16. Chapter 16
Graham
The last call ends at eleven-twenty.
I stand in the dark hallway outside the study with the phone still warm in my hand, listening to the house. The board has been gone for seven hours. Pierce is pulling badge logs. Voss is cross-referencing the access records against Christopher's credentials. By dawn I'll know what I need to know.
There is nothing more I can do until then.
I make myself accept it.
I walk down the hall. Iris's door is three-quarters closed the way she likes it. I push it open another inch. She's sprawled across the mattress with Judge tucked under her chin and a blue marker still loose in her fist. There's a streak of blue on her cheek.
I put the blue marker on the nightstand and I look at her for a long second. Something in my chest does the slow loosening it has been refusing to do since the SUVs rolled up the driveway this morning.
I pull her door back to where she likes it.
The kitchen light is on.
Jade is at the island with her legs folded under her, in one of my t-shirts that hits her mid-thigh.
The cream silk dress is hanging over the back of a chair like a costume someone forgot to return.
Her pearl earrings are in a small dish by the sink.
There's a glass of water in front of her, half-finished, and she's reading something on her phone with the slow scroll of a woman who isn't actually reading.
She doesn't turn around when I come in. She heard me on the stairs.
"Iris?"
"Out cold. I checked at ten. She fell asleep with a marker still in her hand."
"What color."
"Blue. She has a blue stripe on her cheek now. I considered it artistic and let it stay."
I cross the kitchen and stand behind her stool. I put my hands on her shoulders. The muscle along her neck is locked tight. I press my thumbs into the knot at the base of her neck, slow circles, and she makes a small sound and lets her head fall forward.
"You held that house up for six hours. I watched you do it."
"You were busy doing your part. Standing in corners looking expensive."
"That's a specialized skill, Alvarez."
"Sterling."
"What."
"It's Alvarez-Sterling now. You missed the memo from your own PR team."
My thumbs pause. Then they keep moving.
"Alvarez-Sterling. Better."
"Pierce?"
"Handled. He's pulling the logs. We'll know the name by sunrise."
"Good."
"Voss is on it too. There's nothing more I can do until morning."
That last sentence is the one I have not been able to say out loud all evening. Saying it now feels like setting down a weight I didn't know I was holding at full extension. I feel the shift in her too, the small drop in her shoulders under my hands.
She turns on the stool.
She looks up at me with her hair loose around her face and the t-shirt off one shoulder and the lamp catching the line of her collarbone. I have been performing for six hours. I am about to be allowed to stop.
She reaches up and works the next button on my shirt open.
"Jade."
"Quiet hours. House rules. Nobody talks about Christopher or board math or quarterly anything. Not until morning."
"That's not a rule."
"It is now. I'm enforcing it."
"On what authority."
"Mrs. Sterling's. She runs the house. You'd know that if you read your own contract."
I almost smile. I catch her wrist where her fingers are resting on my third button. I don't stop her. I just hold it, my thumb sliding over the inside of her wrist where her pulse is, fast and steady at the same time.
"Upstairs."
"Upstairs."
I take her hand. We go.
The master bedroom is the one room in this house that has never had to perform.
The board didn't see it. The investigator never made it past the threshold. The bed is the one I've slept in since I bought the property, the rug is one Chloe picked out a lifetime ago, and the lamp on the nightstand throws the same warm light it has thrown for nine years.
But Jade is in it now.
She has been for eleven nights, and I'm still not used to it. Her book on the side that used to be empty. Her hair tie on the dresser. The small bottle of cucumber soap visible through the open bathroom door.
I close the door behind us. The lock is a small click in the quiet.
She walks past me to the foot of the bed and turns. The lamp catches her at an angle that makes the breath stop in the middle of my chest.
"Come here."
She comes.
I cup her face in both hands and look at her for a second. The smudge of mascara she didn't bother to wipe off. The tired lines at the corners of her eyes. The mouth that talked the Chairman of Sterling Global out of his own argument by the time he got to the dock railing.
"You were extraordinary today."
"I was terrified."
"You hid it."
"That's the job."
"Not anymore."
She blinks. Just once. I lean down and kiss her, and it isn't the kiss in the kitchen this afternoon. The kitchen kiss had a phone in its pocket. This one doesn't have anywhere to be.
Her mouth is soft and warm and tastes faintly of the wine she had at dinner. I feel the exact second she stops performing for the day.
I walk her backward toward the bed. Slow. One step at a time. My hands learn the shape of her through the t-shirt.
The back of her knees hit the mattress. She sits.
I drop to one knee in front of her. Her eyes go wide for half a second before she understands I'm not asking her for anything. I'm just bringing myself level with her.
