CHAPTER 10 #3
The bedroom is dark except the firelight from the gas hearth — no, the wood-burning is unlit tonight; tonight it is only the slip of light bleeding under the library door across the great room and through the open bedroom door.
I close the bedroom door behind me. I pull the ivory wool blanket from the foot of the four-poster onto the chaise at the window.
I lie down. I keep my jeans on. I keep my sweater on. I pull the blanket up to my chin.
I do not sleep at twenty-two-thirty. I do not sleep at twenty-three. I do not sleep at midnight.
At one in the morning the library door across the great room closes.
I hear it through the bedroom wall. A minute later the master bedroom door opens; he comes in without turning a light on; he walks past the chaise without looking; he goes to the four-poster; he sits on the edge of it for a moment, his back to me; he stands; he pulls the duvet down; he gets into the bed in his trousers and shirt, sleeves rolled down still, the way a man would lie down on a bunk in a war.
He turns onto his back. He puts his right forearm across his eyes. He does not look across the room at me. He does not say my name.
I watch him.
He sleeps faster than he usually does. Whatever the silver cup did, it has set his body down for the night.
The shoulders ease. The forearm slides off his eyes a half-inch.
The mouth opens by a millimeter against the pillow.
He sleeps the way a man sleeps who has fed for the first time in a long time and has paid for the feed with restraint.
I should not be watching this.
I watch this.
The four-poster's iron canopy is darker than the wall behind it; the southwest post is the one closest to the window where the harbor cold bleeds through, and in the firelight from the library across the great room the iron of that post has a faint pewter sheen the other three posts do not.
I track the sheen with my eyes for a while.
I track his sternum rising and falling. I track the slow uncoiling of the line at his shoulder.
I think the sentence before I let myself say it.
I want him.
The sentence arrives at the inside of my throat in the same place my pulse had arrived against the corridor tile.
It does not arrive as a question. It arrives as a finding.
The auditor's part of me writes it down at the top of a fresh page in the inside notebook I keep against my sternum: Finding. Variance against baseline. Material.
I want him.
I think it once more, to be sure I am not mistaking restlessness for it, and I am not mistaking restlessness for it.
I am wet at the seam of my jeans still — the wetness has not left in two hours — and I want him on top of me and I want him inside me and I want his mouth on the freckle at the corner of my jaw that he said he had wanted to put his mouth on since I walked into his office in a gray suit and called his logistics cost a screaming red flag.
I want what he has decided not to be unmeasured about for two hundred years.
I want the man Helene named, the man he chose to be — and I want, separately, the part of him that I just saw choose, the part that walked itself back from the edge of the clinic at six feet across a tile floor for me.
I want both. I want the choice and I want the thing he was choosing against. I want him.
The sentence is true. I do not need to revise it.
I do not get up. I do not cross the room.
I will not say it tonight. I will not say it Monday morning over the audit-hash chain.
I will say it when I am ready to say it, in a room I have decided is the right room, at a moment I have decided is the right moment, with the diction I have decided is the right diction.
I am an auditor. I close the books in the order I open them.
I pull the wool blanket up under my chin.
I lay my left palm against the chaise's velvet, where the cold from the window has come through the cushion, and the velvet is colder than the tile in the corridor was.
I keep my palm there. The cold runs up my wrist and into the chemical-burn scar on the inside of my forearm and dies there, the way cold dies against scar tissue.
Across the room, Julian sleeps. The silver streaks at his right temple are darker in the dim than they were under the brass surgical lamp. The cold-marble has not come back into his face yet — the feeding warmth holds — and in the dim he looks, for the first time, almost mortal.
The 1925 brass alarm clock is in the library, not the bedroom.
The bedroom is silent except for his breathing and mine.
I listen to both. I match my breath to his by accident and then by choice.
The window behind me is iron-cold; the harbor through it is black with one ferry-light moving along the southern rim.
I do not sleep.
At two in the morning I close my eyes anyway. I keep my palm on the velvet. The wetness at the seam of my jeans has cooled and the cold of it is its own small reminder. I think the sentence one more time, quiet, like a person closing a ledger she will reopen tomorrow.
I want him.
I do not say so aloud.