He recruited her a week after her twenty-fifth birthday, five long years ago now. But she remembers it clearly. It was raining, and they stood inside the doorway of the hotel, party noises floating out to them, decorous and low and all but drowned by the sound of raindrops thrumming down on the pavement in a thick sheet of rain. For exactly 368 seconds they stood next to each other, silent. She watched him twirl his umbrella handle around and around in his hand.
When he turned to her, she did not try to pretend she was not watching him. He didn't smile, but one corner of his mouth jerked up, just for a second. He asked for her name. She didn't know what to tell him. She'd spent too many years attached to the name her parents gave her, and she was tired of it, and tired of herself, and tired of being always and simply one thing.
"I could call you," he said, into the pause of her hesitation, one finger reaching up to trace a line down her cheek, "Red Riding Hood."
And so in this way he told her about himself, because if she was Red then he was the Big Bad Wolf, and how terribly enlightening that he should see himself that way. She snapped out at him with her teeth, and grinned.
x
She played their story like a fairy tale. Every day for three days he took her out to dinner. Every day for three days he asked her for her name. "It's a secret," she told him, and "later," she told him, and on the third day she brought him back to her flat and pretended it was something more special than it was, and she pulled him forward by the tie and whispered her name, her real name, the name her parents gave her, right against his lips.
"But I'm tired of being her," she said.
"And who," he asked her, "would you like to be?" He didn't seem impressed, not by her lips or her hand gripping his tie or her hand on his chest, but he didn't pull away and his voice gave her the shivers. She knew even then it was a calculated move. She knew even then what he was like.
Did she answer as she did because she knew? Or even though she knew?
She looked up at him. She didn't bat her eyes, nor blink. "Whoever you want me to be."
x
Her answer did not please him in the way that she'd predicted, in the way that it would some other man. But then she'd already guessed that he was not like other men. And it did intrigue him, which was enough—which was, perhaps, better than pleasing him: he would not have kept her around if she did not keep him on his toes.
Later, months later, over dinner that she still remembers in all of its details, right down to the red glint of the wine in her glass, he had admitted, "You fascinate me." It was the highest praise she had ever received. She did not know what to say, into what expression to direct her face, and she did not know how to touch him, what touch he would accept. He did not give her the ring that day. Yet the two events are twined together in her mind, two halves of a whole.
x
Every other Sunday, she talks to her mother on the phone. Her mother uses her given name, her earliest name. She asks her everyday, mundane, questions, like how are you; are you happy; have you found that special someone yet? She answers with some truths, some lies. To the third question there is no truth, so she steps around it lightly, dances around it deftly, manipulates the conversation in the way that he taught her, and only asks herself later, when she is alone, what her mother would say if she knew.
x
Six months after they meet, he kisses her. It is awkward, and unexpected. Thinking about it later, she compares it to a first kiss in early adolescence, slightly off its target and utterly chaste. Not what she expected of him at all, but then, after half a year of slight touches, of lingering eye contact, of suggestive glances, and no more, she had assumed he would never kiss her at all. It seemed like a tremendous step to feel that slightest of pressures, his lips tentatively touching hers.
It is not a slow building romance. It meanders. By the time she feels his hands at her waist, and his body close against hers, and his tongue sliding across her lips for the first time, she has already shared with him every one of her secrets that is worth knowing. He has already taught her every skill she has that is worth using. Or almost every. He has already given her four different names.
x
Grace, he calls her, when he teaches her the fine and beautiful art of writing codes. It is nimble brain work and she takes to it with ease, sinking into it, a thick feather bed of work, a process of creating lovely things. This is her first lesson, and it takes her over slowly. It builds up in her. She starts to dream of cryptography.
Anna, he calls her, with a slightly drawn out middle n, when he teaches her how to watch people. It is a palindrome name, perfect for slipping into crowds and getting lost; a mirror name, for creating illusion. She feels herself multiply.
Sylvia, he calls her, when they go out to dinner, when they accept invitations to tea printed on thick paper, the text sprawling beautifully in thick calligraphy across the page. She always sits with her back straight and her head held high, when she is Sylvia. She smiles politely, but never broadly, and she never raises her voice.
Ariadne, he calls her, watching her type with nimble thumbs on the small keys of her phone. She slows to look up at him and flicks one eyebrow up in question. He gently tucks her hair behind her ear, and takes his time in answering. He isn't quite smiling. Still, this expression counts for one when it rearranges, in its slight way, the features of his face, and though he's barely touched her, never kissed her, she knows him well enough to say this with confidence: he is fond of her now. "I know you're weaving your webs," he says finally. "With those deft fingers."
