27. Erika
— ? —
Erika
The building is almost empty when I arrive.
I drove here the way I drove to my own award, too fast and not fast enough, and I parked crooked across two spaces in a garage I used to park in every morning for four years, and I sat there for a second with the engine ticking and thought, I could still go home.
I could read about it tomorrow like everyone else.
And then I got out, because whatever else I am, I’ve never been a woman who reads about her own life in the paper.
The lobby is dark except for the security lights, and my heels echo on the marble floor as I cross to the elevators, and the security guard at the desk looks up, and whatever is on my face tells him not to ask questions.
“Go on up, Mrs. Channing,” he says. “He’s in the corner office.”
Some things don’t change, even when everything else does.
The elevator ride feels endless, forty-two floors of watching the numbers climb, trying to work out what I’m going to say when I get there, and I still don’t know, my mind a jumble of headlines and half-formed thoughts and the echo of Dora’s voice saying decide about the man.
The top floor is silent, most of the offices dark, their occupants long gone for the night, but a light spills from the corner office at the end of the hall, the one that belonged to Kai’s father before he died, and I walk toward it slowly, past my own old desk, which has someone else’s photographs on it now, and I don’t stop to look at them.
The door is open, and through it I can see Kai sitting on the floor with a single cardboard box, jacket off, sleeves rolled, and he looks younger than I’ve seen him in years, less like the man in the corner office and more like the boy who asked for my number in the rain.
He’s holding a photograph, his parents on their wedding day, I realize as I get closer, young and hopeful, no idea what’s coming.
I watch him for a moment before he sees me, watch him trace the edge of the frame with his thumb, his expression soft and sad, and I think about the last time I watched him from a doorway when he didn’t know I was there, through a kitchen window with a plate in my hands, and how that was the end of a thing, and I don’t know yet what this is.
Then he looks up.
“Erika.” He doesn’t seem surprised, and maybe he was hoping, and he doesn’t get up, and I don’t know if that’s his legs or a decision to let me come to him for once. “How did you know I was here?”
“Albie.”
“Of course.” A ghost of a smile. “He’d have told you if I’d been on the moon.”
I step into the office, looking around at the box, the empty shelves, the desk cleared of everything except a watch that catches the light, his father’s, I know without asking, because it’s the only thing in this room he’s ever handled like it could break.
“You resigned,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“In front of everyone.”
“It seemed like the honest place to do it.” He looks at the box. “I gave a speech about the future and then I told them I wouldn’t be in it. It was very short. Dora would have said it needed a joke.”
“Why?”
He sets down the photograph and looks up at me, and his eyes are clear in a way I haven’t seen in months.
“My father built this company to take care of his family,” he says quietly.
“I got it backward. I thought the company was the point. That if I just made it big enough, successful enough, everything else would fall into place.” He shakes his head.
“Turns out the family was the point. It was always the family.”
My throat is tight, and I don’t trust myself to speak.
“I’m not doing this to win you back,” he continues. “I’m doing it because it’s right. Because I should have done it years ago, the moment I realized it was costing me you.”
“You gave up everything.”
“I gave up things.” He gestures at the box. “A building and a title. You were everything, Erika. I just didn’t see it until I lost you.”
He reaches into the jacket lying beside him and pulls out a folded envelope, and I know what it is before he opens it, the divorce papers, the ones he’s refused to sign for months, the ones I stopped asking about because I wasn’t sure I wanted him to, and he holds them out to me, and his signature is at the bottom, final.
“I’ve been carrying these around for a week,” he says.
“Since the balcony. Trying to work up the courage.” He takes a breath.
“I finally stopped refusing. Stopped trying to control the outcome. If you file these tomorrow, I’ll let you go.
I’ll love you anyway, for the rest of my life, but I’ll let you go.
It’s your choice. It was always supposed to be your choice. ”
I take the papers with hands that won’t stop shaking, and his signature stares up at me, bold and certain, the signature of a man who’s finally stopped fighting the tide, and I look at him, at this man who refused to give up for months, who walked away tonight from everything he’d built, in front of everyone he built it with, and who is sitting on the floor of his father’s office handing me the one thing I’ve asked him for since the night I left, and doing it in a way that costs him more than the refusing ever did.
And I understand what he’s doing. He isn’t giving up.
He’s giving me the door. He’s saying, here, it’s open, and if you walk through it I’ll stand here and watch you go, and that is a thing the man I married could not have done, not for a million dollars, not for anything, because that man never once in four years let an outcome be someone else’s to decide.
I think about the book with the annotated margins.
The taco truck on Mulholland. The way he looked at me on the balcony, like he was finally seeing what he’d been blind to for years, and the way he stood in Dora’s doorway three hours ago with his hand on the frame and asked if I was all right and didn’t say a word about where he was going.
I tear the papers in half.
“Erika…”
I tear them again, and again, and the pieces flutter to the floor like snow, settling around our feet, and it’s the loudest thing in the building, paper going, the small dry rip of it in a room that quiet, four years and thirty pages coming apart in my hands.
