Work Text:
The Gabriel company hiring process was infamously unorthodox, but the endless humdrum of recession job hunting was infinitely worse.
So Nathalie hedged her bets; clicked apply and added another carton of ramen to her Amazon shopping cart.
The first phone call interview had turned into the second, third and fourth phone interview, as each time the recruiter posed a question a new call came in on another line with a different, follow up question.
The next interview had been in a coffee shop where she was greeted in Italian with directions to a second coffee shop to meet yet another interviewer who alternated between impeccable Mandarin and boorish English.
Not long after that she received emails from the company HR in Latin -- which wasn’t even listed on her CV -- and she only briefly considered replying with hieroglyphics, really.
It carried on like that for a month. There was no indication it was especially going well - that Nathalie was doing well - beyond the persistence of interaction, and honestly? Honestly, she should have known better. Should have put a stop to it days - weeks - ago because unless she was secretly being recruited for the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure there was no logical reason to have a potential executive assistant try out an escape room.
And yet.
And yet. The past few months had slipped by her unnoticed and unmissed. Paris in winter was ceaselessly strung together by days of low hanging fog, dirty streets of gray, soaking slush, and the damp kind of chill that soaked through hundreds of years old architecture like it was a days-old newspaper. The holidays were too bright and close together, and the sun was always too low -- the promise of spring, of change, too far away.
She’d moved to the city five years ago on the promise of prestige from a world - an economy - that didn’t exist anymore -- indentured to a whisper of someday. But the patience she’d always prided herself on had faded. What had someday gotten her?
A shoe box flat with a banging radiator.
An empty address book, and an unblemished calendar.
The intimate familiarity of her couch cushions.
So she indulged it; this game, this farce she’d fallen into; let the ridiculous demands of it catch her attention until, as always, reality reminded her that she wasn’t the kind of woman who flights of fancy suited.
***
Reality made its point clearly.
The Agreste mansion loomed behind gated walls – unremarkable in its marbled design save for how it imposed itself as singular and separate. No buildings shouldered it; there were no neighbors to mar its presentation. In a city crammed tight for want of space and history, the message driven here was clear: Agreste was an island to itself.
Another woman in her - sensible, but still fashionably clicking - heels might have felt small before its gated arches.
Nathalie felt …
Prepared.
That was the point, of course. The game was to be a rock of sanity in the face of a tidal wave of absurdity. A dower realist’s yin to the expressive creative’s yang.
Oh, she’d done her research, of course. She could recite the major fashion houses by rote; she had a chemist’s categorization of fabric types to rival the periodic table; and the man himself wasn’t much of a mystery. Gabriel was Gabriel. On that point, Nathalie was confident – if somewhat skeptical of the wisdom driving it.
A brand could be built on many things, of course, but a cult of personality was hardly the most reliable foundation; and not in the fast-paced, fickle court of opinions of the fashion world, especially. For an upstart fashion house to sell its founder as much as its product was a risky move. After all, if a model was a clothes hanger meant only for display, a designer should have the decency to be nothing more than a moth ball – essential, but out of sight.
Notoriety was marketable, but precarious; it was the sort of currency you could trade in, but not always bank on.
Still, it was hard to argue with the evidence.
If McQueen designed to make clothing into visual weaponry, Agreste designed to make the perfection an outfit promised seem achievable. And Gabriel Agreste, the designer, was the very embodiment of that promised perfection: crisp, cool, and purposely impersonal.
Nathalie had studied the few and far between interviews with the man with a begrudging laugh.
They were, to the last, predictably succinct. Agreste had - to excuse the turn of phrase - perfected the art of saying nothing in particular and making it sound profound for its brevity. And its disdain. (Perhaps especially for its disdain.)
The most viral of them had been a red carpet pre-event at a New York fashion week from a few years past. Some minor late night comic show had sent a man-on-the-cat-walk style ambush interviewer and stuck a microphone in Agreste’s face with a blithe hypothetical.
