25. Arielle
ARIELLE
The Overtown Heritage Fund spring benefit is at the Geraghty on Sangamon on a Friday night in the third week of March, which is fifteen days after Nolan walked out of my apartment and the longest I have gone without seeing his face in front of me since the gala in Miami.
I’m thirty-five weeks pregnant, in a long-sleeved black gown I’ve had altered twice because nothing closes at the rib cage anymore, and I’m here because Carla asked me to be here, because Vega is being honored, and because I refuse to start hiding from rooms that have my own corridor printed on the program.
My hair is down because I don’t have the energy to put it up.
The gold cuff is on. Bianca is two steps behind me in a teal jumpsuit, holding my coat and a small clutch with three Tums, a tube of lip color, and a folded copy of Dr. Ellis’s hospital-bag checklist she refuses to let me leave the house without.
"Eat something off a tray inside an hour," she says, as we cross the lobby.
"Sit down for ten minutes every forty. Do not let Vega make a speech without you sitting beside her.
If a reporter asks you a personal question I want you to look at me, and I will start coughing, and you will say excuse me. Are we clear."
"Bee. I have been to events before."
"You have been to events before. You have not been to events at thirty-five weeks with this many people pretending they did not read the Sun-Times on Saturday. Tray. Forty minutes. Coughing. Clear."
It is, against my better judgment, a good night.
Vega is warm. Two of the four investors I have been emailing for six weeks come up and shake my hand without any of the small careful avoidance I expected.
A photographer from the Reader asks if she can take my picture in front of the lit rendering of the south parcel on the back wall, and I let her, because I drew the building and I want the building's picture taken.
I am at the edge of the floor near the back hallway just before nine, eating a tiny crab cake off a paper napkin Bianca handed me, when a man I have never seen before slides up to my elbow in a suit two seasons out of style and a press badge clipped to his lapel.
"Miss Sutton. Pat Donnelly's replacement.
Crain's. Quick question on the record, if you'll give it to me — do you have a comment on whether Mr. Ashford's continued retainer of Halloran-Reyes' security through the corridor closeout represents an ongoing personal involvement, or strictly a project liability obligation? "
He’s too close. Closer than any reporter has a right to be, his shoulder well past the boundary line.
Bianca’s fingers tighten on my elbow, her warning cough rising, and I’m drawing breath to excuse myself when another hand settles on his chest—steady, unhurried, ending the moment like a door shutting on its hinges.
"You're going to step back from Miss Sutton, sir."
I know the voice before I look up.
Nolan’s in a black tuxedo, the bow tie undone at his collar, his hair shorter, his face leaner than the last time I saw him.
He isn’t looking at me. His attention is fixed on the reporter, the same way Malcolm fixed on Reggie Boyd in the loading bay in November—calm, patient, and already certain of how the next moment will break.
"Mr. Ashford?—"
“You’re going to step back from Miss Sutton.
You’re going to take your badge and your phone and your follow-up question, and you’re going to file a written request with Halloran-Reyes’ press office on Monday like every other reporter in this building.
You are not doing it within nine inches of a pregnant woman at a fundraiser for her own project.
Step back, sir. I’m not saying it a third time. ”
The reporter steps back. Bianca closes around my other elbow. Nolan's hand drops to his side. He still has not looked at me.
"Bianca. Take her to the back hallway, please. I will not follow. I came to say one thing to her and then I am leaving."
"Nolan."
"One thing, Arielle. In the hallway, where there are not three people with phones. Then I am going. I will not touch your elbow. Bianca is welcome to stand at the end of the corridor and time me."
Bianca looks at me. I nod once.
The back hallway smells like floor polish and somebody else's catering.
The wall is exposed brick. There is a single sconce that has been buzzing since 1988.
Bianca stands twenty feet down with her arms crossed, watching us the way she watched Reggie Boyd's foreman in the loading bay, and Nolan stands six feet from me with his hands at his sides and the bow tie still hanging open and his eyes finally, finally on my face.
"You appear, Nolan."
"Arielle."
"Every time. Every single time I get a clean foot under me, you appear.
I had a press conference at six o'clock on a Saturday and you watched it from your study.
I closed the funding on a Monday without you in the room.
