Chapter 5 Thin Walls
Prep week, Marlene called it. The cohort arrived Friday and there was a house to ready and a new donor to drill.
She drilled me herself, in her office, with a list.
“Titles,” she said. “Always. Frau Doktor for me, Frau for the guests, surnames until they offer otherwise, and most will not. You never ask a guest about a husband, living or dead, present or absent. You never ask why she’s here.
The chart tells you everything you are permitted to know, and the chart is the invitation.
If a session is on the chart, it is sanctioned.
If it is not on the chart, it does not happen, regardless of what anyone in a robe suggests to you in a corridor at midnight.
” She held my eyes until the rule settled into me, heavy and permanent.
“The invitation is the chart. Say it back.”
“The invitation is the chart.”
“Good. You’d be amazed how many otherwise sensible men forget it.” She did not, I noticed, mention the exam room, or the cup, or the word she’d underlined. Neither did I. We were both very professional about a thing neither of us was going to be professional about for long.
Yuki drilled me differently. She came to my room with a clipboard and built my baseline into something she called a scheduling matrix, which was the most sophisticated calendar I’d ever seen and which she clearly loved with her whole exacting heart.
“Recovery time,” she said, pen poised, flat as a weather report. “Between sessions. Hours.”
“That depends.”
“On what.”
“On the woman. On the day. On whether I’ve also rewired a generator.”
She wrote that down, all of it, verbatim, including the part about the generator. “Frequency tolerance. Sessions per day, sustainable, before quality degrades.”
“You’re asking me how often I can do my job.”
“I’m building a system that decides everyone’s window for the next two months around the one variable I can’t look up in a journal.
The founders left tables. The tables assume a constant.
You are not a constant, you are a man who also fixes boilers, so I have to measure you directly.
” She did not raise her voice. She did not look up.
But the tips of her ears had gone pink, a clean bright pink against her fair skin, and her thighs were pressed together on the edge of my one chair, and she charted my answers in a hand so steady the steadiness itself gave her away.
“Quality degrades,” she repeated. “Define it.”
“Yuki,” I said.
“Define it for the chart. I need a threshold. A system without a threshold is a wish.”
So I defined it for the chart, plainly, clinically, matching her cadence word for word, because I’d worked out by then that meeting Yuki in protocol was the only kindness that reached her, and I watched her write it down and watched her ears get pinker with every word and watched her not look up once, holding her composure the way you’d hold a full glass crossing a room, level and careful, certain the smallest tilt would spill it.
“Adequate,” she said, when I’d finished, which from Yuki was a great deal.
“That gives me a curve.” She capped her pen, tucked her clipboard flush against her knee, and stood, and at the door she paused, and said, to the doorframe and not to me, “Your recovery figure is faster than the founders’ tables predict for the marker.
Statistically. I’ll have to recalibrate the whole matrix.
” A beat. “It’s good data,” and then she was gone, and I was fairly sure that Yuki Tanaka, flat-voiced and pink-eared, had just paid me the filthiest compliment I’d received all week and called it good data.
The comedy that week came from Poppy, who had decided the staff needed a euphemism for my official function and was running a tournament to select one.
“‘The Cure,’” she proposed at lunch, ticking it off a list she had genuinely written down.
“Too on the nose. ‘The Specialist.’ Too clinical, Yuki’s already taken clinical, Yuki owns clinical, we can’t have two clinicals.
‘The Waters.’ Confusing, we have actual waters, somebody’ll book him by mistake and want a robe.
‘The Asset,’” she read, and crossed it out herself.
“Sounds like he’ll be repossessed. ‘The Resource,’ worse.
‘The Gentleman Caller,’ I liked it but it’s too long for the board. ”
“You want it on the board,” I said.
“Everything’s on the board eventually, that’s what the board’s for.” She tapped the list. “‘Der Hausquelle,’” she said, with relish. “The house spring. The source. It’s got a double meaning, it’s got dignity, it’s got a German-ness Marlene can pretend to disapprove of.”
“Hausquelle,” Bianca said, testing it in her husky accent, barefoot on the bench. “I like it. It’s classy. He’s the house spring. The waters everyone comes for.” She raised her water glass. “To the Hausquelle.”
