Chapter 23 （Another） Unlikely Truce #2
Theo glanced at him, then back at Catherine. "Sorry, I have to—" She gestured at the room, the people, the general situation of being responsible for a meeting that was due to start in two minutes.
"Will you stay?" Theo said. "Afterwards." She kept her voice level. Casual. The voice of someone extending a perfectly reasonable invitation and not, categorically not, someone whose entire nervous system had just rearranged itself around a single appearance. "We could get coffee. Catch up."
Catherine looked at her for a moment, something unguarded in her expression. "Yes," she said simply. "I was actually going to ask you the same thing."
* * *
They went to the place on Delancey that Theo liked, the one with the good espresso and the mismatched chairs and the complete absence of any aesthetic concept that somehow resulted in a room you wanted to stay in.
Catherine looked around when they walked in with the expression she reserved for spaces that surprised her, which Theo had always found disproportionately charming.
And fuck. She was already doing it. Already cataloguing things. Already slipping back into the attentiveness that time had apparently done nothing to erode.
They ordered. The coffee came. For a moment, neither of them said anything, and Theo became aware of the strange doubling of it—how familiar this was, sitting across a small table from Catherine with coffee between them, and how completely different, the months of silence sitting alongside them like a third person neither of them had introduced.
"So," Theo said.
"So," Catherine echoed.
Theo laughed despite herself, and Catherine's mouth curved, and something in the room loosened by a fraction.
They found their way into conversation carefully, the way you find your way into cold water.
Theo talked about The Mission first because it was easiest, solid ground, something she knew how to speak about with confidence.
She focused on the gala, what it meant to the organization, the challenges of getting donors and VIPs in the same room for one night, and making it feel like a celebration rather than a transaction.
Catherine listened the way she always had, fully present, not performing interest but actually inside it.
"You love it," Catherine said, when Theo paused.
It wasn't a question. Theo looked at her. "Yeah," she said. "I do."
Something moved through Catherine’s expression, too fast to catch cleanly, but Theo felt it. Something that looked like it might have been relief, or gladness, or the feeling you have when something you hoped for turns out to be true.
Then Catherine started telling her about the studio, and Theo listened. West 28th Street. Five-year lease. Flooring and fixtures going in next week. A small roster at first, just piano to start, though the way she said it made it clear she was already thinking past that.
"What are you calling it?" Theo asked.
Catherine lifted her coffee cup and took a sip that was longer than necessary. "I haven't decided yet."
Theo looked at her.
Catherine, who folded her socks and arrived everywhere fifteen minutes early and had once spent thirty minutes explaining why there was a correct way to load a dishwasher, hadn't decided on a name for a studio she was opening in twelve weeks?
"Right," Theo said, in a tone that conveyed she didn't believe that for a second.
Catherine continued as though she hadn't noticed. She talked about the students she was letting go, the Upper East Side families, the résumé builders, and the ones she was keeping, and the ones she was looking for.
"The space itself is wonderful," she said. "Although when Luis was clearing out the bathroom cabinet, he found something that led me to form certain theories about its previous occupants."
Theo looked up, puzzled. "What kind of something?"
Catherine took a very composed sip of her coffee. "The battery-operated variety. With accessories."
Theo spluttered into her mug.
"Luis was very stoic about it," Catherine added. "Which has either elevated or permanently altered my opinion of him, I haven't decided which." She paused. "I've decided the space used to be a sex shop. It feels like the most dignified explanation available. Better than the alternative."
"Which is?”
"That someone just really loved that bathroom."
Theo laughed, properly, the kind that came from somewhere real, and when she looked up, Catherine was watching her, and Theo caught the watching and felt it land somewhere it had no business landing—a very final goodbye in a hospital room.
The laughter faded. The café moved around them. Theo turned her coffee cup once in her hands, not drinking from it, and when she looked up, Catherine was still watching her with that expression she'd never quite learned to be unaffected by.
They talked about Mary, which produced a combination of eye-rolling and involuntary smiling that Mary reliably provoked in anyone who loved her.
Theo told her about the evening she'd decided, with complete confidence, that Natalie and Josiah would be perfect together.
She'd organized what she'd billed as a casual group outing that was transparently a setup, which had migrated, as these things do, to an arcade bar on the Lower East Side and ended with Natalie stitching up Josiah's lip after a skee ball incident that neither of them would fully explain.