“Can an Ugly American ever be fashionable like a Parisian?"
“Can the colorblind wear white after Labor Day?” Agreste had replied without giving an inch of reaction, merely glancing down at the interviewer's generic suit and tie. “The only handicap to fashion is effort, as I can see you’re well aware.”
She can’t say she’s not impressed.
But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t also think it’s completely stupid.
A house of cards - a fashion house - a multinational corporate holding - isn’t made to balance on the shoulders of one man. By design - ‘by design’, oh hell, Agreste’s interview penchant for wordplay being contagious might be reason to go home to her instant noodles - a business should be the sum of moving parts; a solitary looking grandfather clock that’s actually run by hundreds of cogs. But Gabriel was a sundial, and Agreste was both the stone and the shadow that it cast.
His ego would be the death of him, she was sure of it.
And yet.
And yet here she was making her way up the driveway, and being ushered through heavy, ornate doors by an apologetic looking house staff. A home office was the sort of eccentricity money could afford, and, frankly, the first time the issue of working in Agreste’s home had been raised it had almost been enough to make Nathalie pull the emergency brake on the carnival ride and finally put an end to the nonsense.
She wasn’t one to waste her time on drug shop paperback harlequins - not when the internet was free - but she knew the storyline that type of set up demanded.
But for all she was a solitary creature, she wasn’t without her resources. Sticking her head into the spider's web of professional networking was easy enough. A careful ear could tune into a thousand whispers - and nary one had anything particularly sordid and sticky to fling against Agreste. Euphemistically, “artistic” in Agreste’s case meant arsehole, not amorous.
Still, Nathalie wasn’t sure how he managed it, as she surveyed the grand foyer that was spotlessly maintained in the pristine shades of a chess board.
Somewhere on the floor above them was a mattress wrinkled by the nightly weight of his body.
Somewhere in the rooms around them there were forgotten cardboard cups still sloshing around the remains of black sludge midnight coffee instead of the ornate china high-noon tea cup that was being offered to her by an indifferent butler.
Somewhere past the porcelain and ornate crown ceiling molding there was a clutter of books and trinkets; mismatched socks and ripped junk mail; dog eared photographs and not oil paint full length portraits.
Somewhere past the facade of perfection there had to be proof of the life he was actually living.
It had to be a Herculean effort to keep the two worlds separate.
And all that effort to not mix the two worlds while existing in the same place? Nathalie didn’t get it. The need for him to be here, to mix the personal and the professional – it all ran counter-intuitive to every single thing she’d learned about the man.
He was cut-throat and clever. A snake in the grass waiting to strike. He was sterile and cool. A perfect, towering statue of precise decision making.
He was not … sentimental. (Professionally speaking. Of course.)
And - although his hiring process seemed designed by Rube Goldberg - he was not - or had not yet been caught out as - outrightly bad at his business.
And yet.
And yet for a man who sold perfection, he clearly enjoyed being on the edge of disaster.
Artists. Honestly. Could there be anything more predictable than a creative-type’s counter-intuitive stubborn provocations?
Take the position for instance. It had taken Nathalie all of five minutes on LinkedIn to realize the job posting wasn’t to replace anyone; no, the man had never had an assistant before. She would be his first. The absurdity of it - the sheer incredulity - was laughable. (And she had laughed. She’d laughed so hard that night she’d splattered a light rain of the cheap screw-top rosé that had been doing the heavy lifting in convincing her that this was a professional cherry she wanted to pop.)
At least he’d had the sense enough to have a lawyer slide an NDA onto the table alongside with her crystalline table coaster. Once she’d signed and sipped her tea delicately enough to demonstrate her discretion she was left alone without the household minders in the waiting area outside the atelier.
