CHAPTER 9
Ana
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“Sit here, look tired, and let the lamp do the lying for you.”
Luca had spent the morning turning one end of the long room into a house upstate, with three objects.
A gray wool blanket went over the back of the chair.
A lamp came down low and angled up under my eyes.
Behind me he cleared a stretch of wall until nothing on it could put a person anywhere on earth.
“The blanket is the entire argument,” he said, and shook it out. “Nobody wraps up in wool for a video call.” He laid it over my shoulders and stood back. “A cold house is a fact about a house.”
He talked the whole time he worked, which is how I have learned he thinks. Then he put a mug of tea into my hands and would not let me set it down. It was too hot to drink and he had known that when he poured it.
“You have thought about the mug,” I said. “There is a version of you that does this for a living, and I do not like him.”
The dimple arrived half a beat behind the smile. He straightened his own cuff, the full stop he puts at the end of himself.
“You have met him twice already,” he said. “Hold the mug in both hands.” He turned my wrist until I did. “A frightened person holds a cup with one.”
The call was set for eleven in the morning. I had the tablet propped against a stack of legal pads, and the room smelled of the lamp getting hot and of paper. I read the attendee list twice, because I read everything twice now. Colette Hargrave was not on it.
She had chaired every internal call I had ever sat in at that firm. Her name belonged at the top of that list, above both the people who were on it. I said nothing about it, and neither did he.
“We have a while yet,” Luca said, and then he stopped moving, which he almost never does. “I want to say something before I connect this.” He put both palms up at chest height. “Hear me out before you answer.”
I had been breathing in the top third of my chest since I dressed. That always comes first, before the rest of me has worked out what is happening.
“I want to be under that desk with my mouth on you while you talk to them. You say yes or you say no, and either one is fine.”
I thought about the recording, and the counsel, and the fact that I had made no decision of my own since they carried me out of my office. This was a decision. It was small and obscene and mine.
“Yes, and I want you to keep going even after he comes on,” I said. “I would like to win something today.”
He crouched so that his eyes were lower than mine. He does that whenever he wants something badly and does not want the wanting to look like taking.
“In words, tesoro. Tell me exactly what you want me to do.” His thumb moved once on my knee. “Do not make it polite.”
My mouth shaped the first word before I gave it any air, which is a habit I have never managed to break.
“I want your tongue on my clit while I lie to the man who is trying to kill me.”
Whatever went across his face then stayed on it. He took the brass casing out of his shirt pocket and closed my fingers over it in my left hand himself.
“If your hand opens and that casing hits the floor, I am gone before it stops rolling.”
He pushed my skirt up over my thighs and took my underwear off, and I lifted myself so that he could. He folded it once, looked at me while he did it, and put it in his jacket pocket. Then he went under the desk and I could see no part of him.
I laid my right hand out on the desk with the fingers spread. The torn nail on my index finger caught the edge, as it has caught on everything since the stairwell. The split in my lip is nearly gone, and the bruise on my left cheekbone has faded to weak tea, which was the whole reason for the lamp.
I connected at eleven exactly. Two tiles came up along the top of the screen where there should have been three, and I made myself stop looking at the space.
“Ms. Verdugo, thank you for making yourself available,” the employment counsel said. “We are recording, as we do with all of these.” Paper moved near his microphone. “The recording goes to the file and nowhere else.”
“Of course you are recording,” I said. “If you were not, I would have asked you to.” I let that sit for as long as it deserved. “Then I would have asked you why you were not.”
My voice came out quieter, which is what it does when I am being most careful. Rooms expect the opposite, and that is the reason I win them.
Then Luca’s mouth on the inside of my right thigh, warm and unhurried, his whisper going into the skin.
“You are going to hear exactly what I am doing,” he said. “You are going to keep your face perfectly still.”
The woman from Human Resources said something generous about wellbeing.
I told her I was out of the city and would rather not put an address on a recorded line, and she did not press.
Lying well is boring work. It is unremarkable sentences at the speed of somebody with nothing to hide, and anybody who makes it interesting has already lost.