“Don’t talk.” My voice is fierce and shaking. “Don’t say anything. Don’t make this about you.”
“What are you…”
“I’m choosing this.” I step closer, closing the distance between us. “Not because you earned it. Not because you groveled enough. Because I love you, you stupid, stubborn man, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.”
They land between us, the first time I’ve said them to his face since everything fell apart, and I watch them land, and I watch him not believe them for a second, and then believe them, and I’ve never seen a face do that before, go from one to the other, and I hope I never have to make him do it again.
His eyes are wet, and his hands are trembling when he reaches for me, and I kiss him.
It’s nothing like the desperate collision on my couch. This is slow and deliberate, a decision instead of a mistake, and I put everything I have into it, all the anger and the grief and the love I’ve been trying to bury, and I feel him shatter against me.
“Are you sure?” he whispers against my mouth.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
“Erika, I need you to be certain. Because if we do this, if we try again, I can’t survive losing you twice.”
“Then don’t lose me.”
He pulls me down onto the carpet, and we sink into each other, surrounded by the box and torn paper and his parents watching from the photograph on the floor, and he worships me. There’s no other word for it.
The office is dark except for the city coming through the windows. He kisses me like I’m something he’s terrified of breaking and desperate to keep at once, slow deep kisses that taste like tears and relief, and his hands are shaking on me, and he doesn’t hide it.
“I love you,” he whispers against my throat. “I love you so much it terrifies me. I don’t know how to be without you anymore.”
“Show me,” I breathe.
He does.
He peels my clothes off piece by piece, pressing open-mouthed kisses to every inch of skin he uncovers, and I do the same to him, his shirt, his belt, and it isn’t fast, and neither of us tries to make it fast. When we’re bare he sits back against the side of his father’s desk and pulls me into his lap, facing him, and I sink down onto him like that, sitting up, my legs around his back and his arms around mine, and we go still with him buried inside me and our foreheads pressed together and nothing between us at all.
The moment feels sacred, a thing being healed instead of broken, and I can feel tears sliding down my cheeks, and I don’t try to stop them, and he wipes them with his thumb.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “For everything.”
“I know.”
I set the pace. That’s the difference. I rock on him slow, barely lifting, grinding down, and he holds me and lets me, his hands spread across my back, his mouth on my throat, my jaw, my mouth, and I get to watch him from six inches away in the light off the city, this man on the floor of his father’s office with nothing left in his hands but me, his eyes wet and open and on mine, his lips parted, the pulse going in his throat, and when I want more I take more, and when I want to stop and just hold him inside me and breathe, I do that, and he lets me do that too.
It builds the way a tide builds, no hurry in it, his hand sliding between us to find my clit and match the slow roll of my hips, his eyes open on mine the whole time in the dark.
“I love you,” I tell him again, because I can, because I already said it once tonight over a pile of torn paper and I want him to hear that the first time wasn’t the adrenaline. “I love you, Kai.”
He makes a shattered sound and I come, wrapped around him, and he follows me over, holding me so tight I can feel his heart slam against my breast, his tears on my shoulder and mine on his, and we stay locked together, breathing each other, kissing between quiet sobs and shaky laughs, and somewhere in the wreck of our history we find our way back to each other.
After, tangled together on the carpet with his jacket under my head as a pillow, I trace the tattoo over his heart, his parents’ initials intertwined, the way I traced it on a pool lounger a hundred years ago on the last night I was sure of everything.
“They would have loved you,” he says quietly. “My parents. They would have adored you.”
“I would have loved them too.” I turn the watch over where it sits on the desk above us, catching the last of the city light. “Are you going to wear it?”
“I never have. I always thought I hadn’t earned it yet.” He’s quiet. “I don’t think that was the point of a watch.”
“No.”
“I think he’d have wanted me to be late to something wearing it. Just once. On purpose.”
I laugh, and it hurts, and it’s the first time in months laughing has hurt in a way I don’t mind.
We lie there as the sky outside begins to lighten, the first hints of dawn creeping through the windows, the torn divorce papers scattered around us on the carpet, and neither of us moves to pick them up.
“Marry me again,” Kai says suddenly. “Properly, this time.”
I prop myself up on my elbow and look down at him. “Is that a proposal?”
“It’s a start.”
“You’re asking me to marry you while we’re lying naked on your father’s office floor surrounded by shredded legal documents.”
“I’m romantic like that.” He tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, and his hand isn’t shaking anymore. “Also I’ve been sitting on this floor for six hours and I don’t think my legs work, so this is really the only proposal available to me at the moment.”
A laugh escapes me, unexpected and bright, and I put my head back down on his chest where I can hear his heart, which is going a lot faster than his voice let on.
“I’ll think about it.”
He grins, the real one, the one that crinkles his eyes and shows the gap in his bottom teeth, and I haven’t seen it in months.
“That’s not a no,” he says.
“No,” I agree, settling back against his chest. “It isn’t.”
We stay there until the sun comes up, and then he drives me home in his car and leaves mine crooked across two spaces in the garage, and neither of us mentions it, because we both know I’ll be back for it, and my car can wait for me the way everything else waited.