It'll save you a fortune in downtime and my back. Your back? She tilted her head. Is your back a line item now? My back's the most important machine in this building, Miss Carter.
And it doesn't come with a warranty. She laughed. A real one. Surprised out of her, the kind she didn't let the board hear. And for one second standing in the concrete dark.
They weren't a CEO and a maintenance man. They were just two tired people who had somehow against all sense become the only place the other one got to rest. "How's Lily?" Olivia asked. She always asked. She never forgot.
Something in Marcus' chest went soft and painful at the same time. "She's good. Lost another tooth. Told me the tooth fairy needs to renegotiate her rates. Smart kid.
Too smart. Terrifying, actually. He picked up his tool bag. She uh He stopped himself. What?
Nothing. Marcus. Olivia's voice changed gentled. What? He shouldn't have said it.
He knew he shouldn't. But something about the concrete and the early hour and the way she looked at him like he was a person and not a function pulled it out of him. She asked me last night if you were my friend, he said. I didn't know what to tell her. The silence that came after that was a different kind of silence than the machines.
Olivia looked at him for a long moment. "What did you tell her?" she asked quietly. "I told her yes," Olivia nodded slowly. "Good," she said. "Because that's true." And then because both of them were standing on the edge of something, neither one was ready to fall into, she straightened up and became the CEO again.
And he picked up his bag and became the furniture again. And they climbed back into their separate worlds like nothing had happened. But something had something had been happening for 3 years, one honest word at a time. The trouble was Marcus Johnson did not believe he was allowed to be happy. He would never have said it out loud.
He wasn't a man who talked about his feelings. He was a man who repaired things so he wouldn't have to. But the belief was down there in the foundation of him loadbearing holding up everything else. It had started 3 years ago in a hospital hallway when a doctor with kind eyes and terrible news told him that his wife Renee, his high school sweetheart, the girl who'd waited for him through two deployments, the woman who'd laughed at his jokes when nobody else did, was not going to come home. Anneurism, no warning.
She'd been standing at the kitchen sink and then she was on the floor and then she was gone. And the last thing she ever said to him was, "Don't forget Lily's dentist Tuesday." He didn't forget. He never forgot anything after that. He turned himself into a man who did not forget because forgetting was how you lost people and he could not lose one more thing. For a year he barely functioned.
He worked because the light bill came whether your wife was alive or not. He held Lily at night when she cried for her mother and he did not let himself cry. Not once, not where she could see, because he had decided that his job now was to be the wall the storm broke against. And somewhere in that year, he built the rule. Don't let them see.
Don't need anybody. Don't want anything you can't fix with your own two hands. Because the one time he'd let himself love something with his whole open chest, God had reached down and taken it. So when a brilliant, beautiful, impossible woman started coming down to his concrete kingdom just to talk when she remembered his daughter's name and his coffee order and the anniversary of a loss he'd never told anybody about. But somehow she knew Marcus did the only thing his rule allowed.
He told himself it wasn't happening. He told himself she was lonely and he was convenient. He told himself a woman like that, a woman who could have anyone would never could never. And that if he let himself imagine otherwise, he was a fool who deserved the fall that was coming. He told himself all of it every single day.
And every single day, it got a little harder to believe. That evening, the whole tower stayed late for the quarterly investor showcase. A glittering thing on the top floor, champagne and slideshows, and men shaking hands like they were arm wrestling. Marcus was there in his coveralls, invisible as always, making sure the AV ran and the lights held. And the 200 important people never once had to think about why the building simply worked.
He was good at being invisible. He'd had practice, but he watched Olivia the whole night the way you watch weather. She was magnificent up there. Sharp, funny, 10 steps ahead of every man who tried to trap her with a question. She commanded the room and only Marcus from his spot by the service door saw the exact moment her shoulders sagged when she thought no one was looking.
Saw her slip off one shoe under the podium and stand on the cold floor just to feel something real. Saw her scan the crowd for what he didn't let himself wonder. It went late past 11. The important people finally drained away into the elevators and the town cars and the caterers packed up and the lights came down to half and it was just the two of them and the mess. "You didn't have to stay," Olivia said.
She was carrying a heavy steel equipment case toward her office, having waved off the last assistant an hour ago. Her heels were in her other hand. Her hair had come loose. She looked Marcus thought like a woman who'd been holding up a building all by herself for far too long, which was exactly what she was. "Somebody's got to lock up the projector," Marcus said.
"And you shouldn't be carrying that. Give it here. I've got it, Ms. Carter." Marcus, I have carried heavier things than this and worse shoes than these. The case slipped. It happened in the space between words.
Her grip gave out exhausted and 40 lb of steel and glass pitched straight down toward her barefoot on the marble. Marcus moved without deciding to. 3 years of catching falling things of being the man who was already moving before the emergency finished happening. He dropped to one knee and got both hands under it an inch before it hit the corner of the case, biting into his palm. His arm screaming his whole body a wall between her and the pain.
Careful, baby. It came out of him from somewhere below. Thought from the place the rule couldn't reach. From 3 years of watching her carry too much and wanting just once to carry it for her, the word landed in the quiet like a dropped glass. Marcus felt the blood leave his face.
He set the case down slowly, so slowly buying himself half a second he didn't have. His mind was already sprinting through the wreckage. I said it out loud. I said it to her. I said it in her building.