Chapter 21 The Linen Room #2
Four seconds. I counted them later and it was four seconds.
Four seconds of absolute stillness, the two of us joined in the dark, frozen, not breathing, a journalist with two million readers standing on the other side of an unlocked door, the latch the only thing between her and the whole story, and Poppy looked at me in the dark with her eyes blazing and an expression of such pure incandescent joy that I understood she was, at this exact moment, having the best time of her entire life.
She reached up, slowly, silently, and pulled a folded flannel off the shelf and stuffed it into her own mouth, her own hand, her own choice, her enthusiastic-consent flag, biting down on the cloth, eyes streaming with the effort of not laughing or screaming or both.
The footsteps moved on, slow, leisurely, a meter and then two and then gone.
We waited until they were well gone, the pool door clicking far away at the end of the hall, and then the held silence detonated.
I started to fuck her again, no longer rationing it, deep and steady, my hips driving up into her, and she came almost immediately, the held charge of the last four minutes releasing all at once.
Her finish shook the whole shelf, towels coming down in a soft cascade around our heads, her teeth clamped in the flannel and her face screwed up and her body clenching and bucking against me in the dark, her cunt spasming hard around my cock, riding it out against the metal upright.
I felt every clench of it milk me and I followed her a few strokes after, burying deep and holding there, spilling into her in thick hot bursts while she clenched tight to keep all of it, and she pulled the flannel out of her mouth just enough to mouth my name silently against my neck, Adam, Adam, shaping it with no sound at all, the most articulate silence I’ve ever been the subject of.
We stayed joined a moment in the dark, both of us shaking, her forehead dropped to my shoulder, her breath a series of tiny voiceless huffs of laughter she couldn’t quite stop.
We rebuilt the towel wall in the dark, the two of us, crying with the suppressed laughter we’d been holding for ten minutes, restacking shelves and shaking with it, biting it down, and when we’d gotten ourselves more or less decent she straightened my collar, brisk, wifely, sending me back out to work, and then debriefed the entire sting operation in complete crisp sentences while visibly vibrating from head to foot.
“The dummy board worked, she photographed Musterfrau, Yuki wiped the roll, and she walked past this door with us in it and she has no idea, none, she’s got a phone full of herbal wraps and a head full of nothing.
” Poppy pressed both hands to her flushed face.
“I am so good at this. I am unspeakably good at this. Why did nobody ever let me be good at this before you came.”
She was still vibrating, mid-debrief, and the easy thing would have been to turn her by the shoulder and build her the careful list of three true things the way I had at the desk the night of the key room.
I didn’t. She’d told me herself she filed patterns, and a man who runs the same play twice on Poppy Brennan gets it clocked and docked for repetition.
So I gave her something blunter and shorter instead, in the gap between two of her own sentences, no ceremony around it at all.
“You beat a professional liar on her own ground, and she never knew there was a ground,” I said. “That includes beating the doctor. You already know it. I’m just the witness.”
And for once I didn’t watch the freckles catch. The blush didn’t come. The fire-alarm mouth loaded nothing and fired nothing. She held my eye a second, steady and a little frightened of her own steadiness, and then she answered me the only way Poppy ever fully trusted, which was not with words.
She crossed to the desk and opened her ledger with great ceremony.
“Three days ago,” she informed me, “I opened a betting line. ‘Eva gets played by the house.’ I set the odds myself. Generous odds, because I’m a fair bookmaker.
” She counted notes out of the pool into her own hand, slow, deliberate, every note a small argument she was making to herself that the thing I’d said was true.
“And I bet on it. Heavily. So technically this is a conflict of interest, but I’ve reviewed the matter as the compliance officer, and I’ve cleared myself.
” She pocketed the winnings, drew her shoulders back, and stood half an inch taller behind her own desk than I’d ever seen her stand. “Wellness initiative.”
That was Poppy letting a thing land. Not saying it back. Going and collecting on her own competence in cash, in front of the one person who’d finally named it.
But Eva, when I caught a glimpse of her that evening in the lounge, was not a defeated woman.
She had her phone out, and she was frowning at her own empty camera roll, and at a notebook, and her bright face had gone flat and calculating in a way I didn’t like at all.
She’d photographed a fictional spa. She’d lost the lot to a “decontamination” she half believed.
But near the linen room, on her circuit, she’d heard something.
A man’s voice in the dark. A stifled laugh.
The unmistakable acoustics of a secret being kept very badly behind a very thin door.
She didn’t have proof. She had something worse, for us. She had an instinct that had just been confirmed.
She wrote one line in her notebook, and underlined it, and underlined it again.
The story isn’t a treatment. It’s a man.