Chapter 9 The Underlined Rule
Simone Devereux started arriving early to things.
I knew because I was in the lab when Simone came down to interrogate Yuki about probability curves.
She wanted the numbers. Implantation rates, the success distribution, the confidence intervals, and Yuki gave them to her, evenly, because numbers were a language they both trusted, and for a few minutes the two most self-contained women at Silberquell had the most relaxed conversation either of them would have all week, two machines comparing specifications.
Then Simone said, not quite casually, capping her pen, “And the donor. What’s he. What’s he like.”
Yuki’s pen stopped.
“That’s not a data point I can provide, Frau Devereux.”
“No.” Simone heard herself, and re-armored, fast. “Withdraw the question. Irrelevant to the outcome.”
“Withdrawn,” Yuki agreed. And then, when Simone had gone, she charted it anyway, because Yuki charted everything, including the questions people tried to take back.
Subject inquired re: donor character. Withdrew inquiry.
She looked up and caught me reading it. “It’s relevant,” she said, flatly.
“Engagement correlates with success. It’s in the founders’ notes.
The women who want him do better.” The tips of her ears betrayed her. “It’s science.”
“Of course it is.”
The competence beat came at six the next morning.
Simone called the desk with a stiff neck, which Poppy relayed to me with a face that said stiff neck, sure, and a pointed look, because Poppy had picked up that the panorama suite was now ringing the desk at hours it had no business ringing.
I went up, and it was a real stiff neck, because she wasn’t sleeping, because she never slept, and a body that doesn’t sleep seizes up like a cold engine left out in the frost.
So I treated it. Properly, the actual craft, no agenda anywhere in it.
I sat her on the edge of the bed in a grey t-shirt with her empire-running phone face-down and silent on the nightstand and worked the knots out of her neck and shoulders for forty minutes, and they were not small knots.
There was a decade of them. The traps like cable, a band under the right shoulder blade hard enough to bounce a thumb off, the dense fused knot at the base of the skull that people who hold their jaw all day grow like a pearl.
I read her back the way I read a building, where the strain was, what was carrying load it shouldn’t, what would fail next, and I worked it loose knot by knot, and somewhere in the second ten minutes her shoulders came down from around her ears for what I’d bet was the first time in months.
“That’s better than the clinic,” she said, eyes closed, gone almost loose. “I paid a man in Zurich four hundred francs an hour for that and he never found the one under the shoulder blade.”
“He was working the muscle. The muscle’s not the problem.
The muscle’s just where you keep the problem.
” I pressed a thumb into the band under her shoulder blade and held it, and she made an involuntary sound.
“You’re carrying it all in your traps. The neck’s just the symptom.
What you’ve actually got is a control problem.
You go to bed every night holding the whole company in your shoulders, and a body can’t sleep while it’s bracing. ”
“The company doesn’t run itself.”
“It runs four hours without you while you’re up here.
I’ve seen the schedule, you cancelled a board call yesterday and the world’s still turning.
” I worked my thumbs up either side of her spine.
“You sign off on things at midnight that could wait till nine. Delegate one thing. One. The least important decision on your desk tomorrow, hand it to someone and don’t check whether they got it right.
Don’t even look. You’ll sleep an hour more.
The neck’ll follow the sleep. The body unclenches when the mind decides it’s allowed to. ”
She was quiet for a long moment, longer than the advice needed.
“That’s not what I’m paying you for,” she said, finally.
“No. It’s free.”
And that disturbed her, I could see it land, far more than anything we did in the dark.
The sex she’d contracted for. The sex made sense to her.
A man telling her something true and useful and asking nothing for it did not fit anywhere in the spreadsheet, and she lay awake the rest of that morning not because of her neck.
It worked, incidentally. She delegated something. She told me, days later, like a confession.
Cohort breakfast that morning was a study in contrasts.
Simone and Greta at the same small table, the auditor and the proof.
Simone watched Greta eat, wary and fascinated at once, unwilling to trust a result she hadn’t audited herself, and Greta, serene, hand on her belly, made conversation as easily as breathing.
“You should do the full program twice, if you can,” Greta said, warmly, innocently, buttering toast. “I almost did. The second eight weeks is even better, you’re not nervous anymore, you can really enjoy it.”
