Chapter 13 #2
Her hand was still at the back of Chloe’s neck.
Her thumb was, Chloe felt without looking, against the small dip of skin beneath Chloe’s ear, the place she had touched once in the hall on the night of the small kiss that had not yet, this Wednesday afternoon, happened.
Eleanor’s hand did not, on the third ring, move.
Her thumb pressed, fractionally, against the skin — half a millimetre, no more, the small involuntary tightening of a hand whose owner had decided something she did not, in the moment, want to act on.
Then Eleanor opened her eyes.
She did not, in opening them, look at Chloe.
She looked at the phone.
On the fourth ring, Eleanor pulled back.
She did not pull back violently. She pulled back the way she did most things.
At her own pace. The reduction of distance Chloe and she had built across the previous ninety seconds was undone in less than two, with the small clean efficiency of a person who had remembered what her hands were for.
Eleanor stood. She walked to the desk. She picked up the receiver.
“Eleanor Vale.”
She listened.
She said, after a pause Chloe could not, from the sofa, calibrate, “Yes.”
She listened. She turned, fractionally, so that her face was, from the sofa, almost in profile. The light from the standing lamp caught the side of her cheek and her jaw and the small soft fall of hair against her ear. She did not look at Chloe.
Chloe sat on the sofa with the book closed on the cushion between her hand and the place Eleanor’s hand had been, and let herself, for the next ninety seconds, imagine what would have happened if the phone had not rung.
She imagined the kiss. She imagined the angle of it.
She imagined the small specific moment in which Eleanor would have, after the first contact, lifted her hand from the cushion to Chloe’s jaw and put it against the place her own thumb had just been pressing under her ear.
She imagined the wine glasses being abandoned.
She imagined being lowered backward into the cushion.
She imagined Eleanor’s mouth against her throat.
She imagined Eleanor’s hand under the cream jumper.
She did not, in any of the imagining, censor herself.
She felt, sitting in the standing lamp’s small radius of warmth with Eleanor three feet away on the phone to a woman whose name Chloe did not know, her own arousal sit in her stomach as a flat clean fact.
She had not, before this Wednesday afternoon, been a woman who would have let herself sit on someone else’s sofa imagining what their hand would have done to her three feet from where they were standing.
She was, now, the woman who would.
She did not, when Eleanor finally turned round and set the receiver down and came back across the room, attempt to make her face do anything other than register what it had been registering for the ninety seconds in which Eleanor had been absent from it.
Eleanor saw.
Eleanor’s face — Chloe registered, in the moment of Eleanor seeing — did the smallest thing it had done all evening.
The composure she had assembled in the time it had taken her to cross the room reassembled itself again, fractionally, for the closing of the moment.
But the reassembly was visible. Eleanor knew Chloe had seen her in the act of putting herself back together.
It was the first time, Chloe registered, Eleanor had been unable to hide the assembly from her.
She did not, in the moment, take pride in it.
She did, however, register it.
She said, “I — I can’t. Not tonight.”
She said, “Yes. I know. I — yes.”
She said, “I’m sorry.”
She said, “I am.”
She set down the receiver.
The phone began to ring again.
It was the same number — Chloe could tell, by the small absolute lack of reaction on Eleanor’s face when the ringing began, that it was the woman she had just been speaking to ringing back to add one more thing.
Eleanor’s hand stayed on the receiver.
She did not, on the first ring, pick it up.
She did not, on the second, pick it up.
She stayed at the desk with her hand resting against the receiver and the phone ringing under her palm and her back to the sofa and her face — Chloe registered, on the sofa, behind her — held in the kind of small composed stillness one held one’s face in when one was deciding, in the gap between two seconds, whether one had it in one to pick up the receiver again.
On the fourth ring, she did.
Chloe registered, on the sofa, that this had happened.
She registered, also, that the registering was now reciprocal.
Eleanor had been seen, by Chloe, in the act of almost not picking up.
Eleanor knew she had been seen. The seeing had not, this afternoon, been hidden — and the not-hiding was, Chloe was beginning to realise, the part of Eleanor that was new this month.
She did not, immediately, turn round.
She stood with her hand on the desk and her back to the sofa for a long beat. Chloe, on the sofa, with the slim Carson face-down on the cushion between her hand and the place Eleanor’s hand had been, did not breathe.
Eleanor turned.
Her face had gone back to itself. The expression Chloe had been about to be kissed by — the parted lips, the unguarded eyes, the version of Eleanor that had been on the sofa ninety seconds ago — had been put away.
She was not, however, looking at Chloe with cruelty.
She was looking at her with a small ruined apology she did not, in the moment, know how to articulate.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s — ”
“It isn’t.”
“No.”
“Let’s stop there for tonight.”
“Yes.”
Both lying. Both knowing they were lying. Neither in a position to do anything other than continue.
Chloe put on her coat in the hall by herself.
Eleanor stood at the bottom of the stairs.
She did not, this time, help with the coat.
She did not, this time, lean against the door.
She said, at the threshold, “I will see you tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Chloe.”
Chloe looked at her.
“I am — ” Eleanor said. “I am — ”
She did not finish the sentence.
She closed the door.
Chloe walked to the gate. She walked through it. She went a third of the way down Banbury Road and stopped under a streetlight and considered, with the clear cold rage of a woman who had been ninety seconds from getting something she had wanted for three months, ringing the bell again.
She did not.
She walked.
The cold went straight through her coat. The bus, when she got on it, was empty. She sat at the back. She put her forehead against the window. She did not, until the bus had crossed Magdalen Bridge and the lights of the High Street were behind her, register that she was crying.
It was a small crying. Two tears, perhaps three. It did not last past Cowley Road.
She did not, when she got home, tell Mira she had been crying. She did not need to.
Mira looked at her once, properly, in the kitchen.
Mira did not ask.