13. Solenn
— ? —
Solenn
One cup of tea.
That’s the whole offer. One cup, because I’m tired and he’s here and arguing costs energy I do not have after eight hours of insurance claims and pretending I don’t clock him every single time he walks past my desk.
“You can come in. For tea. And only because I’m too tired to make you stand out there.”
“I’ll take it.”
My apartment is modest. Clean, but modest. Secondhand couch, clearance rug, a kitchen roughly the dimensions of a shoebox. It’s mine, though. Every inch of it paid for out of my own account.
Liam sits down on that couch like he’s been shown into a palace.
“This is nice.”
“It’s a couch.”
“It’s your couch.” He runs a hand along the armrest, almost caressing, and I do not think about that hand. I do not think about where it has been, or what it used to do to my hips.
“Tea,” I announce, fleeing. “I’m making tea.”
“Take your time.”
I do not take my time. I make tea at speed, because being alone with Liam Sharpe is doing things to my blood pressure that Dr. Mendez would want documented.
He’s taken his jacket off. Pushed his sleeves up. The forearms are back and they have brought a gray henley with them, and that henley is doing something across his shoulders that ought to require a permit.
My phone goes while I’m pouring.
TESSA: He asked me what flowers you hate.
TESSA: I told him carnations.
TESSA: You’re welcome.
ME: Why is he asking about flowers.
TESSA: No idea. Completely innocent question. Nothing to see here.
TESSA: He also asked your favorite film. I said The Notebook.
ME: I hate The Notebook.
TESSA: I know. I’m testing him.
ME: You’re fired as my best friend.
TESSA: Love you. Use protection.
ME: I AM ALREADY PREGNANT.
TESSA: Then what exactly is the downside. Go and get some.
I put the phone face down and carry two cups through with whatever dignity is still available to me.
The book comes out of nowhere.
One second we’re drinking tea like two people who have never done anything to each other. The next he’s holding up my paperback, Post-it notes fanned out of it in four colors.
“You stole my book.”
“I borrowed your book. For research.”
“You annotated my book.”
“I had questions.” He flips to a tab. “Chapter twelve. The hero grovels with a boombox.”
“That’s a classic.”
“It’s amateur. Listen to this. He stood beneath her window, music blaring, heart on display.” He looks at me over the top of the page. “Heart on display. In public. With witnesses. Zero strategy.”
“Romance isn’t strategy.”
“Everything is strategy. Chapter eighteen is worse, he writes her a poem. An actual poem, with rhymes in it. My love for you burns like the sun, without you my life has no fun.” He lets that sit. “He rhymed sun with fun.”
“It’s romantic.”
“It’s lazy. If you’re going to write a woman a poem you put something in it that only applies to her. What her laugh does. The face she makes when she’s about to be rude to you. The noise she makes when-”
He stops.
“When what?”
His ears have gone red. Liam Sharpe is blushing.
“The point is that this man is doing the minimum and being rewarded for it.”
“And what would you do?”
“Everything else.” He shuts the book on his finger.
“I wouldn’t stand under a window with a boombox, I’d find out what she actually listens to.
I wouldn’t write bad poetry, I’d work out which words she needs to hear.
I wouldn’t do anything grand where people could watch.
I’d do small things where nobody could.”
“Like mopping a floor in her workplace badly.”
“Exactly like mopping a floor badly just to be closer with her.”
I pull my feet up under me and don’t quite manage it, because there is a person in my abdomen now with opinions about my hips.
“Chapter twenty-three,” he says.
“Absolutely not.”
“You dog-eared this one, Solenn. Repeatedly. The corner has given up.”
“Give me the book.”
“There are notes in the margin.” He turns it around so I can see my own handwriting. “Finally. And underneath, took him long enough. And then, in a different pen, so this was a second reading, more of this please, the tension is killing me.”
My whole face is on fire.
“I’m going to murder Tessa.”
“Tessa was extremely supportive of my research. She said, and I’m quoting her, if you can make Sol feel half of what that chapter makes her feel, you might be in with a shot.”
“I hate everybody I know.”
“The dialogue is good, though.” He clears his throat, and his voice drops into something lower and slower and entirely deliberate. “Touch me. I’ve been waiting so long for you to touch me.”
“Stop it.”
“His hands found her waist and pulled her in, and she could feel every inch of him against her-”
“Liam.”
“She’d imagined it a thousand times, and none of it came close to his mouth at her throat, his fingers going under her shirt-”
“I swear to God.”
He looks up. Whatever’s in his face has stopped being funny.
“Should I keep going?”
Yes.
“You should give me back my book.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
And it isn’t, and we both know it isn’t, and I sit on my own couch with a cup of cold tea in my hand and think about exactly how easy it would be to take that book out of his hands and put my mouth on him and find out whether he still makes that sound when I bite his bottom lip.
“My feet hurt,” I say instead, which is the most cowardly sentence of my life.
He pats his thigh. “Up.”
“What?”
“Your feet. Up. I’ll keep reviewing this man’s terrible technique while I do it.”
I should say no. I have a whole speech about boundaries that I have been rehearsing since the parking lot.
My feet are in his lap before I finish thinking it. I don’t remember moving them.