Both of them had refused to speak to Theo for four days.
Catherine told her about Liv visiting. And how Liv had spent the entire first afternoon insisting that Americans had no concept of a queue, a position she maintained with some conviction right up until she walked into oncoming pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue three times in one block because she kept looking the wrong way.
Catherine had stopped correcting her after the second time on the grounds that natural selection should be allowed to run its course.
By that time, the third round of coffee was long finished, but neither of them had moved.
Theo was trying to think of something ordinary to say when Catherine set her cup down and looked at her hands for a moment, then looked up.
"In other news," she said. "I've been seeing a therapist. About London, and everything after."
It wasn’t an announcement. That wasn’t Catherine’s style. It was just something true, set down quietly between them.
Theo nodded slowly. "How’s that going?"
"Well." The corner of Catherine's mouth moved. "Infuriating, occasionally. But it’s been useful."
The understatement of it was so completely Catherine that Theo felt a pang of recognition in her chest. She didn't say anything.
There wasn't anything to say, not here, not yet, not with everything that still sat between them unaddressed.
But she looked at Catherine, at the steadiness in her face, at the slight vulnerability underneath it that Catherine was allowing her to see, and felt with a clarity that surprised her that she was glad.
Simply and completely glad that they were sitting here and that Catherine had walked through that door this morning.
"Good," Theo said softly. "I'm really happy it’s been infuriatingly useful."
Catherine nodded once, and something in her shoulders settled.
There it was. The natural end of it. The polite pause where one of them could reach for their coat, say it was good to see you, and return to the version of life they'd constructed in the other's absence.
Theo considered allowing that to happen. She gave it approximately two seconds.
"Completely unrelated," she said instead, "and you are absolutely allowed to say no. But rather than calling donors and picking up decorations with the other volunteers, I could use someone to help coordinate the gala itself. Someone with experience managing people and logistics and mild chaos."
Catherine looked at her. "Are you asking me to be your assistant?"
"I'm asking you to be Chief of Volunteers."
"That is not a real title."
"The audacity," Theo said, hand to chest. "It absolutely is. I just invented it."
“You're asking me to be your assistant."
"I'm asking you to help shape what could be The Mission's most significant fundraising event in a hundred and fifty years."
"Theodora."
"Catherine."
They held each other's gaze, neither blinking, both apparently prepared to let the rest of the room dissolve around them.
"Fine," Catherine said eventually. "But I want it on record that you are not allowed to boss me around."
"Noted," Theo said. "I'll send you the planning documents tonight."
"Of course you will," Catherine said, and she was already smiling as she stood.
"Can you come over on Thursday? I'll have the office to myself," Theo said, and then heard herself say it and felt the color climb her face before she had any hope of stopping it.
She tried again.
"I meant so we won't be interrupted."
No. Wait. That was worse.
"I just meant we can get on with it—" She put her own hand over her mouth, which only made Catherine's expression shift into something deeply, unhelpfully delighted.
"Catherine."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're saying everything."
"Theodora." Catherine pressed her lips together in a way that suggested considerable internal effort. "Would you like to try all of that again?"
Theo took a breath. "Catherine. Are you free to come to my office on Thursday afternoon for gala planning purposes?”
"Yes," Catherine said. "I am."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
Catherine's composure lasted approximately three more seconds before the laughter broke through. "I told you that you'd catch up.”
Theo laughed and held the door open as they stepped out onto the sidewalk together.
"I'd argue I outdid myself," Theo said. "So. See you Thursday?"
Catherine turned and pulled her collar up against the winter air, smiling. "Thursday," she confirmed.
They said goodbye with the slight formality of two people being careful about what their bodies might do without permission.
Theo watched Catherine turn and walk down Delancey, coat pulled close, pale hair catching what remained of the afternoon light, and stayed watching until she'd turned the corner and was gone.
She stood there a moment longer, hands in her pockets, aware of her own breathing.
The wound was open again. She could feel it, raw and familiar, exactly where it had always been since Catherine had moved into The Lenox.
She didn't mind.
She turned and walked back toward The Mission, and thought about nothing, and thought about Catherine the entire time, and those two things were not, she had learned, mutually exclusive.