Chapter Seven and a Half - Elias, Alone
His apartment at eleven p.m. was quiet the way apartments got when the person living in them had spent all day around someone else and wasn't quite ready to stop thinking about it.
He made tea he didn't drink. Sat on the couch with his laptop open to nothing in particular. Told himself he was going to review the deck one more time and instead just sat there, tea going cold, thinking about feet he had no business still thinking about six hours later.
It wasn't complicated, what he wanted. He'd never dressed it up as complicated, not to himself, not in all the years he'd had to sit with it.
He wanted her feet in his hands. Wanted the weight of them, the give of the arches under his thumbs, the way she'd flinch and then relax the way people did when someone else took over a job their own body was tired of doing.
He wanted to feel her stop performing — stop being the sharpest person in the room, stop proving anything to anyone — just for the length of time it took him to work the day out of her feet.
He let himself sit in it instead of pushing it away, which was its own kind of discipline.
Other men he knew treated wanting things like a leak to be patched.
He'd never worked that way. If he wanted something, he wanted it clearly, all the way through, no flinching from his own head — and then he decided, separately, deliberately, what he was going to do about it.
Two different questions. Most people collapsed them into one and made themselves miserable.
Tonight the second question had an easy answer. Nothing. Not yet. Maybe not for weeks.
He thought about her stocking feet crossing the office floor that afternoon like she owned the building.
Thought about the small chip in the polish on her second toe, the pink groove left by a shoe strap, the short exhale through her nose when her own thumb finally hit the sore spot.
None of it dramatic. All of it doing something to him anyway, low and steady, the kind of want that didn't announce itself loudly because it didn't need to — it just sat there, patient, certain of itself, waiting for a door to open.
He put the cold tea in the sink. Went to bed early, which he never did, and lay there a while longer than he needed to before sleep took him, thinking about arches and ankles and a laugh that came too easy and a woman who had absolutely no idea yet what she was doing to him down the hall from a vending machine that hated them both.