You Don’t Even Know How Perfect
RECOMMENDED TRACK: L’One – Все танцуют локтями
Three weeks was almost too long to be ready for the summit presentation. After all, I had already done most of the work, between white papers and slide presentations. I practiced it in front of Emma, Parker, Jacob…I even showed it to Monty, just to see if it was too boring. (He begged me to put in some jokes.) There was nothing else I could be doing—even my internship acceptance had come in as expected.
So instead, I practiced and practiced.
Calloway declined to make himself available as a test audience. He just texted me a schedule of rehearsals for the two days before the summit. I booked a hotel room in the city, with Emma planning to join me after her last class on Friday. That would give us a little time for fun before the Saturday reception.
I arrived at the big fancy venue at 77 Wall Street at nine a.m. on the dot on Wednesday, wearing a new suit I had bought and had rush-tailored in a fit of anxiety. The investment did not pay off, as most of the other presenters arrived in rolled-up sleeves and without their jackets. The more high-ranked they were, the more dressed down.
Calloway himself wore a button-down and slacks. He introduced me to his mother, who I had not known was a Calloway by birth. I had just assumed his father was the connection. But his mother had kept her last name, and she was the one who shook my hand that day, as firm as any Moscow executive I had ever met. She shared her son’s brown hair but with a practiced smile instead of a scowl, wearing a tucked-in t-shirt with the company logo and jeans as she poked fun at him for being better-dressed than her.
“You should have told your friend to dress casual today, Adrian,” she said, jokingly swatting his arm. Calloway responded with only a roll of his eyes as his mother turned back to me. “We’re victims of the West Coast’s race to dress the most scrubby.”
“Bah,” I said, waving my hand. “What is the point of having nice clothes with no excuse to wear them?” I joked, taking on a tamer version of the charm I used at Sigma parties. I had little experience navigating American businesspeople. Russian business culture was different and also I had never wanted those introductions to go well. I needed this one to.
Fortunately, Mrs. Calloway laughed. “I like him,” she said to Adrian. She used more of an indulgent tone than really approving, but it set me more at ease anyway. “But it’s nice to be dressed more casually for tech rehearsals under those awful lights.” She wrinkled her nose. “For tomorrow’s full run-through, you’ll want to wear whatever you’ve planned for the real deal, though.”
Bozhe moy, was she right about the lights. By the time all the lighting, sound, and video production people had decided their work was perfect for my brief talk, I felt like I must be sunburned. “This is theater,” I told Emma in a text message when I was finally done, attaching a selfie of my sweaty face. I had long since ditched the jacket and tie, loosened the top buttons of my shirt. “Just a big performance.”
“You’re good at those,” she texted back. She followed it up with a selfie of herself at work, making a silly face next to the weird little knick-knacks that lined the shelf behind her counter at Classic Vinyl & Curios. “Rizzmo says break a leg!”
I grinned at the photo. Rizzmo was the name she’d given to a demonic-looking Furby that had been deposited at the shop when she was a freshman. She had invented an almost upsetting amount of lore around the thing during slow hours at work.
“Tell him he can break my legs Sunday. I need them until then,” I tapped back.
The tech rehearsal ran late, and worse, the higher-level presenters began trickling out at five. Which meant the less-important speakers like myself were asked to stand in for them under those damn lights.
I’m not sure I have ever fallen asleep as fast as when I finally crash-landed onto my hotel bed that night, a little after midnight.
Dress rehearsals the following day went smoother, and I got to hear everyone’s presentations. I was surprised to see so many of them were…dull. Bland. I had thought Americans would want snazzier briefings. Even the people speaking on topics that could have been interesting, like the company’s Hollywood interests, droned on. It was…enlightening.
So I tried adding a joke during the first run-through, like Monty had suggested. Just a wry little aside about the rising price of vodka. I was rewarded with chuckles from the handful of other presenters.
I decided to keep it for the actual speech.
If the two rehearsal days dragged on forever, the actual summit was lightning-fast. It felt like I got there, blinked, and it was already my cue to take the stage. I hardly remembered presenting at all, but I must have done it, because I found myself standing before an applauding crowd. Not clapping with any special enthusiasm, of course, but this was a shareholder meeting, not a concert. Anything better than polite golf claps felt like a win.
I remembered the correct direction to walk off the stage, where I collected a bottle of water and a “good job” from one of the stagehands. Presenters had to wait until the next speaker finished before we could return to the audience, so I hung out next to a table with a spread of donuts that I ignored.
“That was fine,” a voice said next to me, and I jumped. I turned to see Calloway, his lips curling into a smirk he was trying to suppress. “On the scale of the presentations these meetings get, you’re in the top third.”
I let go of a breath I did not know I was holding. “From you, that’s a big compliment,” I told him.
He shrugged. “I was just worried you’d embarrass me,” he said, then walked away with a nonchalant wave. He had come to check on me, which was…kinder than I expected.
But he was still a pretentious mudak.
When the presentations were all over, the business folks fled quickly into fancy bars and dinners. Mrs. Calloway invited me to join her, but I declined politely. I did not want to spend time with Calloway. The person I wanted to see was already waiting for me at the hotel.
Emma almost tackled me in the lobby, even though I had arranged for the front desk to have a key for her. I was glad to see her even just a little bit sooner, giving her a quick spin in my arms before setting her down and planting a kiss on her forehead.
“How did it go?” She asked, eyes bright and eager, like she didn’t have a single doubt.
“Calloway told me I did ‘fine,’” I said, and she clapped in response as I hefted her duffle bag over my shoulder. “You pack lead bars in this thing, moya koroleva?”
