CHAPTER 4 #2
He sees me at the end of the corridor and his step softens for me with the softness of someone who wants you to know you have been noticed and is not going to make you carry the weight of being noticed.
"Doll."
The word arrives as courtesy — the way other men use a hand on the small of a back to guide you past a wet floor. A tag would land hot. A flirtation would land slick. This lands flat, set down on the corridor between us, and I know the second I hear it that it is for me only.
"Doctor."
"Take care."
"I will."
He goes. The cord at his wrist catches the corridor light for one quarter-second as he passes me. His eyes stay forward. The door at the southeast corner is half-open at twenty-one-twenty-six.
I mark my steps. Forty-two.
I knock once. The voice on the other side does not raise.
"Come in. Close the door."
The room is darker than it was at seven-thirty.
The walnut blinds are drawn three-quarters.
The desk lamp is on — brass-pull chain, low yellow — and the small electric kettle on the credenza has just clicked off again.
Two cups on the tray. The cobalt tin sits beside them with the lid laid on its side.
The silver tea spoon is across the saucer of the cup nearest the desk.
The steam from the spout is rising into the lamp-light in a slow, curling line, and the bergamot reaches me before the smell of the leather chair does. I close the door behind me. My hand on the doorknob is steady. My pulse is not.
He is behind the desk in the same merino as this morning, the oxford open at the collar, the cuffs now turned back to the elbow, the tungsten watch at his left wrist. He stays seated. The room comes to him. He sets the closed pen aside.
"Hayes is at a conference until Monday. Aguilar has gone home. We will not be interrupted."
I stay quiet — the line was a statement, not a question. The medallion at my sternum is warm. My fingers stay at my sides. They want to be where they should not be.
He stands. He comes around the desk without hurry. He stops three feet from me. He is taller than me by nine inches and he uses none of them.
"Rossi."
"Sir."
"I am going to put my hand at your sternum. I am not going to take off your scrub top. I am not going to put my mouth on you. I am not going to put my hands anywhere on you that you cannot describe to me afterward in a sentence. I am going to ask you a question. You will answer it in a word."
I mark the seconds before I answer. Four.
"Yes."
"That was not the question."
"I know."
The corner of his mouth moves a millimeter. It is the closest the man has come to a smile and I will remember it for the rest of my life.
"Turn. Hands on the desk."
I turn. The walnut is warm where the lamp has been on it.
I lay my palms flat — right hand on the small silver tea spoon, the bowl of it cool under the pad of my thumb.
The grain of the wood is mirrored down the center of the desk and I am looking at the line where the bookmatch meets, and I am counting the inches between my hands without meaning to — sixteen, the standard span of a scrub nurse's reach across a Mayo tray — and I am breathing through my nose because I learned at nineteen to breathe through my nose when a room is about to do something a room is about to do.
He steps in. He keeps an inch of air between us.
A soft column of warmer air arrives at the line of my back as a radiator arrives at three feet — present, steady, cool office around it.
His left hand comes up alongside my left arm and lays itself flat on the desk a half-inch from mine, the tungsten watch at the corner of my vision; the strap is darker than the wood and the crown of the watch catches the lamp once and goes still.
His right hand lifts. I do not see it. I feel the air change at my throat.
"Tell me yes."
The voice is at the inch above my right ear.
The breath carries more heat than the room.
The bergamot from the desk is mixed now with something cleaner — chlorhexidine under the wool of his sweater, the faint trace of a scrub he washed off before he sat down at seven this morning and did not get to wash off again.
Tell me yes. I feel the word yes arrive in my throat before I decide to say it. I let it sit there. I take inventory.
One. Two. Three. Four.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes."
His right palm lands. The heel of it presses flat on the chain just above the medallion at my sternum, the cool silver between his palm and my skin, his fingers spread over the rise of my collarbones, the pad of his thumb against the hollow of my throat where my pulse is and the pad of his little finger at the curve of my sternum where the medallion crack is.
He presses into the inch of space between us, never into my breath. He is the inch. He is the restraint.
I exhale.
His hand stays.
He breathes once at my ear. Gospodi. The word arrives at a pitch lower than the room is built for.
I do not know the word. I know the intent of it.
The intent of it is reverence. The intent of it is fear.
The intent of it is a man who has not been afraid since he was sixteen and who is afraid now and who will not tell me that he is afraid for two more chapters of my life, and I am — already, here, on the leather and bergamot and the steel of a watch at my ear — registering that I will know his fear before he names it.
"Are you certain."
The voice is the same voice. The hand on my sternum is the same hand. He holds the quarter-inch he chose.
"Yes."
"Are you certain in the morning."
"Yes."
"Are you certain in the morning when you have slept and the light is in the window in Murray Hill and there is no one at your sternum."
"Yes."
His palm flexes once — a quarter-inch of pressure, the silver chain warming under it, the medallion held flat against me — and he says, low, against the rim of my ear:
"Good girl."
I close my eyes. The word arrives differently than I expected.
It arrives at the place his palm is. It settles there and warms the chain and the inch of space and the breath above my ear and the pulse he is reading at my throat with the pad of his thumb.
I am twenty-five years old and a pediatric-trained surgical nurse and I have had two prior partners and I have not been called a girl by anyone since Sister Mary Catherine, who calls everyone a girl, and that is a different word entirely.
This word is two syllables and the second syllable is the one that lands. Girl. He says it as he laid his palm. He says it as a man says a word he has been holding under his tongue for nineteen years.
I exhale again. His palm holds the chain.
"Rossi."
"Yes."
"You will sleep in your own bed tonight. We will not name what this was tonight. We will name it when you are ready to name it back. Do you understand."