Simone, mid-sip of grapefruit juice, choked.
“Enjoy it,” she said, when she’d recovered.
“Mm.” Greta smiled at her, unhurried, the sweet level lilt on full guileless display.
“Oh, you will. Give it time. The first week everyone treats it like a transaction.” A beat, the smile not wavering.
“Then they stop.” She went back to her toast. Simone stared at her grapefruit like it had betrayed her.
I was across the room at the time, on a stepladder, doing something quiet and useful to the dining-room window latch that had been rattling all week in the wind, and I watched the exchange in the reflection of the glass while I worked.
Simone caught me watching it, as she caught everything, and her jaw tightened, and she pretended very hard to be interested in the grapefruit.
“He’s fixing the window,” she said to Greta, an accusation.
“He fixes things,” Greta agreed, serene.
“It’s very relaxing. You stop noticing and then one day everything in the house works and you can’t remember why you used to be tense.
” She buttered more toast. “It’s a problem, honestly.
You get used to being looked after. Then you go home and the latch rattles all night and there’s no one on a ladder.
” She didn’t look up, but the line wasn’t really about the latch, and Simone, who read subtext for a living, set down her spoon and didn’t finish the grapefruit at all.
I tightened the last screw, and the rattle stopped, and the room was quiet, and I climbed down off the ladder and felt two women not-watching me in two completely different keys, which is a full day’s work all by itself.
The dawn session was scheduled for the next morning, her terms, and when I came in she had a printed agenda waiting, but it was shorter than the last one.
Fewer items. And the no-kissing rule was still on it, but she’d underlined it, which is how I knew.
You don’t underline the rules you don’t have to think about.
You underline the ones that are giving you trouble.
She was at the wall of glass when I came in, in her silk robe, the valley black below, the first grey coming up over the far ridge.
“Standing,” she said, not turning. “Here. At the window.” She set the agenda on the nightstand, level with the edge. “Same terms.”
“You underlined the kissing one,” I said.
Her shoulders set hard under my hands. “Observant.”
“You underline the ones that are bothering you.”
“It’s a boundary. Boundaries are maintained by attention, that’s all the underline is.” She let the robe pool off her shoulders to the floor, dark skin against the grey dawn light, the long line of her, and put her palms flat on the cold glass. “Begin.”
I stepped up behind her and ran my hands down her sides first, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips, and reached around to find her clit and stroke her until my fingers came away slick, and felt the controlled set of her face crack against the rule she’d underlined.
Then I bent her forward by the hips, set the head of my cock against her wet slit, and pushed into her slow, standing, deep, feeling her body open and give around me, until I was flush against her ass and seated deep, and the sound she made fogged the glass in front of her face.
She’d meant to set the tempo. I could feel her trying to, rocking her ass back onto me in a measured cadence, a project on a schedule.
I didn’t match it. I went slower, drew almost all the way out until just the head held her open and pushed back in long and unhurried, dragging deep, and within a few minutes the cadence was gone and what was left was just her, chasing it, pushing back greedy onto every stroke, her palms flat on the cold glass.
Her breath fogged the pane in spreading clouds.
Her palms made handprint blooms in the condensation.
But she’d stopped looking at the dawn. Her eyes had fallen shut and her cheek had turned to the cold glass, hiding the one face at Silberquell she’d never let anyone read, the face I could see clear over her shoulder: lips parted, eyes heavy, the machine nowhere on it.
“You closed your eyes,” I said, low, against her ear, not changing my pace.
“I’m watching the valley.”
“Your eyes are shut.” I rolled my hips and she lost a breath. “You’re hiding it from me.”
“Don’t…” Her forehead dropped against the glass. “Don’t narrate it.”
“You like data. Here’s some. You’re early to everything now. You underlined the kiss. And you won’t open your eyes, because if I see your face while I’m doing this you can’t call it a line item.”
I gathered the cropped hair at the back of her head, gently, a fist of it, and drew her head up off the glass and around toward me, just enough that her mouth was a breath from mine and her eyes had nowhere to land but on mine, and stopped there.
Held it. Half an inch of air, both of us breathing it.