Chapter Fifty-One
Garrett
They ate at the walnut table.
The lamb was right. The wine she had brought was better than right. The table between them was solid and warm in the lamp light and neither of them mentioned it again, because some things did not require mention once they had been seen.
They talked. About Wisconsin and the facility Victor had sent the preliminary report on.
About Diane, who had started sending Garrett articles about labour economics without explanation, which Cait said was high praise.
About his father's Evanston community centre, which had opened the previous week and which Patrick Walsh had attended the opening of and had sent a photograph: the acoustic space, the light through the tall windows, exactly the angle his father had spent months calculating.
They talked the way they had talked at the birria restaurant in November, easily, without agenda, two people who had been finding out about each other for six months and had not run out of things to find.
He thought about that first dinner: the two hours, the cold, the walk to her car.
The distance between that evening and this one was not only time.
It was everything that had been built in the time.
After dinner she washed up and he dried, the arrangement that had established itself in February.
He put the glasses away. She wiped the counter.
She was standing at the counter with the cloth in her hand when he came up behind her and put his hands at her shoulders and she leaned back against him without turning, her head tilting slightly, his mouth finding the side of her neck.
She set the cloth down.
She turned. She looked up at him in the kitchen light, the specific directness he had known since the first morning, but with nothing held back now, nothing professional or managed, simply what she was looking at him with, which was everything she had.
He kissed her there, in the kitchen, with the walnut table visible through the doorway and the green cups on the counter and her father's photograph and the west-facing windows dark with the night.
He kissed her slowly, both hands at her face, taking his time the way he took his time with everything that mattered, and she kissed him back with her hands in his shirt and her body against his and the specific ease of two people who knew each other well enough that nothing needed to be performed.
He walked her backward through the flat.
She went without hurrying, her hands at his face now, finding the angle of it in the dark, the jaw and the cheekbone and the specific architecture of him that she had been learning since November.
He found the bedroom doorway. She found the bed.
They went down onto it together in the unhurried way of people who understood they had time, not the anxious urgency of the first time but the deliberate weight of something chosen fully and without reservation.
He took his time with her. That was the thing he had understood in the months between the first time and this one: that the most important thing was to be present to the specific person in front of you, not to a category or a moment but to her, the exact her, the dark hair and the precise hands and the way she breathed when he put his mouth to her throat and the sound she made when he found the particular place at her collarbone that made her close her eyes.
He found it. She closed her eyes.
"Garrett," she said. His name in the dark, the same difference it had always been from across a conference room, but larger now, weighted with all the months between.
"Yes," he said. Against her skin.
She pulled him closer and he went to her and what followed was not reducible to sequence, was not a matter of before and after, was simply the two of them in the dark room with the night outside and the walnut table through the doorway and everything they had built between them present in the specific warmth of her and the specific way she said his name and the specific weight of choosing someone, fully and without remainder, and being chosen back.
She was different from the first time. He had known she would be.
In November she had been certain but still guarded, the discipline running underneath even when she had let it go, the careful woman choosing to stop being careful.
Tonight there was no discipline to set aside.
She had arrived at the flat with the canvas bag and the three books and the green cup and had placed them on the counter without ceremony, and that act, that simple deliberate act of putting her things beside his, had changed what they were to each other in a way the key had not quite completed and the table had.
She moved with him in the dark without hesitation, her hands knowing where to find him, her breathing even and then not, the controlled person entirely present and entirely without control, which was a form of trust he understood the weight of and did not take lightly.
He moved with her slowly, his hands at her waist and her face and her hair, following the shape of her with the attention he had given everything else that mattered, the press line and the capacity figures and the legal pad with the handwritten tabs, but deeper than all of those, more specific, more earned.
She said his name once more toward the end of it, quietly, in the dark, and it was different from the earlier times, different from the conference room and the parking lot and the bar on Randolph Street. It was the version she had not said before. The one with nothing held back.
It was different from the first time. He had known it would be.
The first time had been the end of a tension, the resolution of something that had been building.
This was not resolution. This was the beginning of something that did not have a fixed end, and he could feel the difference in how she held him, how she looked at him in the low light from the doorway, how she said his name once more at the end of it with a certainty that had not been there before.
He held her afterward in the dark. Her head on his chest, his arm around her, the city quiet outside.
"The table," she said, eventually.
"Yes."
"It seats six."
"It does."
"That's optimistic."
"I'm a data-driven person," he said. "The data supports optimism."
She was quiet for a moment. He felt her fingers trace something on his chest, not a pattern, simply the motion of a hand at rest that was not entirely at rest. "My father," she said. "Your parents. Diane. Petrov. That's six."
"That's six," he agreed.
She was quiet again. Then: "We should do that. Properly. All of them."
"We should."
"Your parents will come to Chicago."
"My father will come to see the community centre. He has a professional reason. My mother will come because she has wanted to meet you since March."
She lifted her head. "Since March."
"She called after I told him about the Crestline vote. She had questions."
"What kind of questions."
"The kind my mother asks. Thorough ones." He looked at her. "You did well, apparently. She approved of your methodology."
Cait laughed, the full version, in the dark, against his chest. He felt it through his whole body. He thought: I am going to hear that sound for a long time.
He held her. The city held them both. Outside, somewhere, the Schuler press was not running, because it was a Saturday evening and the plant ran five days. But it would run Monday, the way it had run every Monday since November, the sound of a thing built to last doing what it was built to do.