Ring on His Lip

"Be good. I'm screensharing in a meeting. Don't start." I had just told my boss I loved him. I'd texted my dad for five hundred dollars to cover a wedding gift.

I'd sent it to my boss instead. By the time I understood what I'd done, I had already taken his money. And said it. I froze. That voice note?

He recorded it with his screen up on the wall of a conference room. Everybody heard him say it. And the ring in his lip, the one nobody in that building has ever seen?

He got it because of me. I waited twentyfour years for Nathaniel Cross. The whole time, I thought I was his kid sister.

Chapter 1 Me: [Send me five hundred.] Dad: [?] Me: [I'm out of cash for the wedding gift. Hurry.] Five hundred dollars landed in my account.

I accepted it before the screen finished loading and typed two words back. Me: [Love you!] Then I looked at the name above the thread.

The man who'd just sent me money was not my dad. It was my boss. Nathaniel Cross. Their profile pictures are the same picture. Sunflowers. A sunset.

LIVE LAUGH LOVE in gold script across the bottom. In my pinned chats they sit stacked, one right under the other. My thumb moved faster than my brain. Frick.

Why does the coldest man in Chicago have a Live Laugh Love sunflower. I couldn't work it out. There wasn't time to work it out. I went for unsend.

I hit delete for me, which removes the message for exactly one person in the world. Me. Ha. Just kill me now.

I was somewhere in the middle of planning my move to Mars when Nathaniel sent a voice note back. I opened it with two shaking fingers.

His voice came out low, with a little static in it. "Be good. I'm screensharing in a meeting. Don't start." My breath stopped halfway in.

The sentence began playing in my skull on loop, in surround sound, in that voice. Hold on. What did he just say. Screensharing. In a meeting. So my Love you! went up on a wall.

In front of everyone. And then he answered it. Out loud. In that voice. In front of everyone. Nathaniel Cross has lost his mind.

I was still staring at my phone when my work bestie started blowing it up. Bestie: [OMG. ADELINE.

THE BOSS HAS A GIRLFRIEND????] Bestie: [And the girl's profile pic is the SAME AS YOURS.] Bestie: [Wait.

Didn't you take PTO this week for a wedding] I watched her get within one message of the truth and threw myself in front of it. Me: [what?? no. not me. I bailed on that wedding.

I'm literally in bed] Two years at that company and I've never said ten words to Nathaniel that weren't about a deadline. So she bought it. Bestie: [lol you're right.

He's a glacier and you're scared to say good morning to him. No way you two are close enough to date] I pulled my chin into my collar and let it go.

Because the truth is, I know Nathaniel very well. We grew up on either side of the same alley. He's four years older than me.

Our backyards faced each other across the pavement, and my bedroom window looked straight into his.

When I was small and had no shame, I used to hang off the sill and yell his name across the gap. Nate.

He was in sixth grade then, always bent over the desk under his window, doing homework. He'd hear me, lift his head, and wave with absolutely nothing on his face.

Then close the window. Yes. He closed the window. I was seven. The next morning I hung off his sleeve the whole way to the school bus and demanded to know why.

He slowed his stride down to fit my short legs and said, without heat, "Because you're too loud." I don't remember what that did to me.

I only remember that from that day on, I never spoke to him above a whisper. Chapter 2 By the time I was older, I'd stopped speaking to him at all.

I just moved my desk over to the window so I could do homework with my head down and my eyes up.

He could be sitting perfectly still with a pencil in his hand and I'd have to look away.

Wind came down that alley through four seasons a year, and I watched him through all of them. Then he left to start his company and stopped coming home much. I went to Northwestern.

The gap widened. Nathaniel was cold and quiet and never reached out first. And Adeline Ward was too anxious to keep chasing anyone.

Then I graduated, went looking for a job, and walked into his company without knowing it was his. The first time he saw me in that lobby, his eyes caught on me and held.

He changed direction and started toward me. I panicked and texted the man who'd sat pinned at the top of my phone for years without either of us ever typing anything. Me: [!!!!

PLEASE ACT LIKE YOU DON'T KNOW ME] I was too old to call him Nate by then. Later I went in and changed his name in my phone to one flat word. Boss.

Nathaniel looked down at his screen. He read it twice. Then he pressed the screen dark with his thumb, turned around, and walked back into his office. I'd changed his name to Boss.

What I didn't know was that the thread labeled Boss sat at the top of his phone, too. Pinned. After that we behaved like two people who hadn't grown up sixty feet apart.

Nothing but work. So nobody in that building knows we've known each other for twentyfour years.

I spent the entire wedding with my head somewhere else, opening our thread every ten minutes to stare at that voice note. I never answered it.

Part of me was sure he'd mixed me up with somebody. Or that something had gone wrong in his brain. My PTO ended. I went back to work.

He walked into the break room while I was standing there with a mug. He had a coffee cup in one hand and the whole doorway in the other.