She shot me a fond glare as we went to the elevator. “I had to bring a bunch of hair and makeup stuff. I asked Chloe to lend me some things and she almost made me bring a second bag.”
“I told you we could book you at the spa,” I groaned.
The elevator doors opened and we stepped in. “I can do it just fine,” she said firmly, spinning on her heel to face the door.
“I know you can,” I said, reaching for her hand with the one I had free. “You will look stunning. I just want to spoil you.” While I still can was left unspoken.
I had planned to spoil her without the spa anyway. She openly gawked at the absurd room I had booked—a corner suite that was bigger than her apartment, with a second bedroom we didn’t need. I’d arranged an in-room couples massage. Dinner. A show—Hadestown, because of all the million things in New York City, the one I knew she’d like most was the retelling of an ancient myth set during the American Depression.
By the time we returned to the oversized hotel room, we were giddy with exhaustion and a little champagne, tripping over one another to get to the bed and snickering like the pair of college kids we still were.
It was the kind of night that your memory dips into gold and keeps forever.
The next day I took her shopping and tried to buy her an all-new outfit for the party, even though I had not seen what she’d picked. She declined, but not in her usual stop spending money on me way. “I think you’ll like what I brought better,” she told me archly.
How could I argue with that?
But she kept it a secret all day, finding a use for that second bedroom after all: she got ready in there with the door shut. “Because if we keep pawing at each other, we’ll be late,” she claimed. She was lying. Well, no, she was right. But she was also being sneaky.
“You’re trying to surprise me,” I remarked, wagging my finger at her. “Fine. Do your worst.”
She winked and closed the door.
An hour later, I sat in the living room, fully dressed and tapping absently at my phone. I had found a few write-ups about the summit in the financial newspapers, and one even mentioned my presentation in a list of highlights. I had to pray it would be enough.
My head jerked up as Emma emerged with a smile that was both eager and bashful, one I hadn’t seen on her since our earliest days together. My breath hitched when I saw why she wanted to wear this dress.
It was the Ozma dress. From Halloween.
She’d had it altered, the big poofy princess skirt made sleek, with one of those wrap styles that meets tightly at the hip and offers a modest slit at the hem. The sleeves, unchanged, now looked like an ethereal accent to a chic cocktail dress. A fairy queen deigning to attend a mortal dinner party.
I stood and crossed the room to her in three long steps, reaching my hands out to her waist, then sliding them to her hips. Then, I realized I had not exhaled in a while and gave an appreciative sigh, pressing my forehead to hers. “Sovershennaya,” I declared softly. “You look perfect. You don’t even know how perfect.”
She brightened even further, pressing a kiss to my cheek. “I’m just hoping I can keep up with you, Mr. National Treasure Eyes,” she teased.
“You,” I said, “far surpass me.” I pressed my lips to the back of her hand. “Wait one second for me.”
I parted from her reluctantly, slipping back into the other bedroom and rifling through my bag to pull out a necklace box that I brought to her before returning. “This…does not fit in the budget you made me sign,” I admitted quietly as I pressed the box into her hands. “And with every bit of my deepest respect—fuck the limit.” There was barely more than a month before graduation. “A thousand months of gifts will not feel like enough if I cannot be there for them.”
She paled, looking down at the box and back at me. “Don’t—”
“Please,” I said, hating the urgency I had to add to the word. “The speech might be enough. But it might not, and I…I do not want to hold back for the sake of optimism, Emma.”
I watched her tug at her ear, eyes darting over my face before she finally dropped her gaze back to her hands. She opened the box slowly, then slammed it shut. Then, opened it again. “Misha…”
“Here,” I said, reaching back for the box. “Let me put it on you. It was made to go with this dress, and I did not even know it.”
I slipped behind her and tucked her perfectly-formed curls over one shoulder so I could pull the necklace into place, fiddling with the clasp for a moment and looking at the pendant over her shoulder.
It was a gold “O” with a “Z” embedded in it and an enameled poppy flower on either side, just like the illustration she had once shown me of her Ozma, the circlet she wore. I had taken the liberty to have an emerald incorporated into the design, at the top of the O. The match to her dress was almost as perfect as she was.
“Moya korolevochka,” I murmured, sliding my arms around her waist and pressing a kiss to her bare shoulder. “I love you.”
She shivered at the kiss—no, she was trembling. Like the night I played Tchaikovsky for her. I held her quietly, waiting for the moment to pass so she could breathe again, kissing her cheek when a tear fell down it.
Finally, she looked back up at me. “I love you too, Misha,” she said, and turned in my arms to press her lips to mine, sweet and sad at the same time.
We stood like that, recovering from the heaviness in each other’s arms. After a few minutes, I took a breath and released her, offering my arm for her to take. “Now. How about we show these shishki we mean business?”
She took a moment to wipe her eyes, careful not to smudge her perfect makeup, and then nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”
We collected our coats and left for the venue. In truth, I was fighting nerves about this evening among the American elite—it would be nothing like the Sigma reception, where half the attendees were my fraternity brothers.
Here, I would have only Emma.
I could ask for no better weapon.
Bonus Content:
Emma’s Dress
Bonus Content:
He hasn’t Been Wasting Time
Author’s Note
B-Side Track: Benson Boone – Slow It Down
I cried writing this chapter. My poor sweet kids. By the way, shishki is Russian for like…bigwigs, fat cats, pompous old business dudes, that kind of thing.
FUN FACT:
Misha booked them at the Hotel Cipriani, and specifically in the Liberty corner suite.
And yes, I did in fact write an entire page of a fictional financial paper complete with its own logo graphic for this. Hope you enjoyed the double-bonus!
Next comes the party.