CHAPTER 27 #2
She steps back. She looks at me up and down — the cashmere I am still in, the wool trousers, the freckle at the corner of my jaw, the small four-day-old fading bruise at my right carotid line that I have left uncovered for her because she is Cora and she will see it either way.
She looks. She holds her question. She nods once, the way she has nodded since we were nineteen.
"You're alive," she says.
"I am."
"You look ten pounds lighter."
"I have been eating fine."
"Yeah, you've been eating fine. So have I. Look at me. Look at this lighting. Whatever. Where's the vampire."
He is two steps behind me in the foyer in a charcoal suit, no tie, the cuffs at his wrists rolled the careful half-inch he rolls them when he is out of council. He has stood there the entire hug. He has held still.
Cora walks past me. She walks up to him at a clip that would intimidate me if I were him; he holds his ground.
She stops a foot in front of him and tilts her chin up because he is a full foot taller than she is.
She studies him. The pale gray eyes. The wet-ink hair.
The two silver streaks at the right temple.
The alabaster of his skin in the foyer light.
"So you're the vampire," she says.
"I am. Ms. Whitlock."
"If you hurt her I will set the building on fire."
He waits a beat. The pale gray eyes go from her face to mine and back. He says, level, "Understood."
"Also: thanks for keeping her alive."
"Thank you for staying alive yourself."
"Yeah, well. Baseball bat in my bag. " She lifts the bag — the extending baton, retracted; I have seen it; it is not a baseball bat; she shrugs. "Same general principle."
He inclines his head. The smallest possible inclination.
She turns back to me. She holds out the manila envelope she has been carrying tucked under her arm — the Wren-Hale executed paperwork from Hawkes this morning; the closure documents; the new engagement letter with Hawkes as senior outside counsel; the formal release of my apartment from the firm's audit hold.
"Sign where the flags are. Don't read it tonight. Read it Sunday. I read it. It's clean."
"Thank you, Cor."
"Don't thank me. I'm going to drink your wine."
---
Adrienne joins us in the great room for the half hour Cora is here.
The gas fire in the southeast corner is on.
The two oxblood sofas; the low brass coffee table; the Tabriz rug runs from one sofa to the other and the worn pale spot is between the table and the hearth.
Cora sits on the sofa nearest the fire with the Sancerre Adrienne has poured her.
She sits the way she has always sat — feet tucked, glass on her knee, free hand making small flat shapes when she talks.
Julian sits in the leather club chair across the rug from her.
Adrienne sits beside her on the sofa, ankles crossed at the cuff of her gray slacks, the black pearls at her throat catching the firelight.
Cora and Julian talk for twenty minutes.
They talk about the city. They talk about her firm.
They talk about Pippa, who is at the safe apartment, who has been bullying Sebastian into a chess game for nine days, who is winning.
Konstantin stays off the table. The funeral stays off the table. I stay off the table.
Cora swears five times in twenty minutes — once when describing her boss's deposition strategy, once when describing the Sancerre ("the entire fuck is right, this is a good wine"), three times in the middle of a sentence about the lobby of her building.
Julian rides each one without a flinch. He nods.
He answers her questions. He uses her surname the second time he speaks to her and her first name the third — she gives him permission with a small flick of her hand; he uses Coraline; she corrects him to Cora; he says Cora; she nods.
At five before nine she sets the glass down. She stands. She comes to me at the other sofa. She hugs me again — shorter this time, harder.
"Call me tomorrow," she says. "Or I am calling you tomorrow. Pick a verb."
"I will call you tomorrow."
"At noon. With coffee in your hand. Or I will be at your lobby at twelve-fifteen."
"At noon, Cor."
"And, Eliza. He is — I do not know what he is. I will figure it out. He is not the worst version of what he could be. That is — that is what I came up here to know."
"I know."
"Okay."
She walks back to Julian. She holds out her hand. He stands; he takes her hand; his palm is the careful cool of his unfed temperature; she meets it. "Ms. — Cora," he says.
"Yeah, you got it. Cora."
She goes. Henrik takes her down. The elevator chime; the door closes; the silence of the great room is the silence of a room that has just been entered correctly for the first time.
Adrienne stands. She takes Cora's glass to the kitchen and rinses it.