“I am going to put my tongue flat on your pussy first,” he said, pitched for nobody in the world but me. “Then I am going to be narrow about it.” His breath went warm and then cool over the wet. “I will time it to whichever one of them is speaking.”
He did all of it, in that order, and it was worse for being announced.
“The firm is placing you on paid administrative leave, effective immediately,” the counsel said.
“Your benefit elections continue unchanged. Your credentials and your system access remain suspended for the duration of the leave.” He turned a page.
“That is a records-integrity measure and not a disciplinary one.”
“I want that characterisation in the minute,” I said. “Records integrity and not discipline, in those exact words.” The point of his tongue found me and held. “Those two things travel very differently once somebody writes them down.”
“Two fingers now, into your cunt,” Luca said against me. “You are going to go on reading them the law.”
He curled them and held them without moving, and the stillness was worse than movement. My nipples came up hard against my shirt. The camera had my collarbones, and shoulders are what give a woman away on a screen, so I kept mine where they were.
“You are asked not to contact clients, counterparties or anyone on the review team,” the counsel said.
“Understood, and I will want that in writing,” I said, and reached for the mug with my right hand. “I am not going to spend my evenings guessing about this morning.”
A third tile opened without a sound, and the man in it was already smiling at me. There was nothing behind him that told me anything, and I noticed the nothing, because noticing is my only trade.
“Ms. Verdugo. Forgive me. I have been standing outside my own meeting, listening to it.” The smile widened by nothing measurable. “It is a bad habit and very nearly the last one I have.”
“Mr. Thorne, I was not told that you were joining,” I said. “I would have prepared myself rather differently.”
Under the desk, Luca stopped for exactly as long as it took me to say that man’s name, and then he went at me harder, deliberately, because he wanted me flooded while I lied.
“Nobody was told. I dislike being expected,” Thorne said. “I dislike waiting rather more than that.” He let his hands come together in front of him. “Delay is the only thing I have ever hated.”
“That is a strange position for a man in your business,” I said. “Most of what the eleventh floor sells is somebody else’s patience.”
“It is not patience, it is waiting in line.” He was still smiling, and the smile had nothing false in it. “You are about to hear a great deal about process from these two, and process is slow. Seventeen days to the netting. After that the quarter closes and every opinion of it becomes history.”
My hand shut on brass. The struck primer sat under the pad of my thumb, and his tongue did not change speed at all, which meant he had heard the number and had decided I would not flinch.
“Your pussy is soaking my chin and your voice has not moved a quarter tone,” Luca said into my thigh. “You are extraordinary.”
“I want something on the recording, since we are recording,” Thorne said. “The leave is paid because I instructed that it be paid.” He said it the way another man would offer a coat. “Nobody in that building has said one word about you that I would not sign.”
A finger wrote on the inside of my thigh, slowly, in capitals, pressing hard enough that I could not mistake a letter of it. The word was grateful. I used it, because a woman who is being handed a line uses the line.
“I am grateful for the way the firm has handled this,” I said. “I would like that on the recording as well.”
He answered before the sound of it had finished leaving my mouth.
“You have not thanked me for anything in six years, Ms. Verdugo, and now you have, which means somebody is writing your lines.”
Against my leg, Luca stopped breathing. That is the thing I am going to keep out of this entire morning, a man with his mouth on me forgetting how to breathe out of pure fear, for a breath and no longer, and then carrying on as though his hands had not gone to ice on my thighs.
I understood that I had seen something he never intended anybody alive to see.
“I have thanked you,” I said. “You were not in the room for it, which is probably why it did not take.”
He laughed. It got away from him, warm and short, and I have worked in that man’s building for six years without hearing him make a sound he had not decided on.
“Here is what I actually came on to say,” he said. “Then I will let these two finish their paperwork.” He put his chin down a fraction. “Nobody who is genuinely out of the city gets through a call without mentioning the weather.”
I had a mug in my right hand, a spent casing in my left, and a man’s mouth on me, and I still arrived at the end of that sentence half a second ahead of him.
“You have not mentioned it once, and I find that I mind rather a lot.”