Chapter 16
Patrick
She’s wearing red.
Not aggressively red, not a statement, just a dress the color of something I don’t have a neutral word for, the neckline low enough to be deliberate, the kind of thing that requires no justification and offers none.
She’s at her desk when I step out of the elevator at seven forty, and I see her before she sees me, which gives me approximately three seconds to arrange my face into something that does not broadcast the specific quality of thought I am currently having.
Three seconds is not enough.
“Morning,” she says, without looking up from her screen.
“Morning.”
I go into my office. I put my bag down. I look at the window for a moment, then go back to look at the Bergamo file like it contains information I am interested in.
It does not contain information I am interested in.
What I’m interested in is currently sitting at the assistant’s desk in a red dress, and the fact that I spent the entire weekend telling myself I had made peace with the situation and was ready to be a professional adult has not, apparently, translated into anything useful.
I work for two hours with reasonable competence, which is an improvement over last week when I was reading the same paragraph on rotation.
At eleven I have a call with Zurich that runs long.
At one Elena brings coffee without being asked, sets it on the corner of my desk, and doesn’t linger, which I notice and file under: she’s doing the same thing I am, which is pretending we are both fine while operating at approximately forty percent of our actual capacity.
She’s better at pretending than I am.
At six the building goes quiet in the way it does when the other floors empty out and it’s just the fortieth, just the two of us and the city outside the glass.
I should go home. Or Maria could stay with Erick a little longer, a standing arrangement on late contract evenings, and there is no practical reason to still be here.
I’m still here.
I hear her chair move. I hear the small sounds of end of day, keyboard, drawer, the particular quiet that precedes a goodbye. I pick up the phone and call her extension before I have fully decided to.
“The Bergamo addendum,” I say when she picks up. “I need another set of eyes on the liability clause. Do you have an hour?”
A beat. “Yes.”
“Order something. Dinner. There’s a Thai place in the system, they have the number.”
“Okay.” Another beat. “Anything you don’t eat?”
“No.”
She hangs up.
I set the phone down. I look at my reflection in the black glass of the monitor for a moment and think: you called her back in. You had a perfectly legitimate reason to let her go home and you called her back in. I examine this. I don’t examine it for long.
She comes in twenty minutes later with a notepad and two sets of chopsticks and the file already open on her tablet, which tells me she pulled it while she was waiting for the food and started reading.
I watch her settle into the chair across from my desk, the red dress, the way she tucks one leg under her with a complete lack of ceremony like my office is a place she’s allowed to be comfortable, and I think: this is what it would look like. Every day. This.
I redirect my attention to the contract.
We work through the liability clause. She asks the right questions, the ones that tell me she’s been studying the structure of these agreements, understanding the logic instead of just the surface.
At some point the food arrives and we eat without stopping, the documents spread between us, and I notice at a certain point that I’ve said something dry about the vendor’s legal team and she’s laughed, and I’ve laughed too, which is. .. It’s been a while.
I’m not sure when it stopped being normal to laugh in my own office, but it did, and sitting here with the contract and the Thai food and the city going dark outside the glass, it feels like something returning. Something I’d filed under: no longer available.
“This clause is designed to be unenforceable,” she says, pointing at paragraph seven with a chopstick. “They wrote it that way deliberately. If you push back they’ll fold.”
I look at her.
“How do you know that?”
“Because it’s the same structure as the clause in the Milan contract that they eventually dropped when you didn’t respond to it.” She tilts her head. “I went back and read the whole chain.”
I look at her a beat longer than I intend to.
“Yes,” I say. “You’re right.”
She writes something in her notepad. The phone on my desk rings, the internal line, a building notification, something operational and entirely unimportant. We both reach for the notepad between us at the same moment. Her fingers land on top of mine.
Neither of us moves.
The phone rings again.
I look at her hand on mine. I look at her face. She is looking back at me with the expression she wears when she’s decided something and is waiting to see if I’ve decided it too.
The phone stops ringing.
I lean across the desk and kiss her, one hand going to her jaw, and she exhales against my mouth like she’s been holding that breath since this morning, since Friday, since considerably before Friday.
The kiss starts careful and does not stay careful.
She reaches up and fists her hand in my shirt the way she does and I feel the specific pull of it in my spine.
I pull back.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say.
She looks at me. Something moves in her expression, something patient and slightly exasperated and under it all something that knows me better than I’ve allowed. “Patrick.” Her voice is even. “I have watched you do it. You’re very good at it.”
“That’s not what I…”
“Stop.” She says it quietly but it lands.
“Stop second-guessing everything. Stop deciding in advance that this is too complicated or that I can’t handle it or that wanting this is the wrong thing to want.
” She holds my gaze. “I want you. I have wanted you since approximately the second week. That is not a complicated statement and it does not require a five-year plan.” A beat.
“I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m asking you to stop pretending you don’t want your hands on me. ”
I look at her.
She’s ten years younger than me, telling me exactly what I need to hear in a voice that doesn’t waver.
I think of the promise I made at the graveside. Erick’s grin. Alister’s fork striking the table.
She’s right. Completely right.
This isn’t cheating. This isn’t abandonment.
This is a woman who is here, present, asking me to meet her there.
The only thing in my way is me.
I stand up. I round the desk. She tips her face up and I cup it in both hands and kiss her properly this time, no hesitation, she makes a sound against my mouth that undoes the last of my resolve.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Her eyes are dark and her mouth is red and she’s looking at me like she has been waiting for me to stop managing this and simply choose it.
I reach down and take her hands. I pull her to her feet.
She’s small against me, even in heels barely reaching my chin, and holding her sparks something possessive and protective I can’t quite control.
