Exit Event #6
He frowns. “Is that why you’re here? You saw me with another woman?”
“No, that was actually when I decided to let you go. When I saw how . . . well, you two fit together. You’d moved on, and
I realized I needed to let you go, and accept we weren’t—that this was it, now.”
Aleksandr shakes his head, a weary laugh. “I took Sanae to that party because I thought you might be there, with Greene’s
son, maybe. Because I thought it would hurt you, to see us together.”
“Ah.” Lili nods, deserved hurts. “Is it . . . is it serious? With her?”
“It’s early on.”
“Are you—are you sleeping with her?”
“I don’t believe you really have a right to ask that.”
Lili recoils. “Right—right, okay, I guess . . .”
Aleksandr sighs. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, we’ve slept together.”
Lili stares out at the park. Chill of late summer, her sweater missed.
She won’t cry. She can’t cry. She did this to herself.
“It’s not serious,” he says, finally.
“Were we serious?” she whispers. “To you, were we serious?”
Aleksandr laughs, once. It’s not a sound of joy.
“Lili, I would have done anything for you.”
She closes her eyes.
Me, too.
Me, still.
“You said, the moment you realized you had to let this go,” he says. “What made you decide to come here and talk?”
“We got back last night,” she murmurs. “Yesterday, I was wandering through Charles de Gaulle alone, looking at the departures
board. I’d seen the photo, I was learning to accept it. I’d finally spoken to my friends, opened up to them. But when I saw
all those flights, all those different places in the world, possible lives, and people, I realized—I realized none of it meant
anything to me, without you. That’s—that’s why I came.”
A siren blares behind them, an ambulance driving down Sixth.
Aleksandr doesn’t say anything.
“What about you?” she asks, already nauseous in anticipation of the answer. “When did you realize? That you had to let this
go, that it was over?”
“I haven’t.”
Oh.
It’s almost sickening—letting something like hope start to grow again, crawling and green.
What is forgiveness but the hope for trust, again? The beginnings of a sort of faith. To have him would be unimaginable, and
unknown; to be without him, the same.
She will have a life to live, either way.
She would like it to be with him.
“I—I don’t know if I can ask you this,” she whispers. “But could we . . . could we work through this?”
“What do you mean, when you say this?”
“You and me,” she says. “Is there any chance—could you ever forgive me?”
He sighs, with exhaustion and sadness. “For what purpose? What else do you want from me, Lili?”
What else do you want from me? When are you going to fucking be done with me? Is this finally it?
“You,” she says, immediately.
You, she thinks. You are a hunger that keeps existing, past the point of satiation, for me.
“I want you to be mine,” she says. “If you’d have me, if you’d want to—if you’d want to work through this. With me.”
Aleksandr shakes his head, disbelief—but still, not yet a rejection; not yet a refusal. “Fuck, Lili—you can’t just come back
into my life, and expect me to make room for you, like this.”
“I know,” she whispers.
He lets out a difficult breath. “Maybe it’s better if we—”
Aleksandr breaks off, running a hand over his face.
She’s never felt so keyed to devastation, the knife’s edge of what someone else might say.
“I work in risk management,” he says then. Heavy voice, and she listens for anything she can find in it. “Exposure, weaknesses,
volatility. That’s my entire business, understanding how to balance the right amount of risk for the greatest amount of reward.
You—you’re all risk, and uncertain reward.”
Lili flinches. “That’s—that’s fair,” she whispers. “I know it’s not . . . I knew forgiveness was unlikely, going into this.
But I just—I wanted to give you answers. And to ask you, at least.”
Aleksandr nods. “Okay,” he says. “And so you have.”
How ends come suddenly, and quietly; a breath, a sigh. And it’s done.
Simple, the slice of cold as it cuts away—what could have been, might have been, what won’t be, anymore, any longer.
“Right,” Lili says, nodding—stinging eyes, tight throat, as she slings her tote over her shoulder; trying to cauterize this
fast, but it hurts, more than she’d thought possible: pain, against the same wound, again. “I’ll just—I’ll go—”
“Lili—”
His hand finds hers, and everything inside of her breaks.
He draws her towards him as she starts crying. Around her, his arms grasp her fast, the knit of his sweater soft under her
palms. “I’m sorry,” she gasps, hot tears against his chest. “I’ll leave—I promise, I’ll leave—I will—”
“It’s alright,” he murmurs, against her hair. “It’s alright.”
Rough, his voice sounds rough. Lili buries her face further into his sweater; the shake of her shoulders, under his arms, as he pulls her closer still, and she cries, collapsed into his side. “I don’t know—I don’t know how to do this,” she whispers between tears. “To let go—”
“I don’t either. But it’ll end—eventually, it will end.”
