Terms of Submission

ARIA

The logo was supposed to look like a skyline.

I stared at the tablet screen, stylus hovering, and recognized with the particular humiliation of someone who’d been to art school that what I had drawn — definitively, unmistakably — was a penis.

Not even a stylized one. Not something I could tilt my head at and call abstract. It was anatomically specific, with that unfortunate optimism of the real thing, jutting up between two softened rectangular towers that were meant to evoke downtown Chicago in the golden hour and instead evoked something my gynecologist might use as a diagram.

I tilted the tablet anyway. Squinted. Rotated it forty-five degrees.

Still a dick.

I set it face-down on the table and wrapped both hands around my oat milk latte and stared out the window at Wicker Park doing its usual Tuesday morning performance — the man walking a corgi and an iguana on the same leash, the woman in the enormous fur coat despite it being fifty-two degrees, the cyclist running the red light with the serenity of someone who had made peace with death. The Grind hummed around me, all exposed brick and Edison bulbs and the aggressive smell of single-origin pour-over, the kind of coffee shop that charged eighteen dollars for a cup and made you feel vaguely ashamed for wanting sugar.

I had a pitch in four days. A real one, the kind that could move me out of scraping together freelance contracts and into something with a retainer, with a name I could put on my website in a font larger than twelve points. I should have been drawing skylines.

I picked up the tablet. Looked at the drawing again.

I put it back down.

The door opened with that particular violence that announced Jade Chen before Jade Chen was even fully inside — a gust of cold October air, the jingle of the bell, and the presence, enormous and unapologetic, of my best friend, who was wearing a camel coat that cost more than my rent and carrying a coffee she’d clearly bought at the place down the street because she thought The Grind’s baristas were “aggressively earnest.”

“You’re late,” I said.

“I’m curated,” Jade said, dropping into the chair across from me with the controlled chaos of a woman who had never once in her life been early and saw no reason to start. She unwound her scarf, caught sight of my expression, and narrowed her eyes. “You look sexually frustrated.”

“I look like a graphic designer with a deadline.”

“Same thing, baby, but you specifically.” Jade pulled the tablet toward her before I could stop her, looked at the screen, and made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. “Aria.”

“I know.”

“This is a—”

“I know.”

“You were supposed to be drawing a logo.”

“I was drawing a logo.” I took the tablet back. “It’s a skyline. It’s an abstract skyline with two towers and a—”

“Honey.” Jade pressed her fingers to her mouth, shoulders shaking. “That is the most optimistic skyline I have ever seen in my life.”

“Stop.”

“How long has it been?”

“Jade—”

“No, I’m asking for real.” She leaned forward, all the laughter dropping away into something that was genuinely, infuriatingly fond. She had this gift for it, the pivot from teasing to sincere that always caught me off guard. “Since Marcus?”

I looked at my latte.

“Aria.”

“Eight months.” I said it quietly, the way you say something you’ve been avoiding saying out loud because saying it out loud makes it real. “It’s been eight months.”

The silence lasted approximately two seconds, which was about as long as Jade was capable of silence.

“Eight months.” The words came out slow, deliberate, with the gravity of a woman reading a diagnosis. “Eight. Months.”

“I’ve been busy—”

“Your pussy has cobwebs, baby girl.”

“Jade.” I looked around the coffee shop with the reflexive mortification of someone raised by midwesterners.

“I said what I said.” She sat back, crossing her legs, utterly unrepentant. “Eight months. Eight months since that man — and I use that word loosely, because Marcus was more of a concept of a man, a mood board for mediocrity — walked out of your apartment with his record collection and his feelings and left you to what? Build a business? Very admirable. Very noble. Very much not getting you laid.”

“That was the plan.” I said it with more dignity than I felt. “Focus on the business. Chicago is competitive. I can’t just go out and pick up someone every time I’m—”

“Frustrated? Sketching penises into your professional work?”

“—lonely,” I finished, which was truer than what I’d been about to say and therefore worse.

Jade’s expression softened. Just barely. Just enough.

“You’re twenty-eight,” she said. “You know what twenty-eight is? It’s prime. It’s the absolute premium vintage of a woman. You’re old enough to know what you want and young enough that your body is still making suggestions your brain can refuse. You are,” she gestured at me with the sweep of someone who believed very sincerely in the gesture, “curvy like a Renaissance painting, Aria, and I mean that in the best possible way. I mean Titian. I mean Rubens. I mean the kind of woman that men — good men, interesting men, men who know what they’re looking at — spend entire careers trying to paint.”

I felt heat in my face and ignored it.

“And you,” Jade continued, “are spending your Renaissance-painting prime watching Netflix and—” She paused, raising an eyebrow. “You still have the vibrator.”

“I have several vibrators. I have invested in infrastructure.”

“Infrastructure.” She said the word like it had personally offended her. “Aria Voss. You are infrastructure-ing yourself into a cobweb situation when you could be out in the world being adored.”

“Being adored sounds exhausting.”

“Being adored sounds like orgasms that don’t require charging a device, but that’s just my experience.” Jade picked up her coffee, the smile back, sharpened now into something specific. Something planned. I recognized that smile. I’d been seeing it since we were nineteen, since the semester abroad in Florence when she’d made the exact same smile before announcing she’d arranged for us to crash a private party at a Florentine palazzo, and I had learned that the smile meant Jade had already done something she was about to explain.

“What did you do,” I said.

“I got you a meeting.”

“I have a meeting. The pitch on Friday with—”

“A different meeting. A better meeting.” Jade set her cup down with the precision of someone about to deliver news she’d been sitting on and enjoying. “I got you a meeting with Dominic Ashford.”

The name landed in my chest like a stone into still water, the ripples going outward before I’d even fully processed it.