I grabbed my mug tighter, gave him a smile I could feel going wrong, and said, in the small voice I've used on him since I was seven, "Getting coffee too?

What are the odds." Behind the gold wire rims, his eyes settled on me and stayed. He didn't answer. He shut the break room door. My heartbeat stumbled with the click of the latch.

He set his cup down. He tipped his head, unhurried, and pushed the black sleeve garter up his forearm. Under the white shirt, the muscle came up in a long line, inch by inch.

He never looked up. There wasn't enough air in that room for me anymore. When he did look up, he did it slowly, and he didn't smile, and he didn't blink.

And then he used the name only he has ever used. "Not really.

I came in here looking for you." "Addie." Chapter 3 Under that, my heartbeat lost its footing and I took half a step back.

I looked into eyes that had none of the usual cold in them, and my throat went dry. That low, sandeddown Addie especially. Disgusting. "Don't call me that, boss.

I'm getting goosebumps." I rubbed my arm while he watched, then held it out for him to inspect. "Look.

You did that." Nathaniel, who ten seconds ago had owned the entire room, frowned. He looked at my arm. He looked at my extremely serious face. He clicked his tongue.

Whatever had been in the air went out of it. I could breathe again. But the break room was still too small with him standing in it.

I haven't been alone in a closed space with Nathaniel in years, so I saw the gap between his shoulder and the counter and went for it. "Boss, if you could just move, I'll, uh." Three words in, the counter caught me across the small of my back.

His arms came down on either side of it. Not touching me. Nothing touching me. The counter edge was cold through my shirt.

He was near enough that I could smell the detergent on his. I heard myself swallow. His breath moved the hair at my temple. I stopped. Looked up. Had no idea what my face was doing.

His eyes were too much to hold, so I dropped mine to his mouth. At the corner of his lip sat a clear ring. You'd never see it unless you knew. I put that hole in his face.

The summer I finished high school, I decided I wanted a lip ring. My parents are openminded people who could not handle this. They talked. I didn't listen.

So they went over my head and called the one person on earth I had ever actually listened to. He was three states away, building his company. They called him anyway.

That was during my hatinghim phase. Because he had a girlfriend. The older, puttogether kind. Beautiful. Nothing like a kid still living in high school hoodies.

I stayed away from him. He posted a photo. Something small and hot lodged under my ribs and stayed there. I never went near them. I was just angry at myself.

Angry that I hadn't been born two years earlier, so I could have stood a little closer to him. Then I found out my parents had dragged him into it, and I felt worse.

So when Nathaniel texted asking whether I was really sure about the piercing, I told him I'd dropped it. I didn't want my disobedience taking up space in his life.

Nate: [Say it again.] Me: [I'm not getting it.] Nate: [Once more.] Me: [I'm not getting it.] He called my parents after that and told them he'd handled me. I chose to be good.

And it stayed there, right next to his girlfriend, and didn't move. The semester before my freshman winter break, I went and got it done anyway.

It was the first time in my life I hadn't listened to him. When the needle went through I looked at myself in the mirror. Adeline. You get to have one thing he doesn't get a say in.

It hurt. And while it hurt, the thing lodged under my ribs finally let go. On the bus home I watched traffic slide past the window with one sentence going around my head.

Get over yourself. That night I packed away every puttogether outfit in my closet and started the long project of not thinking about the woman on his phone.

The piercing didn't stay secret long. My family found out. Which meant Nathaniel found out. He came home over the holidays that winter. It was snowing.

He stood at our door with snow still unbrushed from the shoulders of his navy overcoat, night behind him, lashes down.

At the corner of his mouth was a silver ring that matched mine exactly. He looked at me, and his voice had nothing in it at all. "That's on me.

I didn't watch you close enough." Chapter 4 He meant he'd put a hole in his own face to apologize for mine. And the thing did not belong there. Not on him.

The same way I didn't belong anywhere near his life.

I stood in the doorway with my brain running in circles and finally produced a sentence. "Does your girlfriend mind?" "We broke up," he said. His voice had the winter in it.

I blinked. There were so many things I wanted to ask. When did you start. Did you hold her hand. Did you kiss her. Why did it end. They all melted together into one thing. "Sorry.

I didn't listen. Come inside, it's freezing." Nathaniel didn't answer. He carried the holiday gifts in and apologized to my parents.

They took one look at his swollen lip and nearly died on the spot. My mother opened her mouth to start on me. Nathaniel got there first.

He stood at the end of our dining table and said it one word at a time. "I did this to myself." "It has nothing to do with Adeline." "Anyone who wants to yell at her can come through me." The table went quiet.

My mother's mouth stayed open around the first half of a sentence she never finished. Three seconds. Then they yelled at me anyway. The whole break, start to finish.

They said I'd ruined the Cross family's perfect son. And every single time they said it, Nathaniel said his line again. I did this to myself. Eight days. Eight times.

I never argued. I took my ring out a long time ago. The hole closed up like it had never been there. It never occurred to me that Nathaniel still had his