Overdue Forecast
“It is an emergency copy.”
“It has chosen the wrong emergency.”
She peeled it free and tossed it toward the desk. It missed, fluttered down, and landed against Stuart’s shoulder blade as he reached for his wallet.
Catalina laughed into the side of his neck.
“Cell C-seventeen is trying to witness this.”
Stuart snatched the paper, threw it across the room, and kissed her again. “No audience.”
“Better policy.”
He paused at the open collar of her shirt. “I need to confess something embarrassing.”
“More embarrassing than spreadsheet foreplay?”
“Your collarbone.”
Catalina blinked. “My collarbone?”
“I have been thinking about the line of it since Thursday. It looks like it was designed to ruin an accountant’s standards.”
“Then ruin them.”
His mouth found the clean line from her shoulder to the hollow beneath it. Catalina’s hands slipped beneath his shirt, over warm skin and firm muscle, until she pushed him backward onto the sofa.
She climbed into his lap.
His palms settled at her waist and stayed there.
“May I?” he asked.
She took one of his hands and placed it over her breast. “There.”
His eyes closed for a moment. Then his thumb moved with maddening patience while his mouth returned to her collarbone, her throat, the curve of her breast. Catalina pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, then tugged at his belt.
“Still good?” he asked.
“Stuart.”
“Question.”
“Yes. More than good.”
He opened the condom with hands that had audited catastrophe for a living, and Catalina took the lead again. She guided him to her, lowered herself onto him slowly, and watched his control fracture into something far more interesting.
He stayed still until she chose the depth, the pace, the first slow roll of her hips.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Move.”
His hands held her hips as he did, matching her rhythm, then deepening it when she pulled him closer. Every sensible thought she had ever carried fled the office without filing a forwarding address.
When he shifted them carefully onto the sofa, he stopped again.
“Still good?”
“Better.”
He kissed her collarbone as he moved within her, steady and deliberate, his palm holding her breast, his other hand guiding her higher against him. Catalina came with his name escaping into the quiet office, her body closing around him as pleasure overtook every last rule she had made for herself.
Stuart followed soon after, forehead bent near her shoulder, laughing once as if he had been surprised by happiness and intended to file a complaint about it.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then Stuart reached toward the floor, found the emergency spreadsheet, and held it up between two fingers.
“New policy,” he said.
Catalina took it from him and set it facedown on the desk.
“No more staged touches,” she said. “If you take my hand, you mean it.”
“I mean it.”
“And no pretending a real date would mean nothing.”
His expression softened. “Agreed. No spreadsheets during kissing.”
“That clause was already sacred law.”
From downstairs, the director called, “We need the proposal reset!”
Stuart looked toward the locked door. “Should we go?”
Catalina reached for his wrist, where his watch sat like a surrender he had not yet named.
“Yes,” she said. “But this time, we make the canapé apologize.”
The canapé did not apologize. It remained flattened beneath an overturned napkin, a pastry with no conscience.
At 4:31, Catalina carried a stack of ivory napkins past Marlon’s office and heard Stuart on the phone.
“The approval trail clears Ms. Ortiz completely,” he said. “The deposit was redirected after her authorization. I’ll close the file after opening, then catch the six-ten back to Chicago.”
Close the file.
A very accountant-shaped phrase. It still landed badly.
She turned away before he saw her. Ten minutes later, Marlon found her aligning votives beside the reception tables.
“You and Hargrove survived the weekend,” he said carefully.
“The performance ends when the cameras do,” Catalina replied. “That was always the arrangement.”
Stuart, approaching with the final audit packet, heard every word.
At 4:47 precisely, the director signaled the live segment.
Catalina’s phone countdown reached zero.
Stuart walked to the presentation screen, took the approved script from the producer, and set it facedown on the nearest fern.
“Mr. Hargrove?” the director hissed.
“Minor revision,” he said.
The first slide appeared.
CRESSWORK OPENING: RISK REGISTER.
Catalina closed her eyes.
The next slide read: INCIDENT ONE: DISPLAY ARCH. OUTCOME: ZERO INJURIES, ONE DAMAGED SHIRT, ONE EXCEPTIONAL PLANNER.
Then came sprinkler sabotage, violet tartlets, the crate maze, the runaway frosting cart, and a final chart labeled CATALINA ORTIZ’S EMERGENCY RESPONSE RATE, which had somehow included tiny illustrated fire extinguishers.
Reception guests laughed. Marlon pressed both hands over his mouth. Serafina lifted a champagne flute from the bar like a woman watching justice arrive with a spreadsheet.
Stuart faced Catalina.
“I came here planning to leave after I finished the numbers,” he said. “Then you made me notice that numbers are only useful if they protect something worth keeping.”
The room went quiet. Even the herb wall behaved.
“I would like to stay in Cleveland,” he continued. “And I would like one honest date with you. No cameras, no cue cards, no fake engagement. Will you let me take you?”
Catalina walked toward him beneath the conservatory lights, past two hundred guests and one spectacularly suspicious ficus.
“Yes,” she said. “Three conditions.”
“Of course.”
“Honesty.”
“Always.”
“No spreadsheets during kissing.”
“I can live with that.”
“And permanent immunity from tablecloth emergencies.”
Stuart considered this gravely. “That is a broad indemnity clause.”
“It is nonnegotiable.”
“Then yes.”
Months later, Cresswork’s wedding program booked out through autumn. Catalina ran the timelines. Stuart ran the budgets. Serafina ran the bar and everyone else’s business.
After closing, Catalina found Stuart measuring linen samples with his watch pushed up his wrist.
“That tablecloth is two inches short,” he said.
“It is artistically concise.”
“It is a square.”
“It has feelings.”
He looked at her, then folded the spreadsheet in half before she kissed him.
Progress, naturally, required documentation.