13. Beau #2
“The whole thing only works if we both stay in our roles,” she says, to the page, not to me.
“When we’re seen, fine. Do the arm, do the proximity, do the looking-at-me thing.
That’s the performance, and I’m good at performances, and so are you, apparently.
But when it’s just us — no audience, no one to convince — we’re business partners.
Colleagues. You don’t buy me coffee when there’s no one around to see it.
You don’t —” she stops, restarts, and I notice she’s using more words than she needs, which I’ve started to understand is the tell, the place where the true thing is “— you don’t do the small things.
The unprompted things. Because that’s how people get confused, and I’d like to keep it that way. ”
“Okay,” I say.
She looks up, surprised, like she expected me to fight it. “Okay?”
“It’s your rule. You get rules about how you’re treated. That’s the whole point of rules.” I turn the coffee cup a quarter-turn on the counter. “I don’t fully get it. But I don’t have to get it to agree to it.”
Something moves across her face that I can’t read, and I’m good at reading faces, and the fact that I can’t read hers is becoming the most interesting unsolved thing in my life.
She holds my eyes for a second. Then she writes something next to rule seven — a checkmark, or a note, I can’t see — and her shoulders come down a fraction in the way Theo’s did at the bar, the way people’s do when a thing they were braced for didn’t hurt.
She braced for that one. I add it to the list of things I’m keeping about her which I don’t yet have system for.
“That’s the list,” she says, and caps the pen with a click, and the formality of it breaks like a faceoff being won, and suddenly we’re just two people in a closed bookshop with the work done and nothing left to be businesslike about.
“We need to seal it,” I say.
“It’s not a treaty.”
“It’s an arrangement with terms, you said so. Terms get sealed.” I hold out a hand across the counter. “Handshake.”
She looks at my hand. “A handshake is so —”
“Businesslike. I know. That’s the point. You’ve spent an hour making this businesslike. Lean in.”
She takes my hand.
And it’s a handshake — it’s a normal handshake, her hand smaller than mine and cooler, a firm professional shake of the kind you’d give anyone — except that neither of us lets go on the beat where you let go, and then we’re a half-second past the beat, and then a full second, and her eyes come up to mine and mine are already on hers and the bookshop is very quiet and very gold-going-blue and there is absolutely no one here to perform for, which means whatever this is, it isn’t the performance.
She lets go first.
“That’s sealed,” she says, and her voice isn’t quite level, and she knows it isn’t, and she hates that she knows it.
“We should practice,” I say.
“Practice?”
“Being convincing. You said it has to read as real. We’ve never actually — it’s always been in front of people, reacting.
We’ve never just tried it, cold, to see if it holds.
” I’m aware, somewhere a beat behind my own mouth, that this is a terrible idea dressed as a good one, which is the most dangerous kind.
“Look at me like you mean it. See if I can hold it.”
She sets the pen down. She looks at me.
And she’s good — of course she’s good, she’s the best one on the stage, I watched the clips — she drops something into her face, some warmth, some private attention, the look of a person who’s chosen you out of a room, and it lands like a check you didn’t see coming, takes the air right out of me, and I forget for a second that it’s a drill.
I actually forget. My whole life is performance and I’m sitting here getting out-performed by a theater major in my grandmother’s bookshop and the worst part is I don’t even mind.
Then she breaks it — laughs, the real one, the one she keeps trying to strangle in the cradle, and it gets all the way out this time, surprised out of her, and the sound of it does more damage than the look did.
“You blinked,” she says, recovering, pointing at me. “First. You broke first. You’re terrible at this.”
“I did not blink.”
“You absolutely blinked, you went —” she does an impression of a man short-circuiting that is genuinely, infuriatingly accurate “— you panicked.”
“That was strategic blinking.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s a thing. It’s like strategic blinking is to staring contests what—” I’m laughing now too, which I didn’t decide to do, “—I had a whole plan—”
“You had no plan. You came here with no notes and no plan and one coffee you didn’t even bring—”
“You poured the coffee—”
“—and you’ve been out-negotiated, out-stared, and now you’re inventing strategic blinking, which is the saddest retreat I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve watched the Whitmore football team play.”