It was small. Certainly the least impressive of all the impressive spaces she’d been given access to in the mansion, but she could fit an appropriately sized desk along the wall. She idly wondered whether it would be a fight to keep the office chair ergonomic over aesthetic. There were twin potted vases with fresh white orchid stalks guarding the doorway – something to get rid of at the start, lest she get “gardener” added on to her job duties, but for the moment she let herself enjoy.
Her eyes were on the doorway - on the flowers - when she got her first impression of him.
It was his shadow; the thin, retreating outline of him pacing back and forth that spilled out from under the other side of the door. His steps were quiet, but it was immediately evident that his voice wasn’t.
His complaints were long-winded, and over-enunciated for impact. The language was surprisingly clean – but then, of course, his word choice was too exacting, too perfectly cutting to need to be something so unsightly as crass.
A maelstrom of problems fell from his mouth like claps of disorganized thunder, each rumble of complaint on a new topic as random as a lightning strike.
There were shipping delays in Milan.
There were contract negotiations that were stalled with the Paris Opera Ballet touring company.
There were decisions that needed to be made on renewing the office space contract, and there were decisions that needed to be made about personnel headcounts.
Nathalie listened.
There was a clock out in the main entryway of the house. Some ostentatious Swiss piece that had hardly stood out among all the other showpieces, but she was acutely aware of it now – of its ticking.
The timing of the interview offer had been precise. Monsieur Agreste will allot twenty minutes out of his busy schedule to personally conduct the interview. Do not waste his time.
Time was dwindling. Agreste’s storm gave no indication of easing. His shadow wasn’t drawing any nearer. The clock continued ticking.
And Nathalie?
Nathalie got to work.
***
Anti-climatic.
It was the word her mind settled on somewhere in between the cup of noodles burning her tongue and the rosé numbing the sting.
She had wanted –
No. No, even now, Nathalie couldn’t still quite name what she had actually wanted from the experience. All she could settle on was the lingering whisper of what if and the booming finality the sound of the Agreste manor gate closing had made as it echoed off her retreating back, which played on repeat in her mind.
It was fine. It was over. She could go back to peaceful normality, and be no worse for wear.
And yet.
It was almost a waste. The knowledge and the time she'd put into absorbing his world -- well, it wasn't like she'd had other more pressing concerns to focus on, but still. That was what was galling. It was a shame to be wasteful. Nathalie's time wasn't exactly precious, but it was still hers. Who was Gabriel Agreste to waste it.
It was his loss.
That was the soothing balm she let her thoughts rock themselves to as she sat, legs curled underneath her on her couch, wrapped in a blanket that she now had too much of an opinion on in terms of thread count and manufacturing. Her laptop was open to the on-line classifieds, but truthfully wasn't doing much more than serving as an expensive heating pad. She couldn't quite force herself to actually read the offerings. There would be time for that tomorrow. Tonight it was alright to be ...
wasteful.
And wasted, if she wanted to be truly indulgent -- which she almost did. But then her mind would unhelpfully try to run the numbers on what the whole Agreste experience had cost her in time and potential earnings, and suddenly sobriety seemed more affordable.
Eugh.
No. She was getting nothing done tonight. She could fool anyone except her own common sense, which was screaming for her to either call it a night, or find a more interesting distraction than self-pity.
Her cell phone ringing was suspiciously perfect timing.
The default ringtone chirped at a reasonable volume as Nathalie peered at the device with misdirected annoyance.
The caller ID was blank. It was only the fact that the area code was local to Paris, and the logic that quarter to one in the morning was an abysmal hour to operate a spam operation that made Nathalie reach for it. She tapped the answer button and put on her best blank voice with nary a note of sleepiness or liquid courage rolling off her tongue.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Sancoeur. I generally expect my employees to maintain a better sleep schedule for optimal work performance.”
Sonofabitch.
"Monsieur Agreste." Her voice was as steady as her thoughts were scattered. "Were I on the clock, I might share your concerns."
"Were you on the clock, you would have been paid for the work you did this afternoon."