He touches his fingers to her arm and she shivers. No one else would notice but he does.
x
She wonders what he'll call her when he slips his hand under her dress. When he spreads her knees apart. When his fingers slide into her, opening her.
x
In public, she always and unfailingly calls him sir. She turns the word into a code, a language of its own, all the meaning carried by inflection, by the tilt of her head, by the quirk of her smile. Sometimes she uses the word to argue. At other times, to tease. One chill November day her soft questioning whisper averts an international disaster. He brings her home afterwards and presses her against a wall. She's only dreamt about him this close before. But his kiss is sweet.
x
She loses touch with her old friends. Her new acquaintances are among the most powerful in the nation, and they do not question her, they do not ask about his arm at the small of her back, or about her ring. She takes it off when she visits her mother. Her mother would certainly ask.
When she runs his personal errands, she is Anthea, a name she picked herself. She likes its ring. Anthea deals often with little brother Holmes and his associates. They are unpleasant people, and she calls them 'associates' precisely because the word is wrong and doesn't fit. That makes it funny. At the end of those days, she does not go home to her empty, boring flat—she does not even consider it—because she knows where she's needed.
The news is bad today.
Anthea is the name that he whispers the first time he slides his fingers up the inside of her thigh. Her heart beats in her throat. She's wanted this, but it's wrong. The news was very bad. She's many things, but not a toy. She is not a distraction. She won't be, later, a reminder. That just wouldn't do, because she knows how stories like this end.
x
Anthea is an assistant he treats coldly. There is something out of tune between them, something off and awkward, and, sensing it, knowing it, knowing it is irreparable, Anthea becomes frigid and distant. Anthea lives behind a wall. She peaks over the edge sometimes, teasing, but she knows where she's safe.
Eva is passionate. She is impatient and insatiable. She is completely fearless and she does not hesitate to drop to her knees for him, to kneel between his legs for him; she is eager for him. She is tired of promises that lead nowhere. Tired of negatives. She just wants this and she wants it to be simple.
And if sometimes he whispers, "This isn't you," against her neck? She doesn't know how to explain that it is, it is her, they are all her, we are all I. She wraps an arm around him and one hand reaches up to grab his hair. She wants to rough it up. She wants him to look imperfect. When he moves, she moves too, pressing up her hips to meet his.
x
May, simple and clear-spoken, light make-up and no jewellery, flat shoes, a gaze that never quite meets the eyes, is interested only in business. Sometimes it is simpler to have her around. Sometimes business needs to come first.
When asked, he always calls her his assistant.
x
He tells her that he needn't be the only one. But she does not even consider the idea of having another. Her work keeps her busy, after all.
He trusts her with everything, with more and more as time passes; most nights she falls asleep only when every task he's set has been meticulously done. She goes to bed when Astrid has picked up the pieces of disasters and Belle has talked insecure men out of crises and Sybil has filed away notes and papers so that everything is in its place. Only then, and in the softest part of a long, harsh, night, she finds him. He's still awake but he's tracing the circles under his eyes with his fingertips.
Viola anchors him with her hands on his shoulders, slides them down his chest until she's holding him in and he's resting back against her touch. "Come to bed," she whispers, "come to bed," and takes him there.
x
What wouldn't you do for him? Viola asks, and no one knows what to answer. There is no answer, to a question like that. Kill? Scheme? Bribe? Kidnap? Steal? Do not be naïve. Chloe, who is a bit naïve, who is a bit young, who likes sweet whispered words and always giggles at far-wandering hands, ponders the question while she pinpoints dust motes with her fingertips. She is lying in bed. The hour is difficult to place. A rare day with nowhere pressing to go.
The answer, when it comes to them, seems so obvious.
She stretches, turns; sees that he's asleep. A deep sleeper. He doesn't stir when she wraps an arm around him, nor when she kisses the back of his neck. She will not leave. There, the solution to the riddle. Even if he asked her to, she would not leave.
x
Her mother serves tea in white teacups with pink flowers spread out in no particular pattern, and as her mother pours, she asks questions. For example:
Why are you taking sugar today?
Her mother's daughter never takes sugar in her tea, but Anna does. She woke up as the wrong person today, perhaps.
And:
When will I meet him? This special man in your life? A mother knows.
Anna smiles her secret smile, and doesn't answer.
x
Big Bad Wolf, she whispers to him, even though she knows she shouldn't be joking now. He's wearing his best suit; she's standing at his side. But she catches his mouth quirking up at the corner just the same. He starts to twirl his umbrella but she stops him with one hand on top of his hand, and he's forced to look at her, and she asks him if he remembers and he says that he does. He says very quietly that he does.
Red Riding Hood, he murmurs to her, the first name he ever knew her by, a name he never calls her anymore.