8. Evan
Evan
The hotel had put us on the same floor, which was Ian's doing, and which no reasonable person would read anything into. Except I had been reading something into it since the car turned onto Piccadilly.
We didn't talk in the elevator. She stood against the back rail with her coat over one arm and her hair coming down on one side from the rain. I stood in front of the panel like a man who had somewhere else to be, and watched the numbers climb.
At six she said, "You didn't say anything in the car."
"Neither did you."
"I said my piece on the street. It's your turn now." Her voice had no edge on it, which was worse. "I've been the only person in this arrangement who had to decide anything. I'd like a turn at watching somebody else decide."
The doors opened on eight.
We walked down the corridor and her room came first. She stopped at her door with the key in her hand and turned around. I understood that I had walked her here, which happened while my mind was somewhere else composing a professional exit.
She didn't open the door. "Say something, Evan."
I should have said good night. Ten hours from now, we'd sit in a debrief with the Authority's staff, and eight days after that we'd be in Aspen.
There was an option available to me in which I went to my room and slept badly and nothing changed.
It was right there, and I already knew I wasn't going to take it.
She was standing close enough that I could smell the rain in her hair. Her mouth was doing what it did when she was about to say something that would have an impact, curving before the words came.
For seven months I'd carried her memory from a hotel room and told myself I'd taken everything from that night I was going to take. I'd been wrong in a conference room last Wednesday and I'd been wrong on a plane over Greenland. I was wrong now.
What I wanted was so specific it was embarrassing: her hands, her mouth, the sound she made against my shoulder, the whole of her attention that she gave to the deal and gave to Tariq and had not once given to me tonight. I wanted her to stop being professional with me.
"I've been telling myself since last Wednesday that recognizing you was a complication," I said. "It isn't. Not knowing what you'd do about it is the complication. That's all I've thought about since."
"And what have you concluded?"
"That I don't get to conclude anything. It isn't mine to conclude."
Her face shifted. She looked at me for a long moment, then she reached up and pushed my hair back off my forehead with two fingers, slow, like she'd earned the right to it on the terrace and was collecting it now.
"Good answer," she said, and put the key in the door.
We got about a foot inside.
I had her against the wall with the door still swinging shut and her hands were in my jacket, dragging it off my shoulders.
She kissed with no preamble, getting straight to what she wanted.
Her mouth opened under mine, and the sound she made was the same sound she'd made that night, the exact same sound, and the time between then and now collapsed.
"This is a bad idea," she said against my mouth.
"Catastrophic."
"But knowing it doesn't change what we do next."
"No, it doesn't." I got a hand into her hair, tipped her head back, put my mouth on her throat, and she said something that wasn't a word.
The dress came off with the same efficiency as October, and it turned out, I remembered the zipper. She got my shirt open, put both palms flat on my chest, and pushed. I went where she pushed me, and the backs of my knees found the bed.
She followed me down. She was over me with her hair falling on me and the London rain going sideways past the window behind her. We weren't hurrying anymore.
"Say it," she said.
"Say what?"
"You know what."
I put my hand on the side of her face. "Elise."
She laughed, and it broke something loose in both of us. The laugh turned into her putting her mouth on mine, and then she was moving down my body. She took her time about it in a way that was frankly torturous.
"It took you two days to place me," she said, against my stomach.
"I placed you the second time you did that thing with your hand. Last Wednesday, same week you walked in. Two days is not a crime."
"Two days." She undid my belt, taking her time, enjoying it. "I placed you in about two seconds. From the back."
"You had the advantage. I was facing a window."
"You were facing a view in New York, too." She freed me and closed her hand around my cock and I lost the thread of the conversation entirely. "You have a type. You look at the view instead of the room."
Then she took me in her mouth, and I stopped trying to come up with responses.
She was watching me while she did it, which nobody else ever had and it undid me in a way that had nothing to do with technique. I got a fistful of the duvet and said her name, the wrong one, then the right one. She hummed around me at the second one like she'd been waiting for it.
I let it go on longer than I should have. I was getting dangerously close to finishing too soon. Then I pulled her up by the arms and rolled us. She went over laughing. I moved down her body and put my mouth on her. I swiped up with my tongue, circled her clit, and that made her stop laughing.
She was loud in October. She was louder now, with her hands in my hair and her heels digging into my back, saying "there," "don't," "don't you dare stop." When she came she said "fuck" once, quietly, into the empty room, and I felt it go through her under my hands.
Afterward, she lay with her arm over her eyes, breathing.
"Bag," she said. "Front pocket."
"You brought—"
"I travel forty weeks a year, Evan. Don't be a child about it."
I got up and found the condom. She watched me from the bed with a proprietary look I'd think about for a very long time.
When I came back she took the foil out of my hand, opened it herself, and rolled it on me with the same cool competence she brought to a two-billion-dollar deal.
I looked down at her hands doing that and had a thought I couldn't finish.
"You're staring."
"I'm calibrating."
"That's a terrible word for it." She hooked her leg over my hip and pulled. "Come here."
I went in slow because I wanted to feel her stop breathing, and she did.
Her hand came up and gripped my shoulder hard enough to leave a mark.
We stayed like that for a second, my forehead against hers, both of us all the way still.
It wasn't like October at all. In October, we hadn't known each other and now I knew exactly who was under me and what she could do to a room full of hard-asses.
"Okay," she said, unsteady. "Okay."
Then we moved. It was good, then it was better, then it was past anything I could think through while it happened.
She got a hand between us. She told me what she wanted in a voice she'd never once used in a conference room, and I gave it to her.
Hard and deep and rocking my hips into her.
She came again with her forehead pressed into my neck and her breath breaking.
I followed her with my arms locked around her ribs and the whole of London out there in the rain not caring.
We came apart slowly.
The bathroom, the practicalities, the small unglamorous business of two adults in a hotel room. She stole my shirt on the way back and didn't button it and got into the bed like it belonged to her.
"That was better," she said.
"Than October?"
"October was two strangers being efficient." She turned onto her side to look at me. Her hair was a disaster. She'd never looked less like the woman who'd taken that committee apart this morning. "Tonight I knew who you were."
"Is that better?"
"It's harder. Which is different."
I lay there and let that settle. Somewhere below us a car went by on wet stone. Her foot found my ankle under the covers with the mindless comfort of a woman who wasn't thinking about where her feet were, and I stared at the ceiling and thought: there it is.
The relief was what frightened me.
Not the wanting, I could have managed wanting. What was actually happening in my chest was the loosening of something that had been clenched since a rooftop in October. It was probably since long before that, and the sensation was so pleasant that it took me a while to see it as danger.
She fell asleep with her hand on my sternum, the way you'd hold a door shut.
I didn't sleep for a long time. In nine hours, we would sit down across a table from a committee that would spend the next two months deciding whether we were the kind of people who could be trusted with their family's money.
There was a woman asleep on my chest whose access to my deal was total, and whose name I had not known until she arrived in my office, and in the morning we were going to walk into that room and pretend this hadn't happened.
I was already failing at the pretending.
I was lying in the dark composing what I'd say to her at breakfast, and the honest answer was don't go back to your room, and I knew I wasn't going to say it, and I knew I would want to for the rest of the deal.