Chapter 16 #2
He turned his hand over, slowly, on the bench beneath hers.
He took her hand.
He did not, even now, immediately move.
He looked at her face.
“Ada.”
“Yes.”
“This — this is not — this is not a campaign moment.”
“No.”
“This is — this is a real moment.”
“Yes.”
“There is no camera.”
“There is no camera.”
“There is — Halloran, there is going to be no — I want this without a single camera in the building.”
“Cass is gone. The crew is gone. Joanna is at home. Pete is in his car. Marin is on a plane. There is no one in this building who will know about this except us.”
“Wes.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t ask any more questions.”
He didn’t.
He leaned, very slowly, the small careful distance between them, on the bench in the mezzanine corner in the dim half-light of a building they had both been holding together for years, and he kissed her.
The kiss was quiet.
The kiss was not the small theatrical brushing she had been bracing herself for.
The kiss was the slow attentive thing it was always going to be once Wes Berglund had been given permission to do it on purpose, and it lasted long enough to be a kiss and not so long that it became a thing they would have to be careful about later.
It was warm. He smelled, very faintly, of dust from the banner and of the laundry detergent his mother bought when he was sixteen.
He kissed her like a man who had been thinking about kissing her in the careful way for a long time and had decided, when he was actually doing it, to be entirely there for her face and not for the kissing.
He pulled back.
He kept her hand.
He pressed his forehead, very gently, against hers, for one beat.
Then he sat up.
His eyes were — his eyes were very dark in the dim of the mezzanine.
“Ada,” he said, hoarse.
“Wes.”
“I — I — I think the contract is now a problem.”
“I think the contract is now a problem.”
“What — what do we do with that.”
“I don’t know.”
“Halloran, I am going to be — I am going to be very honest with you. I am going to be — I am going to need to think for a beat. I am — I am not — I am not going to be able to think in this corner. I am going to walk to the staff door. I am going to walk back. I am going to — I am going to put on my coat. Will you wait.”
“Yes.”
He stood up.
He let her hand go, carefully, like a man handing back a thing he had been holding only because he had been asked.
He picked up his coat. He picked up her tea. He set the tea back down by her hand. He did not, this time, look at her again. He walked down the long concrete stair and out across the lobby and out of the building, with no coat on, into the cold February air.
She sat in the mezzanine corner alone.
She did not, in the mezzanine corner alone, do anything.
She sat with her hand on her own mouth and her stocking feet on the cold concrete, and she breathed.
In her chest, the small kept stone she had been carrying since Family Skate Night had moved, finally, into a different position. It had not moved out. It had moved home.
She did not, in the corner, decide what was going to happen next.
She did not need to.
It had happened.
She had reached.
She had, for the first time in two years, reached for a person who had been reaching back.
She drank her tea.
After three minutes Wes came back into the lobby and up the long stair, in his coat, with his hands in his pockets, with his face arranged in the calm, neutral, slightly-funnier-than-people-expected way she had been quietly cataloguing for weeks.
He stopped at the top of the stair. He looked at her in the dim of the mezzanine.
“Halloran,” he said. “I — I have a sentence.”
“Yes.”
“The campaign has three days left.”
“Yes.”
“I am — I am going to ask you a question. I am asking you the question because I told you I would ask. I am — Ada, I am going to ask the question. Do you want me to keep performing the rule for the three days, and we will sit on the lobby bench in March and figure out the rest, or do you want me to drop the rule, now, in private, in this corner, and we will figure out the rest as we go.”
She looked at him.
She had not — she had not expected the question.
She had expected him to ask her, instead, what does this mean. The question he had asked was a much harder question. The question he had asked was, in the end, the only question that was actually on the table.
She thought.
She thought for a beat.
The woman in the third row. Riley’s stick. Marin’s email. The notebook in her bag downstairs.
She thought about her mother, at the marble table by the window, saying you are allowed to like a man who has been quietly trying to keep your hip from hurting when you teach kids to fall like potatoes.
And her brother, on his stool, saying it is January, there is no rule saying you have to have decided anything before the second of March.
She said, “Wes.”
“Yes.”
“I — I want the second one.”
“All right.”
“In private.”
“In private.”
“For three days, we keep performing the rule for the cameras. We hold hands when Cass is in the room. We sit through the gala, because we said we would. But the real version — the real version of us — we — we are real.”
“Yes.”
“Berglund.”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
He came.
He did not kiss her again. He sat on the bench beside her, this time without the coat between them. He took her hand in his, hand to hand, palm to palm, in the dim of the mezzanine. He held it.
He sat with her for a long time, with no clock, with nothing to perform, with no one in the building.
The cello version of the waltz, somewhere far below, was running through the lobby speakers because she had left her playlist on by mistake, and it was the second movement, with the long warm climb under the piano, and the building, that night, did not feel like a building that was running out of money.
It felt like a building that was holding two people who had been holding it.
After a long minute, very quietly, in the dim, Wes said: “Ada.”
“Yes.”
“The contract is now, very definitely, a problem.”
“Yes.”
“For now,” she said, “let it be.”
In the morning — Friday, in the back booth at the Penalty Box, at six-fifty-seven — Bridget Halligan brought their coffees over without being asked. Ada’s was oat milk, two sugars, hot. Wes’s was a black drip.
Bridget set both cups down. Bridget did not say anything. Bridget walked back to the counter.
Ada looked at Wes.
Wes looked at Ada.
Wes did not, this morning, ask whether the coffee was allowed.
He did not need to. Ada’s coffee was already in front of her, made the way she liked, by a woman who had been making it for her without being asked for three weeks.
Ada slid her ankle, very lightly, against his under the booth, where no camera was, where no clipboard was, where no Marin was.
She did not, for a beat, say anything.
He, very lightly, slid his ankle back.
That was the whole conversation.
Ada lifted her cup.
She said, “Berglund.”
He said, “Halloran.”
He said it the way he said it across the back booth on every Wednesday morning since they had been doing this six weeks ago. It was the same word. The word was, this morning, an entirely different word inside her chest.
She drank her coffee.
She watched the lobby, through the door of the Penalty Box, where Joanna had just unlocked the rink for the day and where Riley Henderson’s grandmother was, on the bench, taking off her boots before her morning at the boards.
The building was alive.
The booth was theirs.
It was a small, careful, unphotographed Friday morning, and she let herself have all of it, because she had learned not to assume there would be another one exactly like it.