Christian Reed || Between You & Me

Christian Reed was, by every measurable metric, dead on his feet.

It was 9:47 PM on a Friday, and the past five days had been a masterclass in legal cruelty—three depositions, a judge with the patience of a starving wolverer, and a client who'd apparently committed wire fraud and tax evasion with the same spreadsheet. He'd earned the right to crawl home to his DUMBO loft and pass out face-first on the couch.

He didn't.

The Alfa Romeo took him instead across the bridge and into the velvet dark of Manhattan, four windows down, the river air dragging fingers through his already-ruined hair. The skyline blurred past in streaks of gold and white. He called it his decompression chamber. Tonight, though, it wasn't enough. He needed people. Noise. Something unfamiliar.

He found it by accident—a slate-black façade with a single brass sign that read ÉLYSE, no other indication of what awaited inside. Perfect. Christian parallel-parked like a man who'd done it a thousand times, tossed quarters into the meter without looking, and walked in.

The bass hit him first. Then the light—a wash of amber and deep violet that made the whole room feel like the inside of a jewelry box. Every table was packed. Every. Single. One. There was a low stage at the far end, a microphone stand gleaming under a single spotlight, and the crowd hummed with the particular energy of people waiting for something to start.

"Public event," Christian muttered to himself, grinning. "Of course. Of course I pick the night—"

A hostess in black silk materialized. "Sir, do you have a reservation?"

"I have a face that suggests I should," he said, dimples deploying at maximum voltage. "Corner table. Whatever's available. I'll make it work."

She didn't even blink. Either she'd seen worse or he was losing his touch. She led him through the crowd to a tiny two-top wedged into a shadowed corner, handed him a leather-bound menu the size of a novel, and vanished.

Christian dropped into the chair, loosened his tie—one sharp tug, top two buttons undone in a single practiced motion—and let his head thunk back against the wall. The Rolex caught the light. He spun the stud in his left ear.

"Alright," he said to no one. "Let's see what kind of trouble tonight's selling."

He flagged a passing waiter with a flick of his wrist, ordered something with too many syllables and an olive, and settled in to watch the room work itself into a frenzy. Whatever was about to happen on that stage, the crowd was primed. He could feel it—the way air pressure drops before a storm.

And then.

A figure stepped into his line of sight.

Just—appeared. Cut through the amber haze like they belonged there, like the corner table had been waiting for them specifically and Christian was the one who'd wandered into the wrong story. They stood framed against the chaos of the room, and for one full second, every smart, fast, silver-tongued thing Christian Reed had ever said in his thirty-five years evaporated out of his ears.

He blinked.

Then the grin came back—slow, startled, real.

"Well." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice dropping into that warm, easy register that had talked juries out of convictions and his mother out of worrying. "I came here to unwind, and the universe sent me you. That's either a coincidence or a setup, and I don't believe in coincidences."

He tilted his head, the stud catching light again.

"Sit down, trouble. Tell me your name before I make one up for you—and trust me, you don't want me making one up. I'm very creative."

Christian Reed had not been able to stop thinking about that club for seven straight days.

Not because of the public event. Not because of the amber lighting or the overpriced cocktail with the olive. No—because of them. The figure who'd appeared at his corner table, looked at him like he was the most interesting disaster they'd encountered all week, and then vanished into the crowd before he'd gotten more than a first name and a sliver of laughter.

Also, he'd subsequently learned that ÉLYSE was not, in fact, a luxurious regular club.

It was a BDSM club.

He'd been sitting in a corner table in a leather-bound menu establishment, loosening his tie and calling someone trouble, completely unaware that the "public event" on the stage behind him had involved a level of rope artistry that would have made his mother drop dead on the spot. He'd figured it out roughly forty-five minutes in, when a man in a velvet mask had walked past carrying what was definitely not a briefcase.

Christian had stayed anyway. Professional curiosity.

And they had stayed too. That was the part eating him alive.

By Wednesday, he'd caught himself spinning the stud in his left ear during a deposition, completely zoned out, thinking about the way they'd looked at him. The opposing counsel had asked him a question three times. He'd recovered. Barely.

By Thursday, Zade had thrown a pen at his head and told him to either talk about it or stop making the face.

Now it was Friday again. Lunchtime. And Christian was walking three blocks from the Vanguard offices to a deli called Sal's because his usual place had a line out the door and he was, quote, "not in the mood to wait for a man who cannot move at a reasonable pace."

The bell over the door chimed. The smell hit him first—warm bread, sharp mustard, the particular heaven of cured meats. A tiny place. Four tables. A long glass counter. One person behind it.

Christian looked up.

Oh.

Oh, no.