Nathalie would hardly call it work. It was - it had been almost childish, honestly. She'd never been one to be so mindless as to doodle or god-forbid attempt to outright draw when left to her own devices and a blank sheet of paper, but she'd come close that afternoon outside the atelier. The impulse came from a similar place of mindless energy and natural instinct; she had heard the problems, and she had drafted the solutions.
Her original thought, around when minute three of her original appointment time had slipped by, was that taking notes on what she heard and outlining solutions would make for an easy starting point to the interview. What better way to demonstrate the initiative and unobtrusiveness the position was supposed to demand so intensively. By minute ten, when the door separating them remained so resolutely closed, Nathalie's thoughts had grown less altruistic.
She had perhaps - perhaps - diverted her original solution based organizational chart into more of a ... running commentary on how the problems she had overheard were symptoms of time-delegation failure. A charitable reading would have seen what she had slid under the atelier door at minute twenty as an instructional how-to-guide.
(Nathalie had not been feeling particularly charitable at minute twenty.)
"I didn't provide my notes expecting payment."
In interviews, Agreste's voice had a concrete quality. It was more than just being deep and well spoken; when he answered questions - or more likely commentated on the question he would have preferred to have been asked - you heard the certainty behind the words. Here and now - here and now and somehow on her phone - Nathalie heard a crack in the gravel.
"One doesn't get far in this business working for exposure."
It was an offering. It was curiosity ... and an invitation to satisfy it.
It was also more than mildly condescending.
"Is there something I can help you with tonight, Monsieur Agreste?"
Nathalie's voice was a plateau; flat enough to be inoffensive, raised enough to place herself above judgment.
"Tomorrow. First thing in the morning -- eight o'clock -- won't be a problem for you, will it?"
"Of course not." As if there was any other answer.
"Then I won't keep you." The phone clicked without an 'adieu'.
Nathalie swore.
***
The morning light reflecting off the white marble gave the mansion a golden sheen. Nathalie’s breath lingered in the air the way she knew she wouldn’t. This meeting would be a short one. On that point she was certain.
Just as she was certain that she was the best - the only - candidate for the position. Just as she was certain he already knew that. Just as she was certain that fact - every fact; any fact - didn’t matter.
The only thing she wasn’t certain of? Who would be cutting the final final word.
She declined the offerings and profferings on the second-go around. Time was of the essence, and pageantry was the guise of the leisurely. The house was quiet, but the house had been quiet yesterday too until Agreste made himself known.
Nathalie sat in the same chair, and counted clock ticks.
At eight on the dot there was a clock’s low vibrating chime and nothing more as the atelier door did not creak when it swung open.
Gabriel Agreste stood before her.
The famous and the notorious were similar to the anonymous of the dating apps Nathalie didn’t waste her time on when it came to lying about their height, but the television and the internet might have downplayed his - or, at least, had somehow diminished the effect of him, in person, that left the brain feeling like the only way to look at him was up.
Looking at him - looking up to his face - her mind jumped to thoughts of statues. All the Greek statues at the Louvre (or god forbid some lesser British imitation) erect in sun-bleached white, and held up as the height of perfection.
The Gabriel in front of her was just as parched of flaw as any well-cut Greco-Roman marble; his white button up was pressed and his ash blonde hair was coiffed with the precision of a chisel. His eyes were either blue or grey – she wasn’t close enough to say - but peered with such intensity it felt like they could win a staring competition with a rock.
Nathalie didn’t look away.
“Ms. Sancouer.” He gestured to the door. “Please. This way.”
He stepped aside for her with a slight incline of his head – the picture of civility. It was the opening steps of a dance she knew well.
Here was the one step forward, the offering of banal pleasantries – “Yes, it was quite cold out this morning.” Then came the side step of rebuffing – “No tea for me, thank you, monsieur, I’m fine.” – and recovery – “So kind of you to make time for me again this morning.” The pointed tip toe of the presentation – “Was there anything in particular about my resume you wanted to go over?”