“Come here,” I say.
She comes.
I walk her backward until she’s at the edge of my desk and I lift her onto it, her dress riding up slightly.
I step between her knees and kiss her again, longer this time, my hands in her hair.
She works at my shirt buttons with the sure, unhurried focus she brings to everything she decides to do, and I slide my hands down her sides around the backs of her thighs, which I have been thinking about in a low continuous way since I first saw her sleeping on the couch.
“Your legs,” I say, low, close to her ear. “They’re perfect. The most incredible legs I’ve ever seen. If there were a prize for the most beautiful legs in Manhattan, you’d win it every year.”
She laughs.
I reach down and lift her shoes off, one at a time, and set them on the floor.
Then I step back. She stays where she is on the edge of the desk, watching me, while I take her foot in my hand and put my mouth to her ankle.
I move slowly. Deliberately. I take my time with the inside of her calf, the back of her knee, the inside of her thigh, the place where the skin is warm and soft, she smells like something I am going to have difficulty forgetting.
Her breathing changes. Her hand finds my hair.
“Patrick.”
“I’m not rushing,” I tell her.
“I noticed.”
I press my mouth to the thin fabric of her underwear and she grips my hair hard, I smile against her, not strategically, not because I planned it. Just because I barely believe I’m allowing myself to have this.
I move the fabric to the side.
She exhales sharply, a small broken sound, her hand tightening in my hair.
She is warm and soft against my mouth. I press my tongue flat, drag it slow.
Her hips stutter forward. The sound she makes hits me low in the chest, drops further.
I find what she responds to by staying with it, circling, patient, reading every shift in her breathing like it’s a language I want to be fluent in.
Her thighs close around my shoulders. Her grip in my hair crosses the line from gentle to something that pulls at the base of my skull, and I feel that in my whole body.
I locate the place that makes her breath stop rather than catch.
I stay there. I ease back before she peaks.
I want this to last, I want more of her sounds, more of her weight moving toward me, more of her utterly unself-conscious need.
I am so hard it has become a physical fact I can no longer defer.
“Patrick,” she says, and it comes out unsteady, half-warning, half-something else.
I don’t hurry.
She makes sounds I feel down through my sternum, her fingers have stopped being gentle in my hair and I don’t care, I don’t care at all.
I slide two fingers inside her slowly, watching her react, and use my mouth at the same time, and her thighs press in around me.
I find a rhythm and hold it, unhurried, until she starts shaking. I ease back. Let her breathe.
Every sound she makes goes straight to my cock. Every shift of her hips, every pull of her hand in my hair. I’m aching for her in a way that’s getting harder to think around. I file it away. Deal with it shortly.
I keep everything controlled except this, except the attention I’m paying her, the patience of it, which is its own kind of intensity.
She comes apart quietly. That’s what undoes me. The way she goes quiet at the peak of it, the specific tension that runs through her and then releases, her nails in my shoulder, her breath broken open. Real and entirely unguarded in a way I suspect she can’t help.
I stand. She’s still breathing in pieces. I look at her, the desk, the city behind her through the glass, the dress. I reach for the zip at her back.
“Let me see you,” I say.
She lifts her arms.
I take the dress off slowly, watching her face as I do it. What’s underneath is simple and dark and it goes too. She stands in front of my window in the Manhattan light with her chin up and her eyes on mine. She is extraordinary, she is just completely extraordinary.
I take her face in my hands and kiss her. She reaches for me and we move to the couch, I touch her like I want to know her completely. She gives me everything.
I open my desk drawer, pull out a condom, tear the foil open, and roll it on without taking my eyes off her.
When I push into her I do it one inch at the time I want to savor every instant.
I move slowly. I take my time until I watch her come apart.
We lie still for a moment. The city outside. The quiet of the floor.
Then her voice, practical: “I’m going to need my dress.”
“In a minute.”
She turns her head to look at me. I look back at her. The specific quality of the silence between us has a weight in it, something more than the situation technically requires.
“Erick,” I say.
She waits.
“I think about what this means for him.” I say it plainly. “He’s four. He doesn’t understand the categories. If I let you in and it doesn’t, if this is a thing that ends, it ends in a way that he feels. I can’t do that to him.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then, not carefully at all: “It’s just sex, Patrick.”
I look at her.
“I’m not planning a future around it. I’m not going to show up at your apartment with a moving box. It’s just sex.” She says it plainly, like she’s solving a logistical problem. “Erick never has to know I exist outside this building.”
Something in me goes still in a way that has nothing to do with relief.
Just sex.
The words sit in the room and I examine them the way I examine contracts, looking for what I want to find, finding instead what’s actually there.
What’s actually there is that she’s offering me the simplest possible version of this and I should be grateful, and I am not grateful, and that is information I don’t know what to do with.
I don’t want just sex. That’s the problem. I want, I don’t finish the thought because finishing it would require me to look at something I am not ready to look at.
What I do know is this: whatever I want, she is the one setting the terms. And she’s set them clearly. And if this is what she’s offering then maybe this is what I take, because the alternative is nothing, and I have already established that I can’t go back to nothing.
Then Erick’s face. Four years old, trusting, entirely without armor. If this stays what she says it is, bounded, clean, a thing that doesn’t bleed into anything else, then he’s safe from it. I’m the one who isn’t safe from it, but that’s my problem to manage.
I’ve managed worse.
“Okay,” I say. “Just sex.”
She nods once, satisfied, like the negotiation is closed. She gets her dress.
I button my shirt and go back to my desk and look at the Bergamo contract without reading a word of it.
I said okay. I meant it, and I didn’t mean it, and both of those things are true simultaneously and there is nothing useful I can do with that tonight.