“You can’t toast a colleague with tap water,” Poppy said, scandalized, “it’s disrespectful,” and went to fetch the good schnapps, and Yuki said, without looking up from her chart, “It’s eleven in the morning,” and Poppy said, “It’s a christening, Yuki, there are rules,” and poured four anyway.
“It’s settled. Hausquelle wins.”
“It is not settled,” Ute said, from the stove, without turning around, “because I am banning all of them. This is a kitchen. We eat in this kitchen.” She set down a plate. “I will not have the spring discussed over Kn?del.”
There was a respectful silence.
Then, twenty minutes later, ladling stew, Ute said to the pot, “More for the Hausquelle, he burns fuel,” and Poppy made a noise like a kettle and had to leave the table.
Bianca scheduled her own advanced training for Thursday evening, in treatment room three.
She told me the room number like it was a private joke, which it was. Room three had the thinnest walls in a wing famous for thin walls. She’d chosen it for the acoustics.
No lesson this time. She’d picked the room for one reason and she told me what it was the second the latch clicked shut.
“Listen.” She rapped a knuckle twice on the wall beside the table.
The sound traveled, thin and far, two centimeters of pine and not much else between us and the corridor.
“Whole wing’s built like this. Falk used to complain you couldn’t clear your throat in here without the hallway hearing the confession.
” She started on the buttons of her whites, unhurried, watching me watch her do it.
“I never minded once. I want the corridor to know what I sound like when somebody finally does it right.”
She came out of the whites in stages, because she did everything in stages and made you witness each one, the tunic over her head, the rest peeled slow, until she stood in the lamplight in nothing, deep tan skin gone gold, hair coming loose down her neck.
Then she turned and braced her hands on the table and arched, the defining curve of her pushed up and out like the reason the building had been built, looking back over her shoulder to be certain I’d seen all of it, because she’d earned that body across ten years of real work and she’d be damned if it went unwitnessed.
“You’re not the student tonight,” she said, climbing up onto the table on her hands and knees. She tipped her chin at the thin wall, the dark hall behind it. “Tonight you’re what the wing hears. So make it worth their walk past the door.”
“Yes?” I said, getting her own word in before she could. “Say it for the record.”
“God, yes. Loud as you can stand. Louder than that.” The grin was already enormous. “Begin.”
I put my hands on her with no apology, weight behind them, up the long muscles either side of her spine until she swore into the cradle, and then lower, both hands full of the heft she joked about so nobody else got to joke first. I kneaded her, spread her open with my thumbs, watched her grip the table edge and shove the slick split of her back at me.
She was already soaked, the pink of her glistening between those thick thighs.
I worked her legs wider and leaned in and put my mouth on her from behind, tongue dragging flat from her clit back up.
The room got loud, and she made sure of it. That was the point.
“Adam.” Her thighs jumped around my ears.
“Adam, meu Deus, that’s it, let them hear that…
” I licked into her, fucked her open with my tongue and then two fingers curled deep, mouth sealed over her clit, until she was rocking back into my face, soaking my chin, the muscles in her back jumping under the oiled sheen, loud enough now that the lamp could have taken notes.
“Enough.” She reached back, fisted my hair, hauled me up off her. “I didn’t pick this room for your mouth, I picked it for the part the walls remember. I’ve waited ten years to be the loudest thing in this wing.” She shoved her ass back against me. “Now.”
I stood and pushed the head of my cock against her slick open cunt and slid into her in one long slow stroke, sinking until my hips met her ass, and the curse she made then had no consonants left in it.
She was tight and slick and scalding around me, clutching at me as it went in, and the view, the defining ass of the building filling my hands, her cunt stretched around the base of my cock, her back bowed, the lamplight on the oil, was a thing I’d carry.
I drew back until just the head held inside her and watched the lips of her cling to me, then drove back deep, and started slow like that, all the way out and all the way in, and she set the pace herself for the first minute, coaching even now, like that, slower, there, let me feel all of it, until she stopped being able to coach and started just taking it.
The walls were thin and she knew it and she got louder on purpose. I understood by then that the audience was the whole point for her, that being heard was being acknowledged, that ten years of nobody asking had built a woman who needed the corridor to know she was, finally, being asked.