Chapter 12 #2
Behind the door, Cordelia was on a call.
Wren couldn't make out the words, only the low rise and fall of the voice, and her whole body had tuned to it before she'd noticed, bracing for the pause that would mean it was over.
She read the same line four times without taking in a word.
Last night, that voice had been against her ear, low and coming apart, saying things she could still feel more than remember.
And now, it was three feet away from her on the opposite side of the wall, smooth and unbothered, and she couldn't get her breathing to even out.
She sat very still and hated how much of her was straining to hear.
The door opened a little before half past nine, and Wren was reading her the instant she appeared.
Cordelia came toward the desk, and Wren took her in fast and greedy, hunting for the one thing that would tell her where they stood.
The mouth she'd kissed last night was set in its usual line.
Cordelia had smoothed her hair straight back, and her eyes came up to meet Wren's, held them a beat, and gave away nothing.
Everything about her said this was just another ordinary Saturday.
Wren had watched her wear the same expression in a boardroom to end a discussion, and she couldn't tell now whether she was looking at armor or at the truth of it, whether last night had cost Cordelia anything at all.
She leaned past Wren to set a mug down. For a moment she was close, closer than she'd been since the dark, close enough that Wren caught the cold morning still clinging to her sweater, and the pull to lean the last few inches in was so strong she had to hold herself against it. She didn't move. Cordelia straightened.
Black, no sugar, in the plain white mug from the kitchenette.
It was how Wren drank it, which she'd never told her.
For three months, it had been the other way around: Wren carrying a steaming mug of coffee in her office and watching Cordelia drink it like it was a life-giving elixir, never once looking up to see who'd brought it.
Now Cordelia had gone to the kitchen and made Wren one and carried it out herself.
Wren felt her cheeks grow warm before she could do a thing about it.
Cordelia didn't say anything about the coffee.
She looked at Wren instead, straight on, and Wren made herself hold the eye contact.
It landed on her skin, the whole weight of Cordelia's attention.
For once, she was the one being read and not the one reading, and for as long as it lasted, she couldn't have got a word out, even if the building were on fire.
Then something crossed Cordelia's face, there and gone before Wren could name it, and she shut it away and was the boss again.
"How's the markup coming along?" Cordelia said.
"Done. There's one change buried in the definitions I want you to see before it goes back. I flagged it for you."
"Show me at ten."
"I'll have it ready."
It was easier the second they were talking about work; it always was.
Neither of them mentioned the coffee, which sat there steaming through the whole exchange.
Cordelia took her own mug and went back into her office, and this time she left the door open.
Wren watched her go, then dragged her eyes back to the screen.
She picked up the coffee mug. It was still too hot, and she drank it too fast anyway.
It scalded going down, and she was glad for it, glad that she had one thing she could feel that had a simple cause.
Good coffee that was made right. Wren sat for a moment with the heat of it spreading under her ribs.
The flagged page sat open in front of her, and then she did the only sane thing left on a Saturday morning and went back to work.
At ten, she took the flagged page into Cordelia’s inner office, and they went over it with the door open and the desk between them.
All business. She walked Cordelia through what the reworded phrase did and what it would cost her to let it stand; Cordelia asked two questions, agreed with the fix, and told her to send it back.
Nothing in her face said that ninety minutes earlier she'd shown Wren kindness.
Wren gave her nothing back either. She kept her voice even, her eyes on the page, and was exactly the assistant she was paid to be, and it cost her more than she'd have guessed to sit two feet from that mouth and talk about consent thresholds.
When she went back to her own desk the familiar wall stood up between them again, and she was glad of it and she wasn't.
For the rest of the morning, she worked, and the strangest part was how easily she lost herself in it.
Anyone watching would have seen a capable woman at a desk on a Saturday, building out a calendar and catching up on projects, and none of what was underneath would have shown.
Her hands were steady. Her emails were clean and quick.
On the phone she sounded exactly like herself.
Nobody would ever know. She could take the whole of it, the dark office and the mouth at her neck and the coffee this morning, and tuck it down small and out of sight and go on being useful over the top of it, and that competence, that seamlessness, was the loneliest thing she owned.
The afternoon filled up and thinned out.
She sent the markup back to counsel and moved the Monday meeting for the third time.
It was a skeleton crew that day, and one by one the others finished and left, until it was just the two of them again.
With Cordelia's door shut, the small things landed on Wren’s desk instead.
A little after two, Lauren Pike called for a number she hadn't been sent; Wren had it and read it out, and Lauren thanked her by name and hung up happy.
It was the kind of afternoon Wren knew how to disappear into, and she was grateful for it, for every last thing that needed her, because each one was a minute she didn't have to spend thinking about other things.
Once, later on, Cordelia came out and went to the kitchen and back. Wren went still, and felt something lift in her, stupid and hopeful, and then Cordelia passed the desk without slowing and it dropped. No coffee this time. No look. Just the day, going on.
She didn't see her go. She was deep in the quarterly binder, chasing a total that wouldn't reconcile, and when she looked up to ask Cordelia about it, it was past five and the office across the floor was dark: the desk lamp off, the coat gone from the hook, the door open on an empty room.
For a moment, she kept expecting Cordelia to be sitting in there.
Then she took it in. Cordelia had gone home at five without a word to her and left not so much as a note.
Wren carried her mug to the kitchen to rinse it and found Cordelia's already on the rack, washed and turned over, the only thing left of the morning they shared.
She stood there, just looking at it. Then she rinsed hers and set it next to Cordelia's, the two of them side by side, and got her bag.
Outside, she stood on the steps and took a deep breath.
The whole day was still in her, and she had no one to talk to about any of it, no one at home, no one anywhere.
She thought about the apartment, the boxes she still hadn't unpacked, how quiet it would be, and knew she couldn't be in it yet, alone with all of this.
What she wanted was to keep moving. So she turned left, toward the water, instead of right toward home, and walked.
She walked along the water, and after a while the day stopped churning quite so hard, which was the only reason she ever walked anywhere. She'd come this way once before, months ago, new to the city with no one to call, and she gravitated that way now to the cafe without thinking about it.
The purple door was propped open, and the warmth reached her before she was through it, the noise and the smell of coffee, a whole room of people who wanted nothing from her. After the quiet of the office all day it was almost too much, and exactly what she'd come for.
Lavender saw her the second she walked in.
Wren watched it happen, the lift of her head and the small change in her face when she saw who it was, and something in her chest loosened at being recognized like that.
"There she is," Lavender said. "Sit yourself down, love.
You look like the day had you instead of you having the day. "
Lavender didn't ask what she wanted. She reached for the squat dark bottle on the back shelf and poured, and Wren let herself be waited on, which still felt so uncomfortable for her.
Lavender placed the glass in front of her, filled with the same amber liquid as she was served the first night she was here.
"On me," Lavender said, smiled, and left her to it.
She wrapped both hands around the glass.
The heat of it went up her arms and into her, and she didn't drink it, only held it.
All day she'd been holding other people's things and their problems, and this was one small warm thing that was hers to hold.
She relaxed into her seat as she sank back into her body and drank.