Watch Nathalie do it, backwards and in heels, and make him look like he was leading the charge.
But Agreste seemed intent on re-writing the score.
“What did you think you were doing with that maneuver yesterday?”
His voice was even; his eyes were steady and unblinking; his mouth was a thin line of carefully negotiated neutrality, a place where telling emotional cues went to die. Perfectly practiced. Perfectly perfected by a man too used to winning moves to show any satisfaction in playing the game.
And yet.
And yet, for all he presented a blank canvas, Nathalie was able to see between the lines. She didn’t even need to have her memorized backlog catalogue of his public appearances to recognize this mood: annoyance.
It always looked the same in powerful men.
“Assisting you.” It was a matter of fact reply for what was evidently a layered question.
“And when exactly did I ask for your so-called assistance?”
“Would you like me to open any of the twenty-some odd employment descriptions I’ve received from your HR and control-f search for the phrase, monsieur?”
The secret of Nathalie was this: while she was clever; while she was - frankly - tenacious in using that cleverness when she gave it a direction to point to; while she was skilled and connected in all the sorts of ways that mattered in the modern world; none of what she could do mattered. All that mattered is what she could do for others. And that - that quality of performance - that was where she was truly exceptional. Anyone could be clever. Anyone could learn a language or ten. Anyone could research and absorb and poke and prod at a subject and become its expert. But seeing the truth in the bluster, the ask beneath the asking, the need beyond the want?
That was where Nathalie shined.
Agreste wanted to be challenged.
(And the secret of Nathalie was also this: while her heart rate was a metronome; while her face was a mirror of impassivity; while her posture was a lodestar; her mind was alright with the thrill of being challenging.)
Agreste peered at her down his glasses. When she had first started researching him, Nathalie had wondered about that. Glasses and not contacts in the face of all the rest of his public marketing - not exactly pure perfection then, was it? An exception that proved the rule, or perhaps a far more benign fear of Lasik lasers? She had let herself ponder it in her preparation, but now, in person, the answer seemed obvious. They were a tool.
A glare seemed all the more imposing when it was accompanied by another kind of glare.
“You are an exceptional candidate,” Agreste replied with all the hallmarks of a ‘but’ flashing across his face … but it never came. Instead there was a lengthy silence, the lingering chill of annoyance, and the expectation of response.
“Yes.” Nathalie replied as if she had no more pride in that fact than someone might have pride in being left-handed.
“The thing I find most exceptional about you though,” Gabriel continued on as if he hadn’t heard her, “is how you use that exceptionalism in the pursuit of out-right mediocrity.”
Nathalie waited.
“Your schooling, your work history – there’s hardly an accolade you haven’t earned. On paper you have the skills to run not only this company, but another five Fortune 500 just as a hobby.” He spoke without humor, and somehow the blandness of the assessment was more offensive than the derision of the joke would have been.
“But instead of putting any of that innate ability to work on a goal, a passion, you seem content to labor away underneath people clearly your inferior. The mayor’s office, really, Ms. Sancoeur?” He scoffed, and she hated that the sound made her stiffen.
“I have no interest in being assisted by someone so lacking in meaning in their own life that they seek to find it in the hand-me-downs of my life’s passion.”
That was…
bullshit.
Her pupils dilated - and oh, how she hated that she was handing him her poker tell, and hated even more that he couldn’t even be bothered to notice it.
Her mouth stayed perfectly horizontal and in balance with the rest of her face, but her jaw ached from its hidden clench.
“It’s true,” she spoke calmly, each word a carefully thought out drip of condensation from her mind’s steaming reservoir, “I admit I have no particular passion for fashion. If the position required me to care about the industry, I would be an objectively ‘mediocre’ candidate. But, thankfully - for you - that is not what is necessary for this role, and I am more than qualified to attend to what it does require an interest in.”