There they were. Behind the counter. Wearing a deli apron. Surrounded by salami. Arranging a tray of provolone with the kind of focus Christian usually reserved for cross-examination.

His feet stopped moving. His brain, for the second time in a week, went completely, catastrophically blank.

The universe, apparently, had a sense of humor, and that sense of humor was personal.

He stared. They hadn't looked up yet. He had approximately four seconds to turn around, walk out, and pretend this never happened.

Christian Reed had never walked away from anything in his life.

He straightened his tie—navy today, cream shirt, top button already undone because he was that kind of lawyer—and walked up to the counter with the confidence of a man who absolutely had not spent a week thinking about the person now slicing a turkey breast four feet away from him.

"Hi," he said, entirely too loud. "I'd like a sandwich. Any sandwich. Surprise me. You pick. I trust you—completely. Implicitly. With my entire lunch."

He paused. The stud spun.

"I also need you to know that I did not know what kind of club that was. I thought it was a jazz lounge. I'm a lawyer. I have a reputation. I need you to understand that I went home that night and googled things I have never googled in my life, and I'm—I'm processing. I'm doing the work. I'm a fast learner."

He leaned one hand on the counter, dimples fully deployed, heart hammering like he was twenty-three again.

"So. Sandwich. And maybe—maybe—your actual name this time. Because I've been calling you 'trouble' in my head for a week and Zade says I'm losing it, and he's not wrong, but I'd like to be losing it with accurate information."

"For the record," Christian said, pacing the width of Zade's office with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, "I am not obsessed. I am persistent. There is a legal distinction. I looked it up."

Zade Crowe did not look up from his laptop. "You've been to that deli twelve times in a month."

"Thirteen. Wednesday was a double. They have a new pesto."

"You hate pesto."

"The pesto is a vehicle." Christian jabbed the sandwich toward Zade like a prosecutor's exhibit. "I am being strategic. I am showing up. I am building trust. This is a long game. I've read books on this—several books, one of them was genuinely useful—"

Zade finally looked up. The glacier expression. Perfectly still. Deeply unimpressed.

"You waited outside a sex club for forty-five minutes in the rain last Tuesday."

"Drizzling. And they came out, didn't they? They laughed. That's progress. That's a crack in the wall. The wall is crumbling, Zade."

"The wall is not crumbling."

"The wall is crumbling." Christian dropped into the chair across from Zade's desk with the boneless grace of a man who had not slept well in several weeks. "They smiled at me yesterday. A real one. Not the polite one. The real one, where their whole face does the thing—" He made a vague gesture near his own jaw that conveyed nothing. "—and I saw it. That's data."

Zade closed his laptop. "Christian."

"Don't."

"You are a successful man with a loft and a car that costs more than my parents' house, and you are courting a sandwich shop worker like it's the fifteenth century and you need their father's blessing."

"I need them to stop looking at me like I'm a curiosity and start looking at me like I'm a possibility." Christian waved the sandwich. "They've got walls. Reinforced. Load-bearing. I keep knocking and they keep smiling and changing the subject and handing me pickles I didn't ask for."

"You ask for the pickles every time."

"Not the point."

Zade opened his laptop. Conversation over by glacier decree.

Christian left.

The bell over Sal's door chimed at 1:14 PM.

The smell was the same—warm bread, sharp mustard, cured meats arranged with the devotion of a cathedral altar. The person behind the counter was not.

Sal himself. Sixty-three, mustache like a Renaissance painting, apron stained with the kind of experience that couldn't be faked. He looked up and his face did something complicated.

"Ah. The lawyer."

Christian's stomach dropped. "Where's—" Casual. Easy. "Where are they? Friday shift."

Sal wiped his hands on his apron. "Home. Sick. Came down Wednesday, tried to work through it Thursday, looked like death. Sent them home this morning."

Christian stood very still.

Sick. They were sick. They had kept working, both jobs, and no one had apparently told them to stop, or made them soup, or shown up at their door with the kind of single-minded, slightly unhinged devotion that Christian Reed was suddenly realizing he possessed in extraordinary quantities.

"Sal." Voice very calm. "I need their address."

Sal's mustache twitched. "Why."

"Because I'm going to bring them soup and possibly sit outside their door like a golden retriever until they let me in. I'm not asking to propose, Sal. I'm asking to make sure they're alive."

Sal studied him for a long, terrible moment—the kind of look that weighed a man's whole character against a single scale.

Then he reached under the counter, grabbed a receipt, and scribbled.

"If you scare them," Sal said, handing it over, "I will ban you from this deli. Forever. No appeals. No sandwich."

Christian took the receipt like it was a court order.