His hands close around my left foot and his thumbs go into the arch, and the sound I make is not a sound for a Tuesday. It is not a sound for a living room. It is, frankly, not a sound for company.
His hands stop.
We look at each other for a second and a half.
“Chapter twenty-four,” he says, and his voice has gone to gravel. “The morning after.”
“We are not having a morning after.”
“The hero makes her breakfast.” His thumb finds something under the ball of my foot that makes my spine go loose. “The whole works. Very domestic. She watches him cook and thinks about how different he is from what she expected.”
“Different how.”
“More attentive. Interested in her comfort rather than his own.”
He moves to the other foot. I sink another inch into the cushions and lose approximately all of my convictions.
“The dialogue here is also good.” He is not looking at the book. He hasn’t looked at the book in some time. “I want to learn everything about you. Every sound you make. Every way you like to be touched. I’d like to spend the rest of my life studying you.”
“That’s…” My mouth is dry. “That’s thorough.”
“He believes in doing things properly.”
“Does he?”
“Extensively.” His thumb draws a slow circle on my ankle bone, and it has no business being the most obscene thing that has happened to me in four months. “Repeatedly. Several times in the one night, according to the text.”
“I don’t recall that part.”
“Page two hundred and forty-seven. In the margin you wrote unrealistic but appreciated.”
I am going to combust. I am going to go up like a chip pan, on a secondhand couch, while my ex-husband reads my own filthy handwriting back to me in a voice like that.
“The tea’s gone cold,” I manage.
The knock at the door saves my life.
The courier is bored. The envelope is not.
Heavy paper, ink instead of print. I know the handwriting on sight.
“What is it?” He’s off the couch. The book is forgotten on the cushion.
Inside there’s a check with enough zeros that I have to count them three times. A house, ten houses. Never working again.
And a card, in blue ink.
He told me himself, dear, in as many words. He proposed because it was the right thing to do. That is duty, and duty is not love, and you will do him a great deal less damage if you accept the difference now rather than later.
The room tips very slightly. Because I know which conversation she’s quoting.
I was six feet away from it with my hand flat on a wall and my ears roaring, and this woman is sitting in a house five hundred miles from here writing me a note about it in fountain pen, and she has no idea she’s handing me the same knife twice.
“Solenn.” His voice comes from a distance. “What does it say?”
I hand him the card.
He reads it once. Then he tears it. In half, and in half again, and he keeps going past the point of anything readable, and my clearance rug gets a snowfall of very expensive paper.
“My mother,” he says, level, “has never forgiven me for wanting anything she didn’t assign me.”
“Liam-”
“Angelina was hers. The apartment was hers. The company, the schedule, the life. All of it chosen, approved, signed off.” He looks at me. “You weren’t on the list.”
“I’m aware.”
“You turned up with no interest whatsoever in being impressive, and you ruined the entire arrangement.” He takes the check out of my hand and tears that too, without looking at the number. “She can keep her money and her opinions and her suitable candidates.”
He puts his hands on either side of my face and tips it up.
“I’m keeping you.”
“We’re divorced.”
“For now.”
“That isn’t how divorce works.”
“I’m not interested in how divorce works.”
His mouth is four inches from mine. Three. His thumbs are moving on my cheekbones and I can feel him breathing and there is nothing in my head at all, nothing, not one useful thought, just the flat certainty that I am about to ruin months of extremely hard work.
“Liam.”
“Mm.”
“Stay.”
It comes out of me before I have any say in it. He goes completely still.
“Say that again.”
“Don’t make me.”
“Solenn.” His forehead comes down against mine and he’s breathing like the stairs all over again. “Say it again.”
“Stay.”
And he closes his eyes, and he takes his hands off my face, and he steps back. I have never been so insulted in my life.
“Are you serious?”
“Look at your floor.”
I look at my floor. Confetti. Fountain pen and expensive paper all over a rug I bought for nineteen dollars.
“My mother’s handwriting is on your carpet,” he says, “and you’ve been shaking for ten minutes, and if I take you to bed tonight then for the rest of your life some part of you gets to wonder whether you did it because you wanted me or because she made you feel small enough to need proving otherwise.
” His jaw works. “I’m not having that. Not for the one thing I actually want. ”
“That is the single most annoying thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I’m aware.”
“I asked.”
“I know.” He picks up his jacket and it takes him two goes, because his hands aren’t behaving. “Ask me on a night when there’s nothing on the floor, and I’ll be extremely easy to persuade. I’ll be embarrassing about it.”
“Get out of my apartment.”
“Yes.” He’s already at the door. Stops with his hand on it. “Next Saturday. I’m cooking.”
“You can’t cook.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
The door shuts.
I stand in the middle of my living room in the wreckage of a hundred thousand dollars, absolutely humming, with nowhere on earth to put any of it.
My phone lights up an hour later.
Unknown number. Fifth this month, and I nearly leave it.
It’s a photograph.
The front of the clinic, taken through a windshield from the row of spaces across the road. Time-stamped this afternoon. My car is in it, third from the end, where I park every single day.
UNKNOWN: Does he still do that thing with his hands? Asking for a friend.
Angelina. Ever since the first text.
The frightening part is the angle, and the daylight, and the fact that whoever took it was sitting in a parked car outside my work, five hundred miles from the city, close enough to read my plates.
She has someone following me.