“Which is?” There was a flicker of interest to him for a moment there - a sense of anticipation for the ego-blowing he expected to come.
“Problem solving.”
If her voice rose it was only to punctuate the answer, and it certainly wasn’t with a whiff of exasperation. Nathalie continued, slowly.
“Yes, you’re right, I’ve worked behind others my whole life. But you misdiagnose my forgoing the spotlight as some tepid defect of character when I assure you it couldn’t be anything further from the truth.”
“Enlighten me.” He said as if he wasn’t a man built to thrive in the shadows.
“Passion is a fickle fire,” Nathalie said evenly, “I have no interest in chasing flames. My goal, in my life, and in my work, is results. I see life’s knots, and I seek to untangle them. Unraveling a problem into something manageable – it’s methodical. It’s painstaking. It’s boring. It’s something artists rarely have the stomach for, but which I excel at. Your failure to see my value just proves how much you need it.”
“A circular argument, Ms. Sancoeur.”
“An appeal to emotion.”
He scoffed. “Now there is a fickle flame that has no hearth here.”
Ah - so the wordplay wasn’t an affect for the cameras then. Was it a tell then? A sign that she was getting under his skin? Was that even where she wanted to be? Nathalie wasn’t sure, but she knew herself too well to pretend she could let a question in her mind go unanswered. She considered him anew searching for her next angle to provoke him into response – but it didn’t get the chance to come.
Instead there was an interruption.
“Ah, there you are!” The voice carried clear and sunny into the room.
Nathalie startled and then chided herself for it (the atelier door does not creak when it opens repeated thrice into her mind to keep the warning locked in her memory) and turned around.
Emile Agreste. The tabloids’ white whale. The gauche legacy of French aristocracy. The British’s lost debutante. The artist’s favored (only) muse; the promised perfection writ large. She was like a billboard. Eyes were drawn to her even when they hadn’t intended to find her, and the memory of her stored itself in the brain without asking permission.
She was shorter in person, Nathalie noted.
Gabriel had moved to Emile without making a sound as he fell into the steps of a dance Nathalie didn’t recognize.
Their heads touched in greeting. Her hands found his pockets. His fingers fanned out on her hips without wrinkling the fabric of a dress meant for a much warmer climate than Paris in the dying days of winter. There was a melodic sway in the way they murmured their hellos, their names sounding more like holy mantras than proper nouns when they let them spill off their tongues.
It was nauseatingly domestic, and if it was meant to be performative, it was an abject failure of a show, because it was clear they had forgotten their audience existed. Nathalie was dimly aware that less than five seconds had passed, and yet it already felt longer than it had yesterday counting the minutes of her appointment time fly past her. The only thing that could make it worse would have been –
“Papa!”
Ah. That.
Here was an unfortunate truth: Nathalie had studied nearly every language family on the planet, and yet, without fail, she always found herself tongue tied when asked to interact with a freshly made human. Inevitably, when life conspired to have Nathalie cross paths with a child and its praise demanding parents, she found herself a prisoner of her suddenly aphasic mind, begging it to come up with something to say that wasn’t some variation of, “Well. They look pleasantly sticky.”
The Agreste child that toddled into the room was remarkably pristine looking, and its voice was comparatively soft and careful sounding compared to the usual glass breaking soprano squealing range its peers seemed to favor in all the public settings Nathalie tried to enjoy a quiet meal in. It had blonde hair, of course, and chubby cheeks, and puppy fat in all the pinchable places; its clothes were shockingly free of the usual streak and stain history of things (edible and otherwise) that had recently come across its grubby little hands.
Honestly, if you had wanted to create a psy-op to subliminally trick a low-birth rate nation into having more children by making them seem more appealing to raise, this one seemed straight out of central casting for the starring role.
That was uncharitable, Nathalie realized, but no more so than the interruption was unprofessional.
