13. Cera #2
"Good luck." I'm already pulling out my laptop. "I'll keep at the Rotterdam build while you're gone. Made a start on the plane. I'm putting together a list of what I'll need from you tomorrow to implement."
"Sounds good. Thanks for being flexible." He slings the bag over his shoulder, leaves his jacket on the back of the chair like a thing he's promising to come back to, and he's gone.
The door clicks shut, and the suite goes quiet around me.
Just like that, I'm three states from home in a hotel that costs more a night than I used to clear in a week, with a massage on the books and nobody's permission to ask for any of it.
I could get used to this. That's the dangerous part, and I know it, and I sink into the couch, anyway.
I work for an hour, drift through the massage in a warm haze, and I'm back in the robe with my hair down when my phone dings.
Heading back to the hotel. If you haven't eaten, I can bring Thai. One of the partners swears by a place near the terminal.
I love Thai.
I type back with a smile before I realize it.
Surprise me. Whatever they recommend.
The three dots appear, hover, vanish. No reply. I tell myself that's just him, economical down to the bone, and not the small drop of disappointment it lands as.
Twenty-some minutes later, the latch clicks, and he comes in with two bags of takeout, sets them on the coffee table, and crosses to the bar to pour himself something amber.
"You survive okay?" he asks, not turning around.
"Barely. That massage nearly killed me." I tuck my feet up under me on the couch. "Thank you for it. It was unreal."
"Good," he says to the bottles before turning to look at me. "You earned it. Another Friday night, on your weekend, for me."
The words Friday night land low, and my breath catches on them, because the last Friday night we shared ended with me bent over his desk, and from the half-beat before he moves again, I'd put money on the same memory walking through the room for both of us.
He lifts his glass and lets it pass. "Drink? Wine?"
"Just water. I'm half-asleep from the massage as it is. Anything stronger and you'll have to carry me to bed."
The word bed sits in the air a beat too long. I didn't plan it.
We eat at the small table by the window, cartons open between us, and somewhere between the curry and the last of the spring rolls the trip stops feeling like work.
He's loosened his tie. I've got my feet tucked up.
There's no deck to walk through, nobody to perform for, just the two of us and the dark water and a quiet that doesn't ask anything of either of us.
I watch him while he eats. I can't help it.
Even here, even now, he sits angled toward the door, his eyes grazing the room's edges every few minutes, that restless sweep I've seen him run across a conference table.
He gives nothing away. He never does. And under the expensive calm of him there's a loneliness so complete it makes my chest ache, a man who's spent his whole life in rooms full of people with the exit always in his sightline.
"You do that even here," I say, soft. "Watch the door. Keep one eye on the way out." I set my fork down. "You're never all the way in a room, are you? Not even this one. Not even with me."
He goes still. Whatever he braced for tonight, it wasn't that. For a moment I think he won't answer at all. Then he pushes his chair back.
"I need a cigarette," he says, and pulls a pack from his pocket. "Going to step out on the balcony."
"Mind if I join you?"
"Not at all."
The night's warmer than it has any right to be in February, the air off the water thick with salt.
He lights up and turns his head to send the smoke away from me.
I've never been able to stand the smell of cigarettes.
On him it does something else entirely, settles low in my belly before I can talk myself out of it.
He even makes this look good somehow, the flick of the lighter, the first pull, the tip of his head back into the dark.
"It's a beautiful night," I say. "I can't believe it's warmer here than home."
He doesn't answer right away. He watches the water.
"Coming here always makes me think of my mom," he says finally. "She used to swear the Gulf was clearer on the Florida side. Don't ask me how she landed on that."
It stops me. Of course he has a mother. It's a stupid thing to be caught by, but I've never once pictured him as anyone's boy, and he doesn't hand pieces of himself out, so I step into the opening carefully.
"Does she live in New Orleans?"
"She died when I was nine." He says it to the water, to the place his smoke went, not to me.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry."
"You're not." He takes another pull. "It was a long time ago. I just like thinking about her in the places she loved."
I don't move. I'm afraid that if I do, he'll catch himself and put it all back behind glass. I want to know everything there is to know about this man, every locked room of him, and I have just enough sense to know that saying so out loud would shut the door.
Nobody ever hands me the real thing. They give me the polished version and keep the truth behind glass, and I learned a long time ago to stop expecting otherwise. He just handed me his mother, unguarded, and I want to hold still long enough to be trusted with the rest.
He smokes it down, pinches it out, and tucks the butt back into the pack rather than flicking it over the rail, a fussy habit that somehow makes me like him more.
Then he leans against the railing and crosses his arms, and the wind moves his hair, and for a few seconds he's nothing but a man on a balcony, close enough to touch.
The space between us has gone thin. I feel it like a storm in my teeth before it breaks, that pull toward him I keep losing arguments with. I could close the distance. I think he could too. For a second neither of us does anything but stand in it.
Then he straightens, and something in him steps back, deliberate, a man easing away from an edge he respects.
"Call it a night," he says, and his voice has dropped lower than the words need. "You've been going since this morning. I'm not going to be the guy who takes advantage of that."
Oh, but I want you to. I don't say it. I hold his eyes a beat longer than I have any business holding them, long enough that we both hear the thing I'm not saying.
"Yeah," I manage. "Probably smart."
Neither of us moves toward the door.
He breaks first, stepping aside to let me pass, careful not to touch me, and that carefulness is louder than hands would have been.
I walk in ahead of him with my skin humming and the want sitting heavy and unfinished in my chest, and I already know I'm going to lie awake in that big bed replaying the half-inch we didn't cross.