22. Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
Jessica
So we're building another request.
That's my life at the moment. Things I've asked for, sitting in other people's queues. The rescue block went out without me, and I checked the Preserve weather every morning it was out like somebody's anxious mother, and I haven't told anybody I did that.
The records Elise brought with her include a list of documents the Fourth House turned over after the fall. We asked the archive for the records that matched that list, and most of what came back lines up.
This one doesn't.
Elise's record says they turned over the original. The archive's intake record says it received a copy.
Same document. Same reference. Same date.
Original in one record. Copy in the other.
"So where's the original?" I ask.
"That's what I'd like to know."
Nothing in the copies we have answers that. So Jon is going through every reference to the document while I make a list of what we need the archive to produce: the original intake record, anything attached to it, and anything showing what happened to the document after it left Fourth House hands.
"This man," Jon says, "should have been stopped."
"Which man?"
"Whoever numbered these. He was a menace. I've now read the same reference three times and got a different number each time."
"Read them all out. I'll write down the three and we'll average them."
"That is not how history works."
"It's how my list works."
He makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh and keeps reading, and I go back to the column I've been pretending to check for a while now.
It's warm in here with the door shut, and at some point he pushes his sleeves up without thinking about it. After that, concentrating gets considerably harder.
I read the same line three times and could not tell you a single word of it.
"You're not writing anything," Jon says.
"I'm absorbing."
"You're absorbing the second entry. You've been absorbing it since I sat down."
"It's a demanding entry."
He looks up. There's a flicker at the side of his mouth.
"If you'd like me to put my sleeves back down," he says, "you have only to ask."
"Don't you dare."
"That's what I thought."
He goes back to work. So do I. It lasts about two minutes.
Then he loses his place. I watch it happen — his finger goes back up the column, then up again, then he stops and sets his pen down on the table exactly parallel to the edge of the page.
"Jon."
"Give me a moment."
"How long a moment?"
"That," he says, "is an extremely unkind question."
He shifts in the chair, then does it again.
"I need to stand."
He stands.
Oh.
He turns toward the shelf about two seconds too late.
"You've stopped translating," I say.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He turns around. He doesn't reach for an excuse, doesn't reach for the rulebook, doesn't do a single one of the things he'd have done a year ago.
"Because you're sitting there," Jon says, "and I've read the same line six times, and I've run out of ways to pretend that's about the handwriting."
I stand up.
We look at each other across four feet of workroom, and then both of us move at once, and it isn't toward each other — it's toward the table, because we are who we are.
He squares the card scans and slides them into the folder.
I get the copies into the cart and the cart against the wall.
He puts the pen in his pocket. It takes about twenty seconds and neither of us says a word, and it's the least romantic thing I have ever participated in and my hands are shaking the entire time.
Then he crosses to the door and turns the latch.
"Booked till ten," he says. "Under both our names. The custodian went home at eight."
And then he's on me.
It is nothing like the first time. This is both his hands at my waist and my back against the table edge, and he is not apologizing for anything.
I get my arms around his neck and pull. When I bite his lower lip his fingers flex hard enough that I feel it in my bones.
"Up," I say against his mouth. "Put me on the table."
He lifts me onto the cleared edge with two hands at my waist and no strain in it at all, and sitting there my face is level with his.
"Better," he says, unsteady.
I hook my heels behind his thighs and pull him in, and then he's against me — hard, through his pants and my leggings.
"God," Jon says into my throat.
"Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. He gets one arm around my lower back and takes my weight, so I'm held against him rather than braced on my hands, and the other comes up under my shirt and spreads across my ribs, and he rolls his hips into me.
We are both entirely dressed. There's pressure exactly where I need it and he's found a rhythm and he isn't changing it.
His mouth goes down my neck. His hand goes up and finds my breast, his thumb dragging across the nipple through my bra, and my whole body arches into it.
"Look at me," he says.
His eyes are dark and staring right at me.
"Harder." I get my heel into the back of his thigh. "I'm close."
He isn't careful. He holds me tight against him and drives his hips into me in a hard, steady rhythm, his breathing completely gone against my ear.
"Jessica—"
He keeps going, and his forehead comes down against mine, and I can feel him shaking with the effort of holding on until I'm there.
I come like that, fully clothed, with my face turned into his shoulder to keep the sound down and his arm locked around my back.
He follows a moment after. He says my name — just my name, low and undone — and then he holds absolutely still with his forehead against mine while it goes through him.
For a while the only sound in the room is two people breathing.
He doesn't let go. I lift my head to look at him: his arm is still around my back, his other hand has come up to cup the side of my neck, and he isn't stepping away, and he isn't looking at the door.
"Finally," I say.
He gets me down off the table with a hand under my arm, which I don't need and don't object to. Then he goes out to the corridor washroom and comes back with the water bottle from his bag and a folded paper towel, and makes me drink some before he drinks any himself.
We sort ourselves out with the minimum of discussion. He takes his turn, then I fix what can be fixed, which is not everything.
"For the record," I say, "I suspect that works even better with no clothes on."
He laughs — a real one, startled out of him — and the flush that comes up the side of his neck is so satisfying.
"I have no difficulty believing you," Jon says.
He pulls a chair around with his foot so it's beside his instead of across the table, and sits, and looks at me with his eyebrows up until I sit in it.
We finish the task, because it's ten minutes' work.
"Give me the batch," I say.
Jon reads them out, and I write them down.
"This is useful. When we send the request, it means we're not asking them to explain a general practice, we're asking them about one specific card.
" He sits back. "The accession record or the conservation record for that item, and the recopying schedule for the batch.
If neither record exists, that's an answer as well. "
"Put my name on it."
"It is about your family."
"Put both our names. You found it." I cap the pen. "And if it turns out somebody just wrote the wrong word two hundred years ago—"
"Then we'll have established that, and I'll be delighted, and this will be just a wasted evening."
"I would not call this a wasted evening."
"No," Jon says. "Nor would I."
He switches off the lamp, picks up the folder, and walks out with me — down two flights and the length of the east corridor, talking about nothing.
At the arch where the paths split he stops.
He looks once down the corridor, then catches the front of my coat and pulls me in and kisses me, one hand at my jaw.
"Go on," he says, when he lets me go. "Before I walk you all the way to your door and give the entire building something to discuss."
"Would that be so bad?"
He stands there with the folder under his arm while I go, and this time I do turn around.
He hasn't moved. He lifts a hand.
I lift mine, then turn and head back to my room.
The residence desk has a letter for me when I get back.
I recognize Elise's handwriting on the envelope.
I open it before I make it upstairs.
Jessica,
Tomas is doing well. He spends most of his time following Benny around. Benny was fixing the water pipes last week and let him hold the wrench, so Tomas now believes he's responsible for keeping the entire valley supplied with water.
Klaus came into the shop. He bought flour and left again. He didn't speak to me, but it's the first time he's come down since the burial.
Frances stopped questioning the man.
I stop there.
Then I read the sentence again.
I asked him why. He wouldn't tell me. I thought you should know.
Everyone asks what the Council is doing. I keep telling them I don't know any more than they do.
I hope you're all right.
Write when you can.
Elise
I read it again upstairs.
The part about Tomas makes me smile the second time too.
The part about Frances doesn't.
I get out a piece of paper.
Elise,
I'm okay.
I stare at that for a while, then add:
Tell Tomas I'm glad the water supply is in capable hands.
I leave the rest for later.