His voice is not steady. It sounds like words he’s trying to tell himself, too.
I don’t think this will ever end for me, she thinks.
I think it’ll only change.
They walk back to the loft in silence.
“Um, my sweater,” she says. “I can wait downstairs, if you—”
“It’s alright,” he says, opening his front door. “You can come up.”
They stand apart in the elevator. This is the man I love, she thinks. This is the man I love, and I am letting him go.
In his bedroom, she picks up her crumpled black sweater. “Would it be alright if I used your bathroom?” she asks, brushing
a hand over her damp cheeks. A mess, she feels like a mess.
“Of course.”
Behind the closed door, she turns the faucet on. She doesn’t look inside the cabinet to see if Sanae’s things are there. She
just cries, holding onto the sink.
Economies, markets—they’re just the aggregation of all of us, stumbling along. The staff lounge was full of chatter, professors on break before afternoon classes. After lecture, she’d gone to Kerr’s office
hours.
But doesn’t that discount our entire field to say we’re only trying to understand what’s irrational, rather than shape it? she contested. Isn’t economics a means of improving society? It has to be more than just an attempt to grapple with our own uncertainty,
that’s so—irrational.
Spoken like a Marxist, Kerr laughed, pouring coffee. What drives markets, Marwan?
Depends what type of markets.
Don’t be smart.
She’d sighed. Supply and demand. Fiscal and monetary policy. Geopolitical—
Kerr waved away her answer. No, deeper than that. Our behavior—our emotions becoming beliefs, translating into actions—that’s the ultimate market force. Behind the transactions of the marketplace, it’s just our hopes and our fears.
But that’s all unpredictable, qualitative—unknowable, Lili said, frustrated. Isn’t that saying that economics is a failure, then? If all it’s doing is expressing the mess of humanity, rather than shaping?
We need to express it first, Kerr replied. Think of your stats courses—you express the situation before you find its outcome.
The problem, you mean. Before we solve the problem.
He laughed, again. Our humanity is not a problem, Marwan. What we want, it’s not a weakness to solve.
Well, it’s irrational.
Push further. It’s a way to map logic—force some architecture of the rational—onto what is fundamentally irrational.
But you can’t make desire rational! You cannot make humanity a logical thing. It’s all uncertainty, all the way through.
Exactly, Kerr had said, snapping his fingers as if she’d finally found the answer. Exactly.
We are all of us, trying constantly to make sense of the world.
In the empty bathroom now, Lili presses tired fingers against tired eyes.
Cold water, hot skin. Uncertainty we can never soothe.
Aleksandr is standing by the open window when she comes out. He’s looking outside.
“Hey,” she says, soft. “I—I’m going to go.”
Aleksandr looks at her.
Something’s changed, in his face.
There isn’t sadness, resignation, that released defeat, anymore.
Instead, she sees focus—intent, intense—this frown of trying to understand, and uncertainty.
Uncertainty.
“What?” she asks. “What’s—”
He crosses the distance between them, grasps her face, and kisses her.
He kisses her, and there are transactions you can’t undo, positions you have to dig your heels into; no matter what the market says, no matter the risk hazarded—you can only go forward.
Lili gasps into it, fresh air filling her lungs, bright sun, because he’s kissing her—he hadn’t before, not earlier; it had only been his mouth rough against her skin—
“I don’t know how to do this,” he breathes, holding her face. “I have no fucking idea—”
“Me either,” she whispers. “Me either, but—but do you . . .”
He brushes his thumb along the corner of her mouth, tracing her lips.
Forgiveness is a simple thing, in the end. It feels foreign, and it feels given, and when he kisses her again, Lili lets herself
believe it.
His mouth against hers, heat and the taste of him, a sound almost like a groan from his chest, pushes a burn of her tears,
again; because it is difficult to accept that this is happening.
He sits down on the bed, drawing her between his legs. His hand runs up the back of her thighs, a touch at her knees: soft,
vulnerable flesh. Her throat feels tight. Gentle, her skirt falls down her hips, and he doesn’t let any skin reveal without
kissing it; a painful contrast to how he’d torn her clothes off earlier, like every inch of her body made him angry—and how
he pulls her shirt over her head now, like she’s fragile.
Drawing her closer, he kisses her throat. So gentle, it makes her wince.
Aleksandr pulls away at once. “Does that hurt?”
“No, not really,” she whispers. “But just—are you sure?”
“Are you?” he asks. His fingers brush over the sensitive skin.
No, she thinks. I don’t think I can do this, and then not have you.
Unspoken, she thinks she sees a similar response from him, as he looks at her.
Lili reaches behind her back. She undoes the clasp of her bra, shrugging it off.