Chapter 14 #2
Eleanor’s thumb moved once, at the cheekbone — a small involuntary settling, the same fraction of an inch Chloe had felt against the green book in the study on the second Friday — and then Eleanor leaned in.
The kiss was the smallest kiss Chloe had ever been given.
It was not, by any measure she had previously used, a passionate one.
There was no force in it. There was no insistence.
Eleanor’s mouth on her own was warm, dry, slow, careful — the kiss of a woman who had spent decades not doing this and who was, in the act of doing it, keeping a promise to herself about restraint.
The kiss was, in fact, almost chaste. It would have, Chloe thought later, looked from across a room like the kiss of two friends saying goodbye in a play.
It lasted, perhaps, three seconds.
It undid her completely.
She felt the smallness of it land in her body with a force she would not have predicted from any kiss she had previously experienced.
The chastity was the thing. The carefulness was the thing.
The fact that Eleanor — who had been built, over fourteen years, to seduce younger women into the appearance of consent — had chosen, in the only kiss the two of them would have for two weeks, to give her a kiss she could afterwards have shown to her mother: that was the violence of it.
Eleanor pulled back.
She did not, in pulling back, remove her hand.
She left the hand on Chloe’s face for another full second. Her thumb at the cheekbone. The base of her hand at the jaw. Her eyes very close to Chloe’s. The fire moving against the side of her face.
She said, quietly, “There.”
“Yes.”
“That is what I have been trying not to do.”
“Yes.”
“I would like — ”
She stopped.
She removed her hand.
The removal was the slowest physical movement Chloe had ever watched a woman make.
Eleanor lifted her hand off Chloe’s jaw a millimetre at a time, the way one lifted a hand off a small sleeping animal one did not wish to wake.
By the time the hand had returned to Eleanor’s own lap, Chloe’s face was — she could feel this — flushed, hot, and slightly damp at the corner of one eye.
Eleanor sat back.
She did not, for a moment, speak.
She drank from her wine glass.
She set the glass down.
She said, “Go home, Chloe.”
It was not, this time, said in any voice that could be misread as cruelty.
It was said with the small ruined precision of a woman who had decided, mid-decision, that she was not going to allow any further decisions to be made tonight.
There was nothing dismissive in it. There was, in fact, the opposite of dismissal — there was a small unfinished tenderness that the dismissal was being used to contain.
Chloe looked at her for a long moment.
She did not argue.
She put her glass on the table. She got up. She walked, very carefully, to the door of the sitting room. She paused there.
“Eleanor.”
It was the second time she had said the name.
Eleanor looked up from the fire.
Chloe said, “I am not going to apologise for this.”
“No,” Eleanor said.
“I am not going to apologise for any of it.”
“No.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Chloe.”
She went into the hall. She put on her coat. She did not, this time, wait for Eleanor to come and help her. She let herself out.
She walked.
She did not take the bus. She had not taken the bus on the night of the storm, either, on the way home; tonight she did not take it on principle.
The cold was necessary. The cold was the only thing that was going to make her body feel like a body she lived in rather than a body that had, in the last twenty minutes, been touched.
She walked down Banbury Road. She walked past the streetlamp where she had cried briefly on the bus on Wednesday.
She walked past the corner where, in second year, she had once cried in a phone booth.
She walked into the city, past the round shadow of the Radcliffe Camera, past the long shape of the Bodleian, down Cornmarket and over Magdalen Bridge.
By the time she reached the flat, her ears were burning with cold and her hands were stiff inside her pockets and her face was wet.
She had not, on the walk, allowed herself to cry. The wetness was, she registered when she put her hand to her face on the doorstep, the cold drawing water from her eyes the way the cold did when one walked into it for long enough.
It was not, she chose to decide, crying.
She let herself in.
Mira was in the kitchen, in pyjamas, eating cereal out of a mug.
Mira looked at her.
Mira did not say anything.
Chloe said, “I’m not going to talk about it tonight.”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I’ll talk about it.”
“I know.”
“Tomorrow.”
“All right.”
Chloe went into her bedroom. She closed the door. She did not turn on the light. She sat on the edge of the bed in her coat and felt — for the first time in three months, with an unwelcome and absolute clarity — that she had made a decision about her own life.
She lifted her hand to her face.
She put her thumb against her own cheekbone in exactly the place Eleanor’s thumb had been.
She did this once. Only once.
She had not, when she had stood up from the chair in Eleanor’s sitting room, been sure she had not imagined it.
She was sure now.