Chapter Twenty-Three
Garrett
The flat was dark when they arrived, the city light coming through the west-facing windows in long rectangles across the floor.
He did not turn on the overhead lights. He turned on the lamp on the desk, which cast a low warm light across the room, and she stood in the middle of it still in her coat and looked at the space with the assessing attention she brought to everything.
"Good desk," she said.
"I told you."
She turned to him. He took her coat and she let him, and he set it over the chair, and when he turned back she was watching him with the dark directness that had been there since the first morning, but with something added to it now, something that was no longer managed or contained.
He crossed to her. He put his hands at her face, both of them, his thumbs along her jaw, and she looked up at him without moving back.
Her hands came to his chest, flat, the way they had been on the plant floor three weeks ago, and he felt the warmth of them through his shirt the same way he had felt it then, but without the press line and the shift change and the weight of the decision still unmade between them.
The decision was made now.
He kissed her slowly, taking his time with it, his thumbs moving along her jaw and then into her hair, and she made a sound low in her throat that was not quite a word and pulled him closer by his shirt.
He walked her back until she found the edge of the sofa and sat down onto it, and he went with her, one knee on the cushion beside her, and kissed her throat where her pulse was quick and specific under his mouth.
"Garrett." His name in her voice at close range was a different thing from across a conference room.
"Yes," he said, against her skin.
She laughed, low and brief, and pulled his face back up to hers.
She kissed him with both hands in his hair and her body leaning into him, and he put his arm around her back and brought her fully against him, and for a moment they stayed like that, finding the shape of it, the specific arrangement of two people who had been avoiding this for three weeks and were no longer avoiding it.
He found the buttons of her shirt. She found his.
They were both unhurried about it, which surprised him and did not surprise him, because she did everything with the same quality of attention she brought to a pension variance model or a contract negotiation, fully present and fully deliberate, and he understood now that this was not strategy. It was simply how she was.
When her shirt came off he looked at her in the lamp light for a moment, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her skin warm and her eyes steady on his, and he thought: the most important thing is to pay attention.
He had learned this from his father about buildings and he applied it now to the specific architecture of her, the collarbone and the curve of her shoulder and the way she breathed when he put his mouth to her throat again.
Her hands moved across his shoulders, his back, learning the shape of him with the same thoroughness she brought to research.
She was not passive about it. She was never passive about anything, and this was no different: she pressed her palm flat to his chest and pushed him gently back and climbed into his lap and kissed him from above with her hands at his jaw, and he held her by the hips and let her set the pace, because the pace she set was exactly correct.
"The bedroom," she said eventually, against his mouth.
"Yes," he said.
The bedroom had the same west-facing windows, the same city light coming through in rectangles.
He had not put anything on the walls yet, which she noticed, and which he noticed her noticing, and which seemed in the moment to be exactly right: nothing between them and the thing itself, nothing to look at but each other.
He laid her down on the bed and she pulled him after her, and what followed was the kind of thing that was not reducible to sequence or summary, the kind that existed only in the living of it: her breath and his hands and the city quiet outside and the lamp throwing its warm reach through the doorway.
She was warm and certain and she said his name twice more and both times it was the same difference from across a conference room, and he understood, at some point in the middle of it, that the model he had been building of her since the first morning had been substantially incomplete.
He revised it.
Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and his arm around her and the city doing its quiet November business outside, and neither of them spoke for a while. He was aware of her breathing evening out and then not quite reaching sleep, the particular state of someone resting but still present.
"The Kelleher meeting," she said, at last.
He looked at the ceiling. "We said we weren't talking about work tonight."
"It's not tonight anymore. It's past midnight."
"Technically."
"Tuesday," she said. "Ten o'clock. I'll send you the dial-in."
"All right."
She was quiet again. He felt her fingers trace something on his chest, not a pattern, just the motion of a hand that needed to be doing something even at rest.
"Your father," she said. "Does he know you're in Chicago."
"I called him when I moved in. He asked about the flat."
"What did you tell him."
"That it had a good desk and west-facing windows."
She lifted her head and looked at him. In the low light from the doorway her face was different again, the third or fourth version of it he had found, each one showing something the others did not. "And what did he say."
"He said west-facing was the right choice. Morning light is too much too soon."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she put her head back down on his chest. "I like your father," she said.
"You've never met him."
"I like him anyway."
He held her in the dark and listened to the city and did not think about New York or the board timeline or the six months that had a fixed end, because those were tomorrow's calculations and tomorrow was not here yet.