The child’s name was Adrien, and Nathalie had almost deluded herself in her pre-interview research that was where the need-to-know for her position would end. The precedent set by his birth announcement (delayed until a month after the birth, and listed in the paper’s society page like it was still the 19th century) and the details of his mother’s pregnancy (absolutely none, other than the public conversation her months long disappearance from red carpets and charity galas had sparked – to the point that betting money had still been on rehab not gestation when the first paparazzi shot dropped of her pushing a stroller) had suggested that perhaps Agreste had subscribed to a parenting strategy that famous children should be neither seen nor heard in day to day life. But no - no, it was always a pipedream to think that would extend to his home office.
The child - Adrien - had noticed Nathalie's presence now, and scrambled to the safety of his parents’ legs. It was enough to break their self-contained reverie. Gabriel straightened from his lean, and met Nathalie’s eyes over his wife’s head without seeming to so much as blink as he switched back into his business posture. He seemed about to say something, but Emile beat him to the punch.
“Oh, you still have – “ her head tilted up to her husband as her lips quirked downward in a pantomime of disapproval, which quickly gave way to something more slanted and playful, that matched the lilt to her voice as her eyes found Nathalie, “Forgive me, we were hoping to steal him away to the zoo.”
“Zoo!” Adrien repeated in a whisper echo of his mother’s playful extension of the ‘ooh’ in ‘zoo’.
Gabriel did not frown, but Nathalie watched his forehead crease.
“Ms. Sancoeur and I were wrapping up our discussion,” he said like it was a concession.
“Good! I told him not to waste your time again,” Emile smiled a winner’s smile, “He’s terrible at keeping track of the time. But then - that’s what you'll be for!”
Nathalie did not feel the need to point out that this interruption was, so far, the greatest waste of her time, but she did feel the need to think through what saying that in several different languages might sound like.
She folded her fingers into interlocking fists behind her back, and froze her expression into place like a store mannequin – the kind made without a face that allowed you to see yourself reflected in whatever pose it was manufactured in.
Her silence did not feel unnatural then – who would expect a mannequin to speak – and Emile’s presence was enough that her voice was more than happy to fill the empty space.
“And then maybe you can fix all the other things he’s terrible at –”
“I excel at –” Gabriel interjected with the familiar sigh of a well worn joke. (Or argument.)
“You excel at things that make messes,” Emile said with a wink to Nathalie. “And she will excel at covering up your messes, so that we can have you all to ourselves.”
She tousled Adrien’s hair with a fond expression, and missed the way that Gabriel’s eyes shifted back to his desk and the pile of paperwork it contained.
“It’s too cold for the zoo today.” Gabriel said as he brushed his wife’s hair back over her sleeveless shoulders.
There was a pause. A moment of give or take - Nathalie couldn’t tell which.
Then Emile placed her palm softly against his cheek, her fingers coming in last with the gentlest of taps to his jawline. “You know how I run hot these days, my love.”
She pulled back from her husband with a smile, her voice light and airy like a crisp winter breeze. “Come along Adrien. If we hurry the big cats will still be out and awake. Daddy’s working.”
Gabriel watched the pair’s retreat and then just as they reached the door –
“The new winter collection. For the photos.”
Emile didn’t turn. “Oh there won’t be any candids. I hired everything out for the morning.”
Another well worn joke, Nathalie suspected.
“Indulge me anyway.” Gabriel said in lieu of good-bye.
Nathalie waited in the silence. She would give him a count of three.
One.
Two.
“I think we have come to an impasse, Ms. Sancoeur.”
It was not an apology. She hadn’t expected one, of course, but it was still gauche no matter how smoothly he delivered his dismissal.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I don’t think you are.”
Nathalie’s fingers twitched behind her back, but her face remained passive. “I appreciate the opportunity you’ve –”
“It’s remarkable,” Gabriel interrupted, his words coming out clipped with the weight of the judgement they carried, “How well you play the statue. If I needed a new piece of furniture to blend into the background of this house’s decoration, you’d be an easy hire.”