"Hi."
"Hi."
I put my hands on her thighs through the cotton. Her breath catches. I push the t-shirt up past her hips. She lifts for me without being asked, and I pull it off over her head and drop it on the floor.
Then I just look at her.
"Sterling."
"Give me a second."
"What are you doing."
"Looking at my wife."
The word lands like it always does. Eleven days in and it still does something to both of us neither of us is ready to fully name.
I lean in. I kiss the soft skin just above her knee. Then the inside of her thigh. Slow. Unhurried.
Her fingers sink into my hair.
"I had a whole speech prepared."
"For what."
"For if you ever decided to stay. I had it ready by week three."
"You did not."
"I did. Bullet points. A chart."
She laughs, and the laugh breaks into something else when my mouth moves higher. She tips back onto her elbows. The lamp throws gold across the ceiling and across the line of her shoulders.
I take my time. Her thigh under my mouth. Her hand in my hair. The patient attention of a man who has been reminded today that the world is full of things that want to take this away from him.
"Graham."
"I've got you."
"I know."
When she comes she says my name. Just that. Quiet, against the dark.
I kiss her hip. I kiss the curve of her ribs. I move up the bed and gather her against me.
"Your turn."
"In a minute."
"Sterling."
"I'm not in a hurry, Alvarez-Sterling. I've got all night."
She lifts up onto her elbow. She works the rest of my shirt buttons open, deliberate. She peels it back off my shoulders. I sit up to let her. She pushes the shirt down my arms and onto the floor.
She presses her palm flat over my heart.
"I love you."
I go still under her hand.
It's the first time. I've thought it a hundred times. In the kitchen. On the dock. With her face against my chest in the study after the vows. I have never said it out loud. Neither has she.
I bring my hand up and cover hers against my chest. I hold it there. My other hand cups the back of her neck and I pull her down to my mouth, and the kiss is slow and complete and tastes like a thing being agreed to in a permanent way.
"Jade."
"Don't say it back unless you mean it."
"You think I don't."
"I think you've had a hard day and I'm not asking you for anything. I just wanted you to know."
"I love you. I have loved you since the night you put your hand over mine on Iris's blanket. I've been quiet about it because saying it out loud would make it real and I was not ready for it to be real. It has been real anyway. For two months."
"Sterling."
"I know."
She kisses me. She keeps kissing me. Her hands find my belt and I help her with the rest, and the bed receives both of us the same way it has for eleven nights, except tonight the room is different because the words are in it now.
I brace over her. The lamp throws gold across my shoulders.
"Slow."
"Slow."
I move into her slow. I stay there for a beat with my forehead against hers, both of us breathing, both of us feeling the shift.
I move.
Long, deliberate strokes that have nothing to prove. My hand laced with hers against the pillow. My mouth at her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw. I watch her face in the lamp gold like it is the only evidence I need.
"Stay with me."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Tell me again."
"I love you, Graham."
"Again."
She tells me again. And again. Until the word stops being a confession and starts being a fact about the room, the kind of fact the walls and the lamp and the dark lake outside have agreed to keep.
When we come apart it's together. Quiet. My face buried in her neck, her hand fisted in my hair, the lamp still on, the window still showing the dock and the still water and the moon.
I don't move for a long time. I balance on my forearms with my forehead against her collarbone and listen to her breathe.
"Don't move."
I roll to my side and pull her against me, her back to my chest, my arm heavy across her ribs. I click the lamp off.
The room goes to soft blue.
Her breathing slows against my arm. I can feel the moment she lets the day go. It moves through her in one long exhale.
My phone vibrates once on the nightstand.
I don't move.
Her hand reaches across me and turns the screen face down without looking at it.
"Whatever it is, it can wait until dawn."
"Mmh."
"Sleep, Sterling."
"Mmh."
I don't sleep.
The phone vibrates one more time, muffled against the wood. She doesn't touch it. She is already going under, her breath slow against my arm, her hand loose where it landed on top of mine.
I look at the dark surface of the phone past her shoulder.
Whatever Voss has found can wait until morning. It has waited since nine-thirty. It can wait eight more hours.
I tell myself this.
I keep my eyes on the phone anyway.
Somewhere in Manhattan, on the executive floor of Sterling Global, a badge log is finishing the cross-reference.
Somewhere in this house, a six-year-old is asleep with a blue stripe on her cheek and a stuffed owl under her chin.
Somewhere in the dark beside me, my wife is finally letting her shoulders drop.
The phone goes quiet.
The lake outside is still.
I don't sleep.
I watch the dark surface of the phone until the sun finds the dock and the screen lights up with the name I have been waiting all night to see.