Page 62 of Most Eligible Billionaire

It gets worse when he shows me his absolute favorite under-construction project, the Moreno Sky, a boutique hotel in Brooklyn that will be built in the crater of a half-crumbled-down building. It incorporates many urban ruin elements into the mod design.

He shows me support beams of reclaimed wood, the slabs of reclaimed concrete walls with graffiti from the 1970s. “This would’ve ended up in a landfill.”

I run my finger over the wordsKeep on Truckin’in blue. “Did people say that?”

“Apparently.”

I can see why he likes it. The place incorporates a lot of the forward-thinking design principles from that building in Melbourne he’s so wild about. You can see it in the way the structure is mostly greenery and engaging public/private spaces at the bottom and the way the building takes on mass as it rises.

He shows me more of the construction site, how they’re folding old into new. “This is cool as hell,” I say.

He hands me a hard hat. “We’re not even in the building yet.”

“Kaleb must hate it,” I say.

“I practically had to give up my firstborn to make this happen,” he says. “Running this place, I don’t get to design and build that much anymore, or really getting my hands dirty on any level.” He says this last in a wistful tone. Like he misses it. “You have to see from the top. Come on.”

We climb a circular concrete stairway to the main floor, what will be the future lobby. Right now it’s a noisy, unfinished space full of men and women doing different jobs—the trades, he calls them.

One side is a two-story wall covered in plastic. When the place is finished, it’ll be a curtainwall, which is apparently a wall of windows.

He shows me more old timber and twisted rebar that was heading into a landfill but that Henry feels could be incorporated into lobby furniture—he needs toget the bandwidth to figure it out somehow.

That’s how he puts it. I love his lingo sometimes.

We head to the “freight elevator” which doesn’t look like any elevator I ever rode or ever would want to ride.

Henry punches a button that’s attached to a metal coil thing. There’s a screech and a rumble and our cage arrives. “Come on.”

We step in and it hoists us up through a seemingly endless concrete column that would be utterly dark if not for a sputtering makeshift utility light clamped to the side.

Fear spikes through me during the long flickers when I think the light might go out—I wasn’t prepared for how much like the well this would be—not the cage part, but how dark it is and the way we’re closed in by dark gray walls and you can see light way up high.

I move a little closer to Henry. I was so scared in that well for so long. Scared of dying. Scared to call for help. Scared it was Denny and his friends out there, looking for me, scared that they’d get to me first, but wanting so bad to get out. Scared of the sounds. But mostly I was scared of the dark. I would sit in a little ball. I would tell myself if I got really small, even the darkness couldn’t find me.

The elevator is taking forever, and I inch closer still, enjoying Henry’s nearness, his strength. I tell myself he’s just the vacuum cleaner salesman, not here to make me feel safe.

His fake currency still spends.

“Vicky,” he says.

I brace myself. Does he notice I’m being a freak? “What?”

“Are you going to smell me again?”

I smile. “It’s just a little rickety.”

“I forget you’re not used to this. Totally safe.” He puts his arm around me. “Okay?”

I don’t know whether theokayis about his arm around me or the safety statement. “Okay,” I say.

“I wouldn’t put you in here if I didn’t know it was safe. I wouldn’t do that.”

I nod. It’s not the elevator now, it’s him, doing strange things to my body. Him being protective. Like I’m one of his people.

“But if you want to smell me, you can.”

I don’t want to smell him. I don’t want the warm weight of his arm to feel so good. I want him to stop making me feel alive and happy. I want to not perk up in some soul-deep way when our gazes find each other from across a crowded room. I want him to not seem to admire the Vonda in me.

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