She puts the bottle of Sancerre back in the wine wall and shuts the climate-controlled glass.
She comes back to the great room. She picks up her coat from the back of the sofa.
She says: "Bonsoir, mes enfants. Reposez-vous. " She leaves through the foyer to her own quarters two floors down. The elevator chime. The door closes again.
Julian and I are alone in the penthouse for the first time in three days.
I look at him across the Tabriz rug. The gas fire is throwing its slow orange against the worn pale spot at his feet — the spot the shape of his right boot from twenty-five years of standing there at the edge of the hearth.
I am still in the cashmere and the trousers I wore at lunch.
I am barefoot — I have been barefoot since I came back from my study at seven; the heated floor of the great room is warm under the soles of my feet; the wool of the Tabriz is warm at its weave.
"I am going to change," I say.
"All right."
"Wait for me in the library."
"All right."
---
I change in the closet on forty-six. The cashmere comes off and goes onto the cedar rack.
The trousers fold themselves under my hands; I set them on the shelf above.
The bra goes into the basket. I open the third drawer on my side — the one that has the black silk slip Adrienne ordered for me without asking three weeks ago, the slip I have not worn yet because the moment was never the right moment.
The slip is bias-cut; the silk is heavy; the straps are thin; the hem ends at mid-thigh.
I take off my underwear; I put on the matching black silk panties from the drawer above; I put on the slip.
I look at myself in the closet mirror once.
The freckle at the corner of my jaw; the small fading discoloration at the right carotid line; the chestnut hair I have pinned at the nape with the brass pencil all afternoon — I take the pencil out; I let the hair fall to the collarbone.
The pencil I clip back to the leather memo cover on the shelf. The cover stays in the closet tonight.
I walk barefoot down the staircase to forty-five.
I walk barefoot across the great room. I walk barefoot down the walnut-panelled corridor to the library.
The heated floor; the wool of the Tabriz; the smooth pine of the corridor.
The library door is half-open; the gas fire in the library is on; the green-shaded lamp on his writing desk is the only other light.
He is in the 1740s reading chair. He is in the dark trousers and the white shirt — no jacket, no tie, the sleeves rolled to the elbow the careful half-inch he rolls them when he is out of council.
The brand on the inside of his left forearm is bare.
The pale gray eyes lift to mine. He stays in the chair.
I cross the library on the Tabriz rug — the smaller one in this room, the runner from the door to the chair, the same wool as the great room, an 1830s Tabriz worn pale in the spot at the foot of the chair from a hundred and forty years of his boot.
My bare feet go over the worn pale spot. The wool is warm.
I stop at his chair. I lift one knee onto the leather to his right; I lift the other to his left. I straddle him in the chair, clothed, the silk slip pooling at my thighs and at his thighs. I lower onto his lap. He puts both hands at my waist over the silk. His palms settle and stay. He waits.
I lean down. I put my mouth on his — slow, careful, the way I have not kissed him since the first time.
The kiss is full and slow and unhurried; my hands go to either side of his jaw; his hands stay at my waist; his mouth opens for me; my tongue meets his at a careful pace; he gives me the pace I take.
I draw back. I rest my forehead against his.
"Take me to bed," I say.
He breathes out once. The pale gray eyes are level. "I take orders from you tonight."
"Don't get used to it."
His mouth — the line of his mouth that I have catalogued at the Greybar in week one and at the Vault Room in week three and across the dinner table in his kitchen for thirty nights — lifts at the left corner first, then the right.
He smiles. It is small. It is the smallest possible smile a man can give and still be smiling.
It is the first time he has smiled at me.
It is, I understand in a beat that lands somewhere under my sternum, the first time he has smiled at anyone in a long count of years.
I kiss him again on the smile. He kisses me back. He stands with me on him — he stands the way he does everything else, the slow architectural rise of a man six-foot-two carrying a hundred and thirty pounds of woman as if the woman were no weight — and he walks us to the bed.
---
He sets me down at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom.
He turns from me. He goes to the wood-burning fireplace.
He lays the kindling in the iron grate — pine, cedar, a strip of birch bark; the kindling is fresh; the wood is fresh; he has had Helene's people lay fresh wood in the box this afternoon.
He strikes a long match. The kindling takes. The flame climbs.