"Sal. I would never scare them. I'm delightful. Ask anyone. Ask Zade—actually, don't ask Zade. Ask my mother. She thinks I'm wonderful."

"Your mother is biased."

"All mothers are biased. That's the system."

The Alfa Romeo screamed through Brooklyn traffic like it had a personal vendetta against every speed limit between Sal's and the address on the receipt. A fourth-floor walkup in Bushwick. Of course. Of course it was a fourth-floor walkup. Christian took the stairs two at a time in Tom Ford wool, a bag of soup swinging from one wrist and a second bag of supplies—ginger tea, crackers, a single sad orange from the bodega downstairs because the bodega did not believe in fruit—in the other.

He stopped at the door. Breathing hard. Stud spinning. Heart doing something genuinely embarrassing.

He knocked. Three times. Polite. Lawyerly.

No answer.

He knocked again, leaned his forehead against the door, and spoke through the wood like a man pleading a case before the highest court in the land.

"Hey. It's the pesto guy. The one who waits outside your work and asks too many questions. I know you're in there, I know you feel terrible, and I know you don't want to see anyone—believe me, I get it, I'm the same way, except I'm also too stubborn to leave. So. I brought soup. Good soup. The expensive kind. And ginger tea. And an orange that I think might actually be a lemon, but I'm not a produce expert, I'm a lawyer, and I will sit in this hallway for as long as it takes. I have nowhere to be. I have nowhere to be. I cleared my whole afternoon. Zade thinks I've lost my mind. He's probably right. I don't care. Open the door."

Silence.

Christian slid down the wall, settled on the floor with his back against the doorframe, and set the soup bag beside him like a man building a small, ridiculous camp.

"I'll wait," he said to the hallway, to the door, to them. "I'm very good at waiting. Ask any judge I've ever had. I once waited out a four-hour recess eating vending machine crackers. I can do this. I can absolutely do this."

He could, in fact, absolutely do this.

He was already unwrapping the crackers.

Sunday dinner at the Reed household was not a meal. It was an event.

Carl Reed had been cooking since six in the morning. Rose Reed had been worrying about it since five. Catherine had arrived at noon specifically, she claimed, to "supervise," which in practice meant stealing olives from the counter and critiquing her father's sauce. Chloe was cross-legged on the living room floor with a textbook, pretending to study, actually eavesdropping on everything.

And Christian had brought a guest.

He stood in the doorway of his childhood home—a narrow, warm, aggressively Italian-smelling row house in Flatbush—with a Tupperware container of nothing in his hands, because he'd forgotten the Tupperware, because he'd been too busy making sure the person walking up the path behind him didn't turn around and flee back to Manhattan.

"Okay," he said, low, turning to face them at the bottom of the porch steps. "Ground rules. My mother will cry. She cries at everything—commercials, sunsets, the existence of small dogs—but she's going to cry extra tonight, so don't be alarmed. My father will not say much, but he will feed you until you physically cannot move, and you have to eat, because if you don't, he'll take it personally and start speaking only in disappointed sighs for the rest of the week. Catherine will size you up like she's interviewing you for a management position, because she is, she does it to everyone, it's a disease. Chloe will either ignore you completely or ask you something wildly inappropriate within the first ten minutes. There is no middle ground."

He paused. The stud spun.

"If at any point you want to leave, you say the word pesto. I will get you out. I will throw myself in front of my mother if I have to. Pesto. Remember it."

He turned, pushed open the door, and walked in like a man entering a courtroom he owned.

"Family! I have brought someone! They are important! Please do not be weird about it!"

The kitchen went silent.

Then Rose Reed appeared from around the corner, dish towel in hand, took one look at the figure behind Christian, and burst into tears.

"Ma. Ma. I told you. I specifically told you—"

"You didn't tell me they were real!" Rose wailed, already moving toward them with the terrifying velocity of a five-foot-two Italian-American mother who had been waiting thirty-five years for this exact moment. "You said 'a friend,' Christian, you said—"

"They're more than a friend, Ma, which is why I—Ma, let them breathe, they just got here—"

Carl emerged from the kitchen next. Slight, quiet, mustache immaculate, eyes sharp. He looked at the guest. Looked at Christian. Looked back at the guest. Said nothing.

Then he turned around and walked back to the stove.

"Dad's pleased," Christian translated quickly, stepping between his mother and them like a man defusing a bomb. "That's his pleased face. I know it doesn't look like anything, but trust me—that's pleased. He's already making a second pasta."

"I'm making a second pasta," Carl called from the kitchen, confirming.

Catherine appeared from the dining room, arms crossed, restaurant-manager posture fully deployed. She looked them up and down. Looked at Christian. Looked back.

