted lightly in the lapel of Andy's blazer like she had every right to it. Which she did. Which she'd earned, the hard way, over the better part of two decades neither of them talked about in interviews.
"For the record," Miranda murmured, without pulling back more than an inch, "you did not lose your tenure to a girl named Andrea."
"I know."
"You never had competition." Her mouth curved against Andy's, wry and warm and entirely private. "You had a twenty-year head start and the singular advantage of actually knowing me. That other one will go home tonight and write a very flattering profile of a woman she has met exactly once." Her hand slid to the back of Andy's neck, thumb resting exactly where the jealousy had knotted itself tight all morning. "You get to go home with the woman herself. I'd call that an unfair fight."
"You would."
"I would," Miranda eyes darkened with desire, her hand slipping down to grip Andy’s waist. "Oh, Andrea," she breathed, leaning in to press another lingering, unapologetic kiss to her girlfriend's lips right there in the middle of the office. "Trust me. Everyone knows exactly who I belong to. That's all.”