Chapter 16: The Final Straw
The contracts were urgent. Dasha knew this. The studio’s legal department had called three times, their voices escalating from polite to thinly-veiled panic. The messenger had already been turned away from the gate. It had to be her.
She rode the private elevator to his penthouse, the metal box humming its ascent. She held the leather portfolio against her chest like a breastplate. She had not seen him alone since the alley. Communications had been a series of terse, perfect emails sent from her desk to his phone, bypassing the man entirely.
The doors opened directly into his foyer. The air was cool, smelling of lemongrass cleaner and something else, something floral and expensive. Chloe’s perfume.
She heard the low murmur of the television, a sports highlight reel. She stepped onto the polished oak floor, her heels clicking a firm, announcing rhythm.
They were on the long, low sofa, a tangle of limbs and linen. Chloe was half beneath him, her hair fanned out against a charcoal cushion. Matt’s back was to Dasha, his shoulders tense under a thin cashmere sweater. His lips were on Chloe’s neck, then her mouth. One of his hands was splayed on her bare thigh, high up, the grip possessive and deliberate.
Dasha stopped. The air left the room.
“Leave it on the table,” Matt murmured, the words thick and muffled against Chloe’s skin. He didn’t turn his head.
Chloe’s eyes, over his shoulder, found Dasha. They glinted with a lazy, victorious amusement. She made a small, giggling sound into Matt’s mouth. “Baby, she’s always so serious.”
Matt’s laugh was a cold, short bark. It wasn’t his laugh. It was a weapon he’d fashioned just for this moment. “Efficiency has no sense of humor,” he said, and finally lifted his head, turning just enough to glance over his shoulder. His eyes met Dasha’s. They were flat, empty. A stage curtain drawn shut. “The table, Dasha.”
She moved. Her legs carried her to the glass table where a stack of scripts sat neatly. She placed the portfolio down, aligning its edge perfectly parallel to the table’s border. Her hands did not shake.
As she turned to leave, her gaze caught what Chloe could not see. Matt’s other hand, the one braced on the back of the couch. It was clenched into a fist, the tendons standing in sharp relief, the knuckles white as bone against the dark fabric. He was holding on as if the couch were the edge of a cliff.
She walked back to the elevator. The click of her heels was the only sound. She pressed the button. The doors slid open.
Behind her, she heard Chloe’s whisper, “Is she gone?” and the low, indistinct rumble of Matt’s response.
The descent was silent. In the underground garage, the chill bit through her blazer. She got into her car, started the engine, and sat for a full minute, hands on the wheel, staring at the concrete wall.
Then she took out her phone. She opened the contact list. She scrolled past ‘Bomer, M. ).’
She sent it. Then she deleted the draft.
Up in the penthouse, the sports channel droned. Chloe traced circles on Matt’s chest. “You’re somewhere else.”
“I’m right here,” he said, his voice hollow.
“You’re not.” She sat up, rearranging her dress. “It’s the movie stress. Or… her.” She said the word like it was a curious, slightly distasteful thing.
“Her?”
“Your robot assistant. She looks at you like you’re a math problem she’s trying to solve. It’s creepy.”
Matt stood up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window. The city was a grid of light, impersonal and vast. He saw the reflection of the room behind him: the perfectly ordered space, the beautiful woman on his couch, the contract left on the table. A perfect life, assembled like a magazine spread.
He saw his own reflection, too. A handsome man in a beautiful cage.
“She’s just very good at her job,” he said, repeating the line that was becoming his epitaph.
“Get a new one,” Chloe sighed, stretching. “There are hundreds of people who’d kill for that job. People with actual personalities.”
He didn’t answer. His attention was locked on the coffee table in the reflection. Next to the portfolio, two ceramic mugs sat. They were his, from a set of four. They were stacked, one inside the other, but crookedly. The handle of the bottom mug jutted out at a wrong, clumsy angle. It was a tiny monument of disorder.
Dasha had not touched the table except to place the contracts. The housekeeper had come that morning. The mugs had been in the cabinet.
He had made coffee this afternoon, after the gym. He’d taken one mug down. Then another. He’d stacked them, his mind a thousand miles away, in a shaded alley, watching a piece of paper fall.
That small, careless error—his error—was the only human thing in the entire room.
“I have to go,” he said abruptly.
Chloe blinked. “Now? We have dinner.”
