21. Thomas #2
"Okay," I said, to the window, a little unevenly.
"Findings. The bond is an amplifier, not a driver.
Choice survives contact. Repeat trials indicated but not required.
" I turned around. He hadn't moved. He'd sat in a kitchen chair through thirty seconds of full-voltage refusal with his hands flat on his knees, and he would have sat there all night, and the sitting-there-all-night of him came through the wire too, and that, not the want, is what moved my feet.
I crossed the kitchen and stood over him and took his face in both hands.
"Ask me," I said.
"Is that a yes?"
"That is a yes," I said, in his own dialect, so there'd be no translation error. "Yours?"
"Yes," he said. "Entirely."
* * *
The first part happened against the desk, because the bed was four steps too far and we were owed a term of arrears.
I'd like to report finesse. There was no finesse.
There was his mouth, finally, no rain on it this time and no lamp counting, and there were my hands inside his coat walking the architecture of his back like they'd been issued a map in September and never once gotten to use it, and there was the moment I went for his cuffs and met the buttons.
Both wrists. Buttoned like a legal document.
I fought the left one for a solid ten seconds, swearing into his collarbone, which gave my mouth salt and laundered cotton and him, and felt the flicker ignite in his chest, and he said, "Allow me," and undid it one-handed without moving his mouth from under my jaw, which is the single most obscene thing I have ever seen a school administrator do.
And underneath all of it, doubling it, the loop.
Here's the mechanic, for the record, since the record is the only place I can be calm about it: whatever I felt, he felt, and I felt him feel it, and it came back with interest. I put my palm flat on his bare chest, over the sternum, over the place, and my own hand landed on me from both sides of the bond at once, toucher and touched, and we both made a sound that neither of us would claim afterward.
Every point of contact was a closed circuit.
When I dragged my thumb along his hip, my hip lit up.
When he got a hand into my hair and pulled, just enough, I felt the pull, and I felt what pulling did to him, which was demolition, and the two feelings ran the loop and doubled and came around again, and I understood very quickly that composure was not going to be a thing either of us got to keep.
This scene had no audience seats. Nobody got to perform.
"I'm still angry," I said, against his mouth, with my hands wrecking his shirt. Both true. Both audible to him anyway.
"I know," he said. "I can feel it. Do not spare me."
So I didn't. The anger went into it, the taped wrists and the schedule of holdings and the silverware, and it burned clean, the way anger does when it finally gets somewhere to go, and somewhere between the desk and the bed it stopped being anger and became just speed, and the speed became his hands solving my belt with terrifying administrative competence, and then we were down to skin, and the room's three candles, two of them Elena's housewarming pillars and one a power-cut stub, all stood up white at once, and the air went sweet with hot wax.
White as struck magnesium, all three, flames dead still, and I clocked it over his shoulder and it did not feel like a compliment. It felt like being read aloud.
"Mind the beam," I said, and he ducked without asking, and we fell onto a bed built in 1911 for one penitent.
The bed is five foot ten. He is not. What we lacked in acreage we made up in engineering, and I mean that literally: there was a full three-second pause, mid-everything, both of us breathing like laborers, in which the two of us silently solved the geometry, his back against the headboard, me astride, the eaves doing their best to concuss no one, and the solution arrived through the bond before either of us said a word, and we both started laughing at the same instant, one laugh, doubled, and that, more than anything before it, is when I stopped being able to tell whose body was doing the wanting.
Then his hand closed around us both, and the laughing stopped.
I felt my own pleasure and I felt his, and his had mine inside it, and mine had his, mirrors down a hallway, and there was no performing anything into that.
He tried, for about four seconds, to keep his sentences.
That's the thing nobody could have told me about Adrian Thorne: he talks.
Low, formal, wrecked, right against my ear, there you are and I have wanted and let me, complete grammar all the way down, until the loop came around the third time and the grammar went, and what was left was my name.
Just that. Thomas. First time in three months.
He said it like a word he'd been keeping in a drawer with a lamp that never gets lit, and I came apart, and half a heartbeat behind me, because the loop leaves no one standing, so did he, and for one long white second there was a single event happening in two bodies and nobody driving, both of us feeling both of it, doubled and doubled again until it whited out every list I have ever kept.
The candles held white through all of it. I checked, after, because I'm me.
And in the quiet, before either of us had breath, one image crossed my mind that wasn't mine and wasn't his either, exactly, more like a thing his dread knew and mine caught: a brass needle in a glass throat, somewhere far below us, in the dark, moving.
Swinging, slow, to a place it liked better.
I don't know what it was. I filed it. Even then, wrecked, with his heart hammering under my ear half a beat off mine, I filed it.
We lay in the wreckage of a bed built for one, my feet hanging off into the cold, his arm the only thing under my head, and he said, up at the sloped ceiling, "I am going to buy this college a larger bed."
"You can't. I'm inventory. It'd be a conflict of interest with the silverware."
The flicker, then the arm tightening. We stayed like that a long time.
* * *
At midnight we sat at my kitchen table in most of our clothes and he opened the folder he'd carried in at eight, and the night turned its collar up.
Micah's file. The real one, the station copy, the one that had lain face down on a desk eighteen inches from my elbow all those Tuesdays.
He walked me through it page by page, keeping his voice in officer, and on the second page, clipped inside the cover, there was a half-sheet I'd never heard described in any account of anything: the flag.
Every sitting starts with one, he said. Officers flag.
Sometimes the outer circle flags. This one was dated the June before last, unsigned, and it was written on library request stock, the yellow flimsy, the kind that lives on a brass spike on the issue desk.
Merits early assessment. Access unsupervised. Recommend within the interval.
Nine words and a body in a day room. My eyes caught on the tail of the last letter. Then the handwriting reached up off the paper and tapped me on the sternum from the outside.
I knew the hand.
Small, upright, ruled-in, old-fashioned, the tails of the y's hooking back under the words like little paper clips.
I'd seen it. Not in an archive, not in some 1902 elevation, recently, inside the week, somewhere with no fear in it anywhere, and I sat in my own kitchen with the knowing right there, right at the edge of the shelf, and it slid.
The way names slide at 2 a.m. The way the voice that said Now slid.
I went back for it three times while Adrian sat absolutely still and let me, and I came back empty three times, and the third time I looked up and said, "Somebody with faculty access wrote this.
Somebody who could stand at that issue desk without one person looking twice. "
"Yes," he said. "And flagged him, and eighteen months later somebody flagged you, around me, to a stamp that has never lost. I do not say it is one hand. I say the station has a hand in it I have never audited, and I have audited everything."
Item eight: Micah Vane was flagged on library paper, by someone this college trusts.
Item nine: I know the hand. I've seen it somewhere kindness lives.
Item ten: I don't know where. And until I do, every kind thing anyone on this ground has ever done for me is a document, and I'm going to have to read them all again.