Chapter 23 Frau Doktor #2
She brought me near the edge, caught the change in my breathing before I felt it myself, and stopped. Deliberately. Pulled back, breathing hard, her lips parted, her hair down and her coat open and her control in ruins.
“Not here,” she said, low, fierce. “Not in this office. I live upstairs. I have lived upstairs, alone, for two years, above this room where I schedule everyone else’s lives.” She stood, and took my hand. “Tonight that ends. Come up.”
The stairs to her private suite were taken half-undressed and urgent, her coat abandoned on a step, my shirt somewhere behind us, and at the top was a room I’d never seen, austere and warm and entirely hers, and a bed she’d slept in alone for two years.
And she did one more thing first that told me everything about the cost of it.
She bent herself over her own footboard. Before I touched her. Of her own accord, gripping the wood, presenting herself, the directress who signed every document in the building with her own hand putting the pen down for once and asking, with her whole body, for someone else to take it.
“I sign everything in this house,” she said, over her shoulder, every cut-glass consonant of it gone soft and unsteady, her knuckles whitening on the footboard where her steady surgeon’s hands had finally begun to shake.
“Everything. Every prescription, every result, every beginning. Tonight someone else holds the pen. Do you understand me. Take it.”
I stepped up behind her and ran my hands down the long stocking-seamed length of her legs first, up over the full matronly curve of her hips and ass, the body the pencil skirts had framed and the corridor had watched and no one had touched in two years, and she shivered and pressed back into my hands.
I dragged my fingers through her from behind and found her drenched and swollen and waiting, sank two of them up into her and felt her clench, and she made a low broken sound at the first curl of my fingers, the directress of Silberquell bent over her own footboard begging without words, rocking back onto my hand.
Then I set the head of my cock against her and pushed home, sinking into her slow and deep, her body stretching to take all of me until there was no more of me to give her, until she gasped and her knuckles went white on the wood, still in her stockings and the abandoned ruin of her uniform, and the cries that came out of her climbed up out of two years of silence, out of a house full of other people’s hope, out of the woman who’d watched everyone walk through doors she built and never once used one herself.
I gripped her full hips and gave her the steady relentless weight she’d been holding her breath for since a printout stopped her cold in the autumn, fucking her deep and unhurried and certain, the slap of my hips against her ass filling the quiet room, and she gripped the footboard and shook and made sounds I’d have sworn she had no capacity for, sounds with no German precision in them at all, the composure gone all the way down to the woman.
“There,” she got out, “there, God, like that, don’t stop, I’ve written that exact instruction onto a chart for someone else and never once…” and the sentence broke and didn’t come back.
Then I turned her, and laid her back on the bed she’d been alone in, and the glasses came off at last, set on the nightstand, and the directress was nowhere in the room.
There was only Marlene, forty-four, magnificent, her heavy breasts spread soft across her chest, her silver-blonde hair loose across her own pillow, her stockinged legs wrapping around the man her own bloodwork had found in a panel of routine staff screening eight months before, and I slid back into her slow, face to face, sinking deep until she gasped, and she pulled me down and held on.
And she counted.
It was the most extraordinary thing. The clinical habit, the woman who counted and charted and measured everyone’s everything, turned wanton, counting each one aloud between gasps as it came, a scoreboard of her own undoing kept in her own breaking voice.
“That’s, that’s two,” she gasped, her nails in my back, “God, three, that’s, I haven’t, in two years I haven’t even by myself more than, four, Adam, four…
” and she lost the count somewhere after that, the data abandoned past retrieval, the most exacting woman I’d ever watched work reduced to no numbers at all.
When I was close she framed my face with both hands, as I’d learned the women of this house did when they needed me to see them, and she held my eyes, and she gave the order, the house’s own command phrase turned all the way around and aimed at herself, soft and absolute, the prescriber prescribing her own cure.
“Complete the treatment,” Marlene whispered, her legs locking, drawing me deep. “Doctor’s orders.”
I drove deep and finished inside her, my cock throbbing through spurt after spurt as I emptied into her, held there deep, and her body bowed up to take it, her arms cinched around my back to keep me planted and all of it deep inside her, and the last of it gave without a single sound, the way her magnets had scattered loose off the board downstairs, two years of locked doors and a logbook in a drawer all coming free at once, and she held me inside her and didn’t let go, her face against my throat, her loose hair everywhere.
We lay tangled a long time after, the chignon a silver ruin across us both, her head on my chest where her own habit had her taking my pulse with two fingers even now.
And in the dark, near two in the morning, she cracked one sealed door an inch.
“I came to Silberquell the first time,” she said, quietly, to the dark ceiling, “long before I ran it. Years before. I came up that cable car like every other frightened woman, and I signed my name in the book at the front desk, and I took the waters.” A long pause, and she let it sit in the dark between us before she finished it. “It did not end in a nursery.”
She didn’t say more about it. I didn’t ask. Some doors you let a person open by exactly the inch they choose.
“Henrik was kind,” she said, after a while, even quieter.
“Greta has the phrasing right. The kind ones ruin you for clinics.” And the logbook in the locked desk drawer, and the pressed edelweiss, and the blank magnet she’d carried into the monitor room to think about, all of it lay suddenly in the same room together, contiguous, a shape with no name yet but a clear silhouette, and she let me see the shape and kept the name, and that was hers to keep.
Then she was nearly asleep, and the dryness came back into her voice, the directress reassembling one last time at the very edge of sleep, and she said the most Marlene thing I ever heard her say.
“Tell Brennan the pool money goes to the staff fund,” she murmured, into my chest, eyes closed. “All of it. She’ll understand.” A breath. “She’ll know I knew the whole time.”
“You knew about the betting pool?”
“Herr Keller,” Marlene said, on the absolute edge of sleep, “I know everything that happens in my house. I always have. I had Thursday in my own pool under a false name through Poppy’s cousin.
” And she fell asleep on that, on my chest, the most controlled woman I’d ever known having played her own betting pool on her own surrender, and won.
At dawn I went down before the house woke.
The board in the office had been righted, the scattered magnets returned to their places in the night by someone, by her, before we’d gone up, or after, I didn’t know. The grid was whole again, every name and window restored.
And her magnet, the lonely white one, was in the grid at last. Named now, M.A. in her own hand, no longer set apart at the edge, no longer blank, no longer eight months alone.
Placed not in the guest column.
In the staff column.