“Dominic Ashford,” I repeated.

“The one and only.”

“The — Jade, that’s—” I stopped. Recalibrated. “How?”

“My cousin works at Ashford Group. Junior associate. He mentioned they’re looking for branding for the new development — the one on the river, the luxury thing, you’ve probably seen the renderings — and I may have mentioned that my best friend is the most talented brand designer in Chicago.”

“That’s an enormous overstatement.”

“It’s a targeted overstatement. There’s a difference.” Jade looked entirely too pleased with herself. “He wants to meet Thursday. Preliminary consultation, get a sense of your aesthetic, your process. Nothing formal yet. But Aria — that project? That would be the one. That would be the name on the website in the big font.”

I knew it. I knew Ashford Group. I knew the development — everyone in Chicago design circles knew it, the kind of prestige project that turned careers. I also knew the other things people knew about Dominic Ashford, the things that traveled through industries and dinner parties and the comment sections of Chicago business profiles.

Ruthless. Brilliant. Never photographed with the same woman twice.

I’d seen one photo of him — a charity gala spread in a magazine Jade had left at my apartment, the kind of event where everyone looked polished and purposeful. He’d looked neither. He’d looked like a man who’d walked into a room full of people performing wealth and simply was it, standing slightly apart from the group, a glass held loosely, jaw like an architectural decision. His eyes, even in print, had that quality of noticing everything and revealing nothing.

I’d turned the page quickly.

I turned the memory over quickly now too.

“He’s a womanizer,” I said.

“He’s a man who enjoys women,” Jade said, “which honestly sounds fine to me.”

“Jade.”

“Multiple reliable sources describe him as devastating in all the best ways, and by sources I mean women who have been devastated and didn’t seem particularly upset about it.” She leaned in, voice dropping not into gossip but into something more honest. “He’s never photographed with the same woman twice because he doesn’t do relationships. Not because he’s cruel. Because he’s honest.”

“And you think that makes him a good candidate for—”

“A rebound fuck with zero strings?” Jade smiled. “I think it makes him a perfect one.”

Something shifted low in my stomach. I catalogued it and filed it under irrelevant.

“This is a business meeting.” I heard myself say the words and recognized, distantly, that I was saying them with slightly less conviction than I’d intended. “He needs branding. I have a portfolio. We are going to have a professional consultation.”

“Absolutely,” Jade agreed, with the tone of someone agreeing to absolutely nothing. “And while you’re being professional, you might notice that you are a stunning woman in a room with a man who, by all accounts, notices stunning women. And you might also notice that you haven’t been noticed in eight months and that your body has been filing grievances.”

I thought about the sketch on my tablet. I thought about eight months of going to bed alone, eight months of waking up to my own stillness, eight months of telling myself I was fine and mostly believing it and sometimes, at two in the morning, not believing it at all.

There was something seductive about the idea of him, I could admit that to myself if not to Jade. Not just the jaw in the photograph. The reputation. The man who was honest about what he wanted and wanted it without apology. The man who, by all accounts, walked into rooms like he already owned them — and I had spent my entire adult life building something specifically so that I could be the kind of woman who walked in the same way.

Two people like that in a room together.

I picked up my latte.

“This is still a business meeting,” I said.

“Of course it is.” Jade reached across the table and squeezed my hand, quick and warm. “Now. The pencil skirt.”

“What about it.”

“The red one. I know you have it. I was with you when you bought it and you wore it once and put it in the back of your closet because you said it was ‘too much.’”

“It is too much.”

“It is exactly enough. You wear that, and the heels — the black ones, the ones with the ankle strap, the ones you describe as your good heels but what you mean is your going-to-war heels — and you walk into that meeting like you’ve already won it.”

I looked at her.

“No panties,” Jade added.

“Absolutely not.”

“Aria—”

“I am not going commando to a business meeting with Dominic Ashford. I would like to maintain at least one layer of—”

“Fine.” Jade waved a hand with the magnanimity of someone making a great concession. “Fine. The lace ones. The black ones. The ones that make you look like a present waiting to be unwrapped.” She paused. “You know the ones I mean.”

I did know the ones she meant. They’d been in the back of the same drawer as the red pencil skirt, living their small, unworn lives alongside every other thing I’d been saving for an occasion that kept not arriving.

“Thursday,” Jade said. “Two o’clock. Ashford Group offices. I’ll text you the address.”

I looked out the window. The man with the corgi and the iguana had gone. The fur coat woman was gone. The street was just a street, ordinary and Chicago and mine, and Thursday was only two days away and I had a pitch to finish and a logo that was currently shaped like an architectural feature I was trying very hard not to think about.

“Okay,” I said.

Jade beamed.

“Don’t give me that look,” I said.

“What look? I’m not giving a look. I’m simply sitting here being right.” She stood, rewinding her scarf with the efficiency of someone with places to be, people to rearrange. “Let me know how it goes.”

“It’s a business meeting.”

“It’s the beginning of something,” Jade said, in the manner of someone who had already seen the ending, “and you are wearing the red skirt.”

She left the way she’d arrived, all coat and momentum and the jingle of the bell, and the door swung shut behind her and The Grind settled back into its pour-over quiet, and I was alone again with my tablet and my deadline and the particular, humming restlessness I’d been carrying for eight months like something I kept forgetting to set down.

I picked up the tablet. Looked at the sketch.

Saved it to a folder labeled textures and opened a new canvas and told myself the skyline I would draw this time would look like a skyline, and that Thursday was a business meeting, and that Dominic Ashford was a client, and that I was a professional woman in full control of herself and her choices.

I drew the first line.

It curved.

I stared at it.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Famous last words. I’d think about that later.

AUTHORS NOTE

Thank you so much for reading this book 💛📖

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