“Something came up. The studio. I’ll call you.” He was already moving, grabbing his keys from a bowl.
“Matt. This is getting rude.”
“I know,” he said, and he meant it. He was being rude. He was being cruel. He was replicating the damage, spreading it evenly, because it was the only thing he seemed capable of doing with any consistency.
The elevator ride down felt longer. His palm tingled where he had gripped the couch. He could still smell Chloe’s perfume on his sweater. It made his stomach turn.
His car was where he’d left it. As he slid into the driver’s seat, his phone lit up with a notification. It was an automated calendar alert.
Dasha Waldorf - Employment Review - 6 Month. Scheduled: Tomorrow, 10am.
He stared at the screen. The review. A formality. A box to tick. He’d approved the meeting weeks ago, when the future was a vague, comfortable blur.
He could cancel it. Delegate it to the head of HR. Sign the raise authorization without seeing her. Handle it.
His thumb hovered over the screen.
The crooked mugs were all he could see. That slight, jarring angle in their pristine world replayed behind his eyes as he navigated the evening traffic, a splinter in his mind. His phone buzzed twice on the passenger seat. Chloe. He let it go to voicemail.
It buzzed again immediately, a persistent, angry drone. He hit answer on the steering wheel. “I’m driving.”
“To where, exactly?” Her voice was sharp, the giggling veneer completely gone. “Your doorman just told me you left alone. After that incredibly dramatic exit.”
“It wasn’t dramatic. I had to go.”
“You humiliated me.”
Matt switched lanes, his signal clicking a steady, patient rhythm. “You were never humiliated. You’re Chloe Stone. The room rearranges itself for you.” He said it without malice, a simple statement of fact.
“Don’t you dare be analytical with me right now.” He could hear the rustle of fabric, the clink of glass. She was probably pouring a drink at his bar. “It’s her. It’s that assistant. I’m not an idiot, Matt.”
“Then don’t talk like one.” The words came out colder than he intended. The traffic light ahead turned red. He braked, staring at the crimson glow.
A brittle laugh echoed through the car’s speakers. “Wow. Okay. So it’s true. You’re having some weird little meltdown over the help. Does she know? Or are you just brooding in that beautifully decorated prison all by yourself?”
His grip tightened on the wheel. “Leave Dasha out of this.”
“Why? She’s clearly in it.” Her tone shifted, becoming tactical, smooth. “Listen. I get it. A proximity crush. It’s boring, but it happens. You spend twelve hours a day with someone capable, they start to seem interesting. It’s an illusion. Fire her. Write a check. Problem solved.”
The light turned green. He didn’t move. A horn blared behind him. “You don’t understand a single thing about it.”
“Then explain it to me!” The shout was sudden, raw, and it silenced the line for a beat. When she spoke again, her voice was lower, wounded. “You invited me into your home. You let me… and then she walks in and you turn into a block of ice. You used my skin to send her a message. That’s fucked up, Matt. Even for you.”
He had no defense. She was right. He had engineered the entire vile tableau, a calculated performance using Chloe’s body as a prop. The white-knuckled grip on the couch, the only true part of him in that moment, had been for an audience of one who was already walking away.
“You’re right,” he said, the admission tasting like gasoline.
The silence from her end was complete. He’d never agreed with her before. It disarmed her.
“So what does that mean?” she finally asked, all the fight draining into confusion.
“It means I’m an asshole. And you should leave the penthouse. Tell Luis at the front desk to call you a car. Put the drink on my tab.”
“Matt—”
He ended the call. The navigation screen cheerfully informed him he was seven minutes from Dasha’s address in Silver Lake. The streets here were narrower, darker, lined with jacaranda trees and parked cars crammed close together.
He found her building, a modest Spanish-style courtyard complex. Her unit number was beside a wrought-iron gate. A light was on in the second-floor window, casting a soft, yellow rectangle onto a stucco wall.
He killed the engine. The sudden quiet was a physical weight.
What was his plan? To apologize? To explain? To what end? To make himself feel better, to scrape the tarnish off his own conscience? The selfishness of the impulse choked him.
He saw her in the alley again, placing her shoes back on her feet, that small, devastating retreat. We’re handled.
He looked at the light in the window. Then he looked down at his hands, still holding the steering wheel. They were the same hands that had gripped Chloe’s thigh for show. The same hands that had smoothed out the note with the word ‘handled’ on it.
He didn’t get out of the car.