And I laugh, the real one, the one that surprises me, and she’s laughing, and for a second the whole arrangement — the rules, the tiers, the capital letters, the careful borders of the furniture — falls away completely, and it’s just us, in a warm shop, laughing at nothing, and I notice, late, the way I notice everything:
this stopped being a negotiation a while ago and I didn’t catch the moment it happened.
I don’t say that.
I never do.
She walks me to the door when it’s done. The cold comes in when she opens it, and she’s standing in the warm gold of the shop and I’m half into the blue of the street, and there’s a beat where neither of us says the thing that would end it.
“Text me your schedule,” she says.
“Text me the rules. Whenever.” Whenever.
“I will.” A pause. “Goodnight, Sorensen.”
“Night, Beckett.”
She doesn’t veto Beckett.
I noticed, three days ago at the parking lot, that she doesn’t veto Beckett — she vetoed everything else, babe got a look that could curdle milk, sweetheart got a full sentence of contempt earlier tonight when I floated it as a joke, but Beckett she just lets stand, lets land, and I don’t know what it means and I want to know what it means.
I walk home in the cold with the rules in my head — six of them, with sub-clauses, because I do remember, I told her I would and I did — and somewhere around the second block I realize I never found out what she wrote next to rule seven.
The checkmark. The note I couldn’t see. There was a thing she added there at the end, in pen, and I didn’t see it, and I want to have seen it, and I’m aware that wanting to have seen it is its own piece of information about me that I’m choosing not to process.
A beat late. The way I process everything.
My phone buzzes against my hip.
Sloane
The rules. As promised. Now you can’t claim you misremembered tier three.
There’s a photo attached. The list. She’s photographed the whole thing rather than typing it out, the actual page in her actual handwriting, small and even, and I stop under the lamppost at the corner of Mill and Main because reading a photo of handwriting is its own particular fight and I’d rather lose it standing still than walking.
I work down the page. Slow. The way it always is — the lines wanting to slide, the letters not holding still, the effort of it that I’ve spent thirteen years making sure nobody watches me spend.
But I’ve got time and I’m alone and there’s no one waiting on the reply, which is the only condition under which the page and I make peace, so I take it rule by rule.
Duration. Visibility. The tiered system, capital letters and all.
Rule four, Mormor underlined twice. Five, six.
Seven — and there, next to seven, the checkmark I couldn’t see across the counter.
Just a checkmark. Nothing else. I sit with the small disappointment of that longer than a checkmark warrants.
And then under seven, under the line where the list was supposed to end, where the arrangement officially stops — there’s another one. Lower on the page. Smaller. Like it got added at a different time, in a different mood, pressed harder into the paper.
8.
It takes me a second. It always takes me a second, and then the words come, and then I wish they’d taken longer.
Do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake.
I read it twice. Once for the words. Once for the meaning, which is the part that lands.
She didn’t mean to send me that one. I know it the way I know where the puck’s going before it gets there — she photographed the whole page, the six rules and the secret seventh thing under seven, and didn’t think to crop, or did think to crop and decided it didn’t matter because rule eight isn’t a rule for me.
It’s a rule for her. A note she left herself in pen on a morning I don’t know anything about, and now I’m standing under a lamppost on Mill Street holding the one piece of her she’d never have handed over on purpose.
Do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake.
You only write that down, I think — you only need that rule, in pen, underlined harder than the others — if some part of you is already worried you might.
I don’t text back about rule eight. I’m not going to embarrass her, and I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t see it. So I do the third thing, which is the coward’s thing, which is to answer the part she meant to send.
Got them. Tier three noted. I’ll behave.
The dots appear. Disappear. Appear.
Sloane
You won’t, but I appreciate the effort.
I put the phone in my pocket. I stand under the lamppost a second longer than the cold makes reasonable, because there’s a thing happening in my chest that I’d have to be a lot more honest than I currently am to name, and I’m not going to name it — the same way she’s not going to admit she wrote rule eight, because she’s scared of the exact thing I’m not naming.
We’re going to be a problem for each other.