Chapter 10 #2
"Still not frightened," she informs me. Her fingers work at my collar button, and I feel the slight drag of it against my throat, and her hands are warm and unhurried in a way that demolishes my last operational reserves entirely.
I press my mouth to her jaw, her throat, the soft place below her ear, and she tips her head to give me the angle, her fingers stilling on my collar because she has temporarily lost the thread of what they were doing, and I feel her pulse hammering against my lips, rapid and certain and not even slightly afraid.
She smells like damp rain and the vanilla perfume and underneath it something warm and specific and entirely hers, and I catalogue it with the same precision I catalogue everything, which means I will never lose it, which means this is going directly into a protected cell in the model and I will not be deleting it.
"Narod." She breathes it against my head. "The twelve to eighteen minutes."
"We have used approximately four," I report, against her collarbone.
She laughs, full and bright, and the laugh in the concrete stairwell is the best actuarial outcome I have produced in eleven years of practice.
I bring her mouth back to mine and she kisses me with her hands finally achieving their objective on my collar, pulling the fabric aside, and I am done with careful architecture, done with managing my angles and my volume and the precise quantity of myself I allow to occupy any given space.
She told me to stop. She came here and took apart my reference-numbered apology and pressed her hand to my chest and told me she wanted the version that doesn't calculate, and I am choosing, with the full weight of deliberate informed consent, to believe her.
Her cardigan, with her glasses neatly folded in the pocket, ends up over the metal railing.
Her blouse is extremely well-pressed, which I note because Livia presses her blouses, she is that kind of person, precise and considered, and the contrast of her pressed blouse against the concrete industrial wall of the emergency stairwell is something I find unreasonably compelling.
She gets my shirt untucked with the efficient economy of someone who has audited this particular process already and knows where the inefficiencies are.
The alarm continues its muffled testimony.
She is warm against the wall and I am between her and the rest of the stairwell and there is not much stairwell remaining, and her hands on my sides are doing something to my nervous system that my continuing professional development programme did not adequately prepare me for, and I am making sounds that I spent eleven years not making in professional or quasi-professional environments, and I find I cannot apply the required level of effort to stop, because she responds to every single one of them with a rolling urgency against me and a very specific expression that I am now, finally, learning to read correctly.
The expression means: more.
I oblige.
And then, with the timing of a risk event that arrives precisely within its stated probability window, the alarm stops.
The silence hits the stairwell like a dropped spreadsheet.
A beat. Two beats. Three.
The magnetic lock on the door above us disengages with a sound like a gunshot, and the door swings open, and the stairwell fills with industrial overhead light and the silhouette of an individual who is large even by the standards of a building full of Orcs, broad-shouldered and grey-tusked and with the aura of a person who has run an actuarial firm for twenty-three years and has personally reviewed my last four performance evaluations.
"Drokk Guumstrop, Chief Executive Officer of Guumstrop and Varik Actuarial Associates and the individual who signed both my initial employment contract and my last three annual salary reviews, comes to a complete and total stop in the doorway.
He looks directly at me, his gaze sweeping from my dishevelled shirt to my loosened tie to the specific angle at which Livia is currently pressed against the concrete wall.
He looks at Livia, whose glasses are askew and whose hair has come entirely free of its usual neat arrangement and whose blouse is displaying a degree of structural compromise that would not pass any reasonable professional dress code audit.
He looks, with an air of grim methodical assessment, at the navy blue cardigan that is draped over the metal railing approximately four steps below us, one sleeve dangling in a manner that suggests it was removed with some urgency and without particular attention to its subsequent storage location.
His expression moves through several distinct phases in approximately two seconds.
"Narod," he says.
"Drokk," I say. My voice is the other voice still, which is not ideal.
The silence extends for exactly the length of time it takes my blood pressure to "The all-clear," Drokk says, with the flatness of a man who has decided that some variables are outside his current scope, "has been issued. Your team is returning to their floors."
He reaches into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, extracts a crisp business card, and extends it toward Livia. She reaches past my arm to take it. "Call if you ever need anything," Drokk adds.
A pause. "Take your time." He pulls the door shut behind him with great deliberate care.
The magnetic lock clicks back into place.
Livia's face is pressed against my shoulder and her shoulders are shaking.