25. “The Asset” #2
“Sleep. Tomorrow is going to be long.”
“I know.”
We went to bed.
The bedroom was different at night. I had slept in it for six weeks and it had always been mine, the pressed-tin ceiling mine, the white quilt mine, the low light from the window that turned the whole room a particular shade of pale gray that I had spent the first week counting. Tonight it was not only mine.
He came in behind me. He did not turn on the light.
He knew the room well enough now not to need it.
I heard him set his watch on the nightstand, the small precise sound of the case opening, the watch going in.
The glasses next. I heard him sit at the edge of the bed and take off his shoes.
I was already under the quilt. I watched the shadow of him across the room.
I had been watching the shadow of him across rooms for six weeks and I was not done yet.
He came to bed.
He came to bed the way he did everything — with attention.
He pulled back the quilt on his side and he slid in beside me and he did not immediately reach for me and he did not immediately speak and that was the thing about him, the thing I had been learning and relearning since the Tuesday morning in his office.
He gave things their moment. He did not rush the thing before it was ready.
I turned to face him.
“Atlas.”
“Eden.”
“What happens tomorrow.”
“Foster handles the rest. We handle the rest of the rest.” His hand came up to my face in the dark.
His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone.
“Tonight, nothing happens. Tonight you are not a senator’s daughter.
Tonight there is no leak and no Ardent and no Tristan. Tonight there is only this room.”
“This room,” I said.
“This room.”
I kissed him.
I kissed him the way I had been not kissing him for six weeks, which was the way of a woman who has been keeping something very carefully and has now set it down.
He made a low sound against my mouth. His arm came around my waist and he pulled me in, and I went, and the whole six weeks of being careful and controlled and a Whitlock about everything dissolved against the warmth of him.
I pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were very dark. His hand was in my hair. He looked at me the way he had looked at me from across the room at the Pierre — as if I were the only thing in the room worth looking at and he had given up pretending otherwise.
“I have been wanting to do that since Tuesday,” I said.
“Only Tuesday.”
“Before Tuesday,” I said. “But especially since Tuesday.”
He kissed me again. This time he did not pull back.
He kissed me until I forgot the legal pad on the table and the list and the names crossed off the list and the whole long work of the evening.
He kissed me until I forgot everything that was not his mouth and his hands and the sound of the river outside and the weight of him settling beside me in the dark.
I pushed his shirt off his shoulders. He let me.
He shrugged out of it without letting go of me, which required a small negotiation that made me laugh against his jaw, and he said very quietly against my ear: “Are you laughing at me,” and I said: “I am absolutely laughing at you,” and he made a low sound that was not quite a laugh but was near one, and then his mouth found my throat and I stopped laughing.
He learned me the way he had been learning me for six weeks — methodically, with the particular kind of attention that built up like pressure, slowly, until I was not thinking about anything but the next place his mouth would go.
He had found, somewhere in the last month, the exact combination of deliberate and unhurried that made me feel like the ceiling of the room had lifted.
He knew what he was doing. He had always known what he was doing. I had learned that early.
I pressed my face into his shoulder. He pulled me closer.
We had been careful for so long. We had held our faces and measured our distances and made all the right calculations in all the right rooms and I had come home from every Sunday dinner with the particular exhaustion of a woman who has been performing steadiness for four hours.
Tonight there was no performance. Tonight it was only the bed and the dark and him, and the long luxury of not being careful.
He moved over me. I felt the weight of him settle.
His forehead against mine for one beat, two, his eyes open, watching my face.
I watched his. There was nothing in his face that was kept back.
The thing he had spent years not showing, not saying, not allowing himself, was right there in the low light of the bedroom, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to know something.”
“Tell me.”
His hand cupped my face. His thumb against my jaw. “I am not doing this carefully. I want you to know that. I am not holding anything back. Whatever this costs me, I am not going to spend the night holding anything back from you.”
I felt it in my sternum. “Then don’t,” I said.
He didn’t.
He moved into me slowly, and I felt the whole six weeks of careful distance collapse into the particular closeness of this, of him, of the way he said my name when he said it against my hair and meant it only for me.
I held his shoulders. I held the back of his neck.
I pulled him in the way you pull in something you have been almost afraid to want and have finally stopped being afraid of.
He moved with me the way the best things move — unhurried, fully present, giving me all of it.
I came with my face against his jaw and his arms around me and his voice low in my ear saying my name over and over, soft, private, a thing that existed only in this room.
He followed me. He held me through it, his whole body pulled tight against mine, his mouth against my temple, breathing into my hair.
Afterward he rolled onto his back. I lay across his chest. His hand in my hair. The ceiling above us, the river outside, the whole quiet loft around us. He breathed slowly. My ear against his heart.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“We are going to be all right.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Yes.”
“Say it like you believe it.”
“We are going to be all right, Eden.” His hand tightened in my hair. “I believe it.”
I believed him. I believed him the way I believed things he said in the low steady voice he used when he was not performing certainty but simply had it. He did not perform certainty often. When he had it, you knew.
I fell asleep with my head on his chest.
I did not dream.
I woke at two oh four a.m.
The bed was cold beside me. Atlas was not in the bed.
The bedroom door was closed. The light under the door was the kitchen light. I could hear him on the phone, very low.
I got out of bed. I padded across the floor. I stopped at the door. I did not open it.
He was talking to someone. The voice was quiet but the words were precise. He was using his courtroom voice, which he used when he wanted to be impossible to misunderstand.
“No,” he was saying. “Don’t tell the senator yet.
Let me handle it. I will fly down in the morning.
I will handle it tonight if I have to. I do not want him in the building when this happens.
He will react and the reaction will be a problem.
I want him in Connecticut. Tell him I have an emergency at the firm.
Tell him anything. Just keep him in Connecticut for the next twelve hours. ”
He paused.
He listened.
“I am sure. I have been sure since Eden said the name out loud. I will be in DC by eight. Have her at her office at nine. Tell her it is a routine ethics review. Do not tell her it is me.”
He hung up.
I stood at the door for a long minute with my forehead against it.
I heard him pour himself a glass of water in the kitchen. I heard him drink it. I heard him set the glass down.
I went back to bed.
I did not let him know I had heard him.
I lay there in the dark with my eyes open and I waited for him to come back.
The sheets were cold on his side.
I rolled onto his pillow because I needed the smell of him. Eagle Rare. The cologne I had bought him for our six-week. Soap.
I thought about Sara at my mother’s funeral.
The casserole. The small precise way she had stood at our kitchen counter and made me a sandwich at three p.m. because nobody else had thought to feed me.
The story she had told me about my mother as a junior staffer in 1995, about a meeting Eve had walked out of in Hartford because the lieutenant governor had used the word girls in a way Eve had not appreciated. I had laughed until I had cried.
I thought: she is a victim of something. She has to be. She would not. She loved my mother.
I thought: people do things love does not protect them from doing.
I thought: please let it be the first thing.
The bedroom door opened at three eleven.
He came in. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his hand on my hair.
He thought I was asleep.
I let him think it.
He sat there for a long minute with his hand on my hair. Then he leaned down and he kissed the top of my head, very lightly, the way you kiss a child who you do not want to wake.
He climbed into bed.
He did not turn off the light on his side.
He pulled me into his chest in the dark and he held me and he did not sleep, and I did not sleep, and neither of us said anything, and outside the river kept moving, and somewhere in DC a woman who had held my hand in a receiving line at a cathedral was about to wake up to a Monday she did not know was coming.