It was something in his delivery that did it - something about the way his eyes kept their focus past her shoulders to the door - that sparked her brain’s raging synapses into jolting realization. The missing piece of the puzzle snapped into place with terrible clarity. Why was she there? Why was he playing this game? What he wanted and what he needed.
The answers swirled from her mind into her bloodstream; she felt her heart pumping with the certainty and the annoyance of her clarity. It was all just so … so … patently … cliche.
The man before her was a family man desperately trying to cling to any other title. She almost sighed.
“You don’t want a personal assistant.”
“I don’t?”
“No. Emilie wants you to have a personal assistant. You’ve been placating her.”
“Have I now.”
“Yes, and rather poorly.”
“Oh?”
“She would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to notice the three ring circus of an application process you’ve created.”
“I think that’s enough Ms. Sancouer.”
“Perhaps. But my point stands. You don’t want a personal assistant. And I don’t want to be a toy in your marriage’s game of cat and mouse.”
In a movie that would be a finishing flourish; a cinematic verbal victory and then a hard cut to a new scene of the heroine relishing her triumph. But Nathalie was not a star, and her bills did not allow her to fast forward past the fallout of being labeled “insolent” in the job market’s rumor mill. She allowed herself a heart beat’s worth of satisfaction, and then prepared herself for the disappointment of disavowing the evident truth.
“I apologize, that was –”
“No.” He cut her off with a steady voice and a frown. “I won’t be hiring a liar.”
“Again, I apologize, sir, for the disrespect –”
“The disrespect wasn’t the lie I took issue with, Ms. Sancoeur,” he said with an unimpressed raising of his brows.
For the first time in longer than she cared to remember Nathalie felt doubt. It was a profoundly irritating feeling.
Perhaps that was why it was so satisfying to see the feeling mirrored in the face across from her.
Not the irritation - although that was there and was clearly an ever-present accessory for the man. No, she could see it clearly. It was there in the flex of his hand as if he had to stop himself from reaching for an unseen pen. It was there in the shift of the weight in how his posture held itself -- this wasn’t the straightbacked spine of unwelcome that had greeted her or the collapsing rush of magnetization for Emile. This was the incremental sway of the pendulum of consideration that unconsciously positioned him from foot to foot. This was doubt.
The hard finality of ending both of them had written for this morning was unraveling around them like wisps of smoke.
She reached for the certainty that had carried her steps to the mansion such a short time ago. The truths were still there: she could do the job as it was described on paper without breaking a sweat. She was certain he knew that before, and that he knew it even more so now.
She was certain that she could do the job as it existed in the shadows of his needs.
And she was certain that he would fight her every step of the way.
Gabriel Agreste was pompous and rude. He assumed he was the smartest mind in every room. He created problems to solve problems and clearly thought that made him some sort of mastermind.
He wasn’t a knot, but an ouroboros. To assist him would be to substitute in for Sisyphus.
And yet.
Nathalie’s mind saw the hill, but her eyes were on Agreste’s and in his gaze was the acceptance of her victory over him. There was such a rush of satisfaction in seeing him acknowledge her that she couldn’t help but smile - thinly though, to her credit - at him.
When he mirrored the smile back to her she had the stupidest thought.
A lifetime of besting him wouldn’t be so bad.
Before the thought had time to settle, she refocused to the clearing of his throat.
“I’ll start tomorrow.”
It wasn’t a question that needed answering so she turned to leave.
“Today you’ll do something about your hair.” His voice carried after her with a smugness at the way it stopped her in her tracks
Nathalie schooled her expression before she glanced back over her shoulder at him letting the raise of her eyebrows do the asking.
“Something fashionable and aposematic,” and the humor she heard in his voice was from how he wasn’t joking, “to remind me what’s lurking under the statue.”
Eugh. Artists.
She left before she let herself reconsider.
***
On the way home, Nathalie stopped at the drugstore and picked up a box dye in red.