I walked into this benefit on my own two feet at thirty-five weeks pregnant tonight, and inside an hour you are in the hallway.
Don't tell me Claire didn't tell you to stay away.
I had drinks with your sister on Tuesday. She told me to my face she told you."
"She did."
"Then why are you here, Nolan."
“Because staying away from you is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, Arielle.
I’ve built a structure in a swamp. I’ve buried both my parents.
And still, walking past your floor this week — under that awful sconce — felt like passing a fire I’m forbidden to put out.
I came because Vega was being honored, because I’m still a foundation board member, and because Bianca told Claire and Claire told me you’d be here.
I swore I could last an hour in the same building without speaking to you.
I lasted forty-two minutes. That’s the number.
That’s all I’ve got. There isn’t a stronger defense. ”
I look at him. The sconce buzzes. Bianca, twenty feet away, does not move.
"Take me out of here, Nolan."
He looks up. "Arielle."
"There is a hotel across the street. I am thirty-five weeks pregnant and the gown does not close at the rib cage and I am tired and I am very, very angry at you and I do not want to have the rest of this conversation in front of my cousin in a back hallway.
Take me out the side door. Bianca will tell Carla.
We are going to argue about this somewhere that does not have a sconce. "
"Sweetheart."
"Don't sweetheart me on a yes."
He drives me himself in a car he must have parked in the side lot, because Malcolm is conspicuously absent and he has remembered, apparently, that he is supposed to be honoring the request to leave me alone, and he has decided, apparently, that tonight he is allowed exactly one violation.
The Soho House is two blocks. He books a room from the car.
He does not ask me what I want from the bar.
The room is high-ceilinged, dim, an exposed beam over the bed, a tall narrow window onto Green Street. He does not turn on the overhead light. He turns on the small lamp by the bed. He takes off his jacket and lays it on the chair.
"Don't be careful, Nolan," I tell him. Before he’s close enough for me to hesitate, I say, “Take this as the starting point. Not tonight. Not careful. Save that for her — she’s the one who needs it. What’s left isn’t for me, and I need that spoken before anything else comes off, because if I wait, you’ll check and re-check whether I mean it. ”
"You're sure."
"I am thirty-five weeks pregnant in a back hallway hotel with the man who broke my heart in my own kitchen fifteen days ago and I am asking you to take this dress off me, Nolan. I am sure. Don't make me say the word twice."
He crosses the room. He puts his hand on the side of my jaw the way he did at the door of the suite in Miami, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, and he does not kiss me yet.
"I love you, Arielle."
"I know you do."
"I am not asking you to do anything with the sentence. I am putting it on the floor between us so you can step over it on your way out in the morning."
"Nolan. Stop talking."
He kisses me. He kisses me harder than he has ever kissed me, which is also gentler than he has ever kissed me, which makes no sense and is exactly the right sense.
My hand finds the open bow tie around his neck and pulls him down by it.
He makes a noise into my mouth that lands somewhere in my hips.
His other hand drifts to the small of my back, palm flat, low, careful around the curve of me, and he walks me backward toward the bed in the same patient way he walked me backward toward the bed in his suite in July, except this time he is shaking, and so am I, and neither of us is pretending otherwise.
“The dress is going to be a project, Nolan.”
“I’ve been waiting for it to be one. Turn around. Show me where the seam gives.”
I turn. He finds the hidden zipper with that focused, unhurried precision he’s always used on me, and when he reaches the bottom he stops and presses his mouth to my shoulder blade the way he did in Miami, then in December, then in every moment since when he’s been close enough to try.
The sound that escapes me is new, something I didn’t have ten minutes ago.
“This is the last time,” I tell the wall.
“Then let it matter, Arielle. For both of us.”
He eases the dress off my shoulders and lays it over the chair, just as he did the jacket.
Then he turns me toward him, and I’m standing in the soft maternity bra and underwear I’ve lived in this last month, clothes chosen for comfort, not for anyone’s eyes.
He takes me in — the curve of my stomach where our daughter shifts, the weight in my breasts, the thin dark line that appeared in February — and his eyes change the way they did in the back row of the planning office in January. They fill, and he lets them.
"Don't make me do the crying part for both of us, Nolan."
"I'm sorry."