Chapter 9 #2
Today is what I call the Wants Her look, and it has been on his face since approximately nine fifteen when I brought him his coffee and he said thank you and his eyes tracked from my face to somewhere around my collarbone and back up in a way that was, by any reasonable standard, not a professional gaze.
I registered this the way you register a small earthquake: you feel it, you know what it was, you look around to see if anyone else noticed, and then you go back to pretending you were just sitting quietly.
I’m sitting at my desk at two in the afternoon, pretending to process emails, actually writing the scene where he corners me against the bookshelf in the conference room and says something devastating and true, when the phone rings.
A client needs to reschedule. Third Wednesday of next month, can we move the eleven o’clock.
“Absolutely,” I say, with the confidence of someone who knows how to do this. I pull up the calendar.
The calendar does not open.
I click again. The screen loads halfway, spins, stops.
I try a different browser.
Same result.
I close everything, restart the application, wait, try again. The calendar opens, shows me two weeks of Patrick’s schedule, and then freezes completely, cursor blinking at me like a tiny flag of surrender.
I stare at it. The client is on hold. I look at Bernard. Bernard offers no guidance.
I stand up, and walk to Patrick’s door.
He’s at his desk, reading something, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm because it’s late enough in the day for that. He looks up.
“The calendar isn’t loading properly,” I say. “I have someone on hold who needs to reschedule and I can’t get into the system.”
“Schedule it in the calendar.”
“I just said I can’t get into—”
“The calendar application. Bottom left of the screen.”
“I know where it is. It’s not opening. I’ve tried four times in two different browsers.”
He stands and walks toward me. I step back to let him through, then follow him to my desk and sit down. He stops behind my chair, and leans over.
I should stand up. There’s no reason to stay sitting. I should offer him the chair.
I stay sitting.
He reaches past me and his forearm passes directly in front of my face and he smells, he always smells extraordinary, I don’t know what it is, something clean and warm and quietly expensive, and it is absolutely not helping, and his fingers move over my keyboard with the focused precision of a man who does everything on his own terms and at his own pace.
“It’s frozen,” he says.
“Yes. That’s what I said.”
He doesn’t respond to this. He presses several keys, waits, presses more. He’s close enough that I can feel the warmth of him behind me, this specific human warmth, my back is very straight and I’m staring at the screen and not at anything else.
He reaches to click something and his hand brushes mine.
One second. His knuckles against the back of my hand, barely, the kind of contact that happens constantly between people in offices and means absolutely nothing.
It does not feel like nothing.
It feels like something running from my hand up my arm and settling somewhere in my chest that has no business being involved in a calendar problem.
“There,” he says. The calendar opens, fully loaded, all of Patrick’s October laid out in front of us.
He straightens. But he doesn’t step back immediately.
He’s still right there, close enough that I could lean back half an inch and be against him, and I’m acutely, embarrassingly aware of this fact. I don’t move. I don’t breathe correctly. I stare at the calendar like it contains the most interesting information I have ever encountered.
He reaches past me one more time to close the extra tabs, and his forearm grazes my shoulder, just barely, fabric against fabric, and I feel it like contact with an open flame. Low in my stomach something pulls tight. My whole body has made a decision I have not authorized.
I want him to touch me again.
Not accidentally. Not fingers against the back of a hand on the way to a keyboard.
I want him to put his hands on me deliberately, with full awareness of what he’s doing, and I want him to do it now, in this chair, in this office, with Manhattan forty floors below us and nobody else on this floor to know anything about it.
This is the closest we have ever been maybe the closest we’ll ever be and it lasts approximately four seconds before he straightens fully and steps back and the air between us returns to a normal temperature.
“Thank you,” I say. Something close to my real voice.
He looks at me. Just for a second. His expression is completely unreadable, which is his default setting, except that his eyes drop to my mouth and come back up before he turns and walks back to his office.
He just looked at my mouth.
I pick up the hold call. I schedule the appointment. I say goodbye to the client in a voice that does not betray anything, which is, under the circumstances, a feat of acting I should be able to put on a résumé.
I go home that evening with the particular, humming certainty that something is shifting.
I don’t know what to do about that.
But I’m going to think about it on the new couch.