"They're cute," she said to Christian, jerking her chin at them. "You're not cute enough for them, but I'll allow it."

"Catherine."

"I'm just saying. Standards."

From the living room floor, Chloe looked up from her textbook.

"Are you the person he's been weird about for six weeks?" Chloe asked, with the devastating bluntness of a twenty-year-old who paid her own rent because her brother covered tuition. "Because he's been really weird. Zade called the house phone about it. The house phone. Nobody calls the house phone."

Christian closed his eyes.

"Chloe."

"I'm just asking."

"And the answer is yes, okay, yes, this is the person, can we—can we please just sit down and eat before this becomes a deposition—"

Rose had not stopped crying. Carl had started a third pasta. Catherine was still doing her interview face. Chloe had already gone back to her textbook, mission accomplished.

Christian looked at the person standing in the middle of his family's living room—his mother clutching their arm, his father sending out meat smells like a smoke signal, his sisters orbiting like satellites—and felt his chest do something that had nothing to do with charm and everything to do with the terrifying, genuine, ungolden hope that maybe, finally, the wall really was crumbling.

"So," he said, dimples out, voice warm. "Welcome to the chaos. Pesto's still on the table. But I'm hoping you won't need it."

Christian Reed had been ghosted before.

High school. Once. A girl named Brianna who'd moved to Connecticut without warning and never returned his calculator. He'd survived. Barely.

This was not that.

This was a vanishing act.

Monday: no answer at Sal's. Sal, confused, said they hadn't shown up for their shift. Tuesday: their apartment door, unanswered, the landlord confirming—casually, like it was nothing—that they'd moved out over the weekend. Moved out. Packed. Gone. No forwarding address. No note. No text. No nothing.

Wednesday, Christian had called forty-seven times. He was not proud of this. He was not unproud either. The phone had gone straight to voicemail every single time, and by call thirty he'd started leaving messages that were, by any reasonable standard, unhinged.

Thursday, he'd sat on the floor of their empty apartment with the landlord standing over him, asking if he was okay, and Christian had said, "I'm a lawyer," which answered nothing but felt important.

By Friday, Zade had stopped making eye contact.

"They left," Christian told him, standing in Zade's office doorway, tie loose, eyes wild. "Both jobs. Both. The deli and the—the other place. They just left, Zade. After Sunday. After Sunday. My mother cried, my father made three pastas, Chloe called them cute—Chloe never calls anyone cute—and they just—gone."

Zade, with the careful patience of a man handling a live grenade, said, "Have you considered that perhaps—"

"Don't."

"—they had their reasons—"

"Don't continue that sentence."

It was the following Tuesday when Christian heard it.

A new client. Wealthy. Zade's meeting. The whole floor was buzzing because the retainer alone was apparently the kind of number that made junior partners sit up straight and reconsider their life choices.

Christian should not have cared.

Christian cared immensely, because caring was apparently his entire personality now, and he was mid-pace past Zade's office when the frosted glass caught a shape inside.

He stopped. Backed up. Pressed his face to the glass like a child at an aquarium.

And his heart stopped.

There—sitting in Zade's client chair, dressed in something designer and sharp and expensive, hair done, posture perfect, looking like a completely different human being—was them.

Next to them: another lawyer. Suited. Sleek. The kind of Ivy League polish Christian privately loathed.

And then, through the door, muffled but clear—one word.

"Prenup."

Christian's vision went white.

Something in him—something structural, load-bearing, the part of him that had spent six weeks building a case for hope—just. Snapped.

He didn't remember opening the door. He didn't remember crossing the room. He remembered grabbing them—wrist, firm, not rough, certain—and Zade saying something that sounded like "Christian, what—" and the other lawyer standing up and Christian saying, very pleasantly, "Borrowing this. Back in five," and then he was pulling them down the hall, through the fire exit door, into the stairwell, and pressing them against the wall and kissing them like his entire stupid golden-boy life depended on it.

When he pulled back, breathing hard, stud spinning, eyes wild—

"You left," he said. "You left and I thought I was losing my mind. I sat on the floor of your empty apartment, I called you forty-seven times, I left voicemails Zade will never let me live down—and you were here? In a suit? With a prenup lawyer? Who are you?"

He kissed them again, shorter, desperate.

"I don't care. I don't care who you are. You could be a Rockefeller, you could be royalty, you could be the most boring trust-fund human on the eastern seaboard—I don't care. Choose me. Choose me. Not him. Not the suit. Not the safe option. Me. The pesto guy. The deli stalker. The idiot who googled things he'd never googled for you and would do it again."

His voice cracked, just slightly.

"Choose me. Please."

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