CHAPTER 10 #2
I am wet. I locate it before I let myself name it because I am a forensic auditor and the act of locating is the act of not flinching.
I am wet at the seam of my jeans. I have been wet since his pupils blew on the first cup.
I have been wet at low baseline since the kiss in the library a week and three days ago; I have been wet at fault-line baseline since the four-second eye contact at the Greybar twelve days ago; I have been wet on my chaise in the master bedroom every night for five nights now and I have not let myself say so to myself.
My body is making a confession in the clinic on floor forty-two of Vance Tower and my body is not asking my permission.
I do not name it.
I make my mouth work. "Has he ever — unmeasured —"
"He has refused to be unmeasured for two hundred years. He chose not to. This is the man he chose to be."
The cobalt pin on her cardigan has not moved.
Julian is watching me hear the speech. He does not look away. He does not speak. The silver cup in his hand is half-empty.
I have to leave.
I stand. The folding chair scrapes the tile and the sound is loud — the loudest thing in the room.
Julian's eyes track me without moving his head.
Helene says nothing. I walk three steps to the door of the clinic and out into the corridor and I do not run.
I close the clinic door behind me with one hand because the act of closing it is the act of not letting him hear the next sound I am going to make.
The corridor is empty.
I press the back of my left hand against the tile.
The tile of the corridor is colder than the tile of the clinic — a thing I notice with the auditor's part of me, because the clinic is warmed for patient comfort and the corridor is not, and the temperature differential is real and I am cataloging it because cataloging is what keeps me from doing anything else.
I press my whole palm to the tile, fingers spread.
The tile is so cold it bites. I hold my palm there and I listen to my own pulse arrive at the inside of my throat.
The pulse arrives. It is fast. It is faster than I have been letting myself feel it.
It is the same rhythm I had on the chaise last night when I woke at three and watched him sleep and walked back to the chaise without crossing the room.
I am wet, I think, into the tile. I am wet and he knows. He saw it across the clinic. He read it on me line by line and he did not say so because he is a man who chose not to be unmeasured for two hundred years. He saw it and he chose. He chose.
I take my palm off the tile. The print of my hand stays on the tile for a second — a damp ghost of five fingers and a palm in oils and water — and then evaporates.
I walk the corridor for ten minutes. I count tiles.
I count one hundred and eighty-four. I count past one hundred and eighty-four.
I walk past the elevator twice without taking it because I am not ready to go upstairs and I am not ready to go back into the clinic and the corridor is the third option and I take it.
Somewhere through the cream wall I hear Helene's voice — a single soft Italian word, unintelligible, a bene or a basta — and then nothing.
I count to two hundred and forty tiles. I stop at the small alcove between the linen closet and the autoclave room. I press my forehead against the tile.
When my pulse has come down to a number my hand could write — eighty-eight, then eighty-four, then eighty-one — I straighten. I smooth my sweater. I walk back to the clinic door. I open it.
Julian is on his feet. The silver cup is on the steel tray, empty.
The shirt is rebuttoned at the throat. His suit jacket is over his right forearm.
His skin at the temples has gone from cold-marble to ivory to a near-living warm, the color that comes up under skin that has just been kissed.
His pupils have retracted to the cold-pale gray.
Helene is closing the steel kit. The cobalt pin on her cardigan catches the brass lamp once and throws the small bright circle of light onto the cream sleeve as she fastens the latch, and the latch makes a small definite click.
Helene looks up at me. Helene's face is the face of a woman who has read a great many bodies in a great many clinics, and Helene's face says: I saw. I will not say. Capito.
"Capito," I say aloud, to nobody, although the word answers her.
Julian says, "Quinn. Upstairs."
I nod. I do not trust my voice yet.
We do not take the elevator together. He goes first. I take the next car alone. I am grateful for that. The doors close on me in the elevator and I lean my forehead against the brushed-steel wall for the eight floors, and my reflection in the wall is a smudged shape that I cannot read.
The penthouse is dim. The Great Room has the gas fire on low in the southeast corner; the harbor windows are black; the Tabriz rug is the only color in the room and the worn pale spot in it catches a thin slip of fire-light.
Julian is in the kitchen. I do not see him from the foyer; I hear the small definite sound of him setting down something glass on the marble island.
I walk to the kitchen.
He is at the island, his back to the doorway, in the same white shirt and dark trousers and unbuckled belt, sleeves still rolled down.
The Carrara marble has a single tumbler of water on it with two ice cubes.
He has set the suit jacket over the back of the stool.
The brass pot rack overhead throws a faint copper shine across the line of his shoulders. He does not turn.
"Don't come closer," he says, without turning. The voice is precise. The voice is the voice from the clinic with one more degree of warm. "I do not want to be touched tonight, Quinn. I will not stop."
"I am not touching you."
"I know."
We stand like that for a beat. Then he turns.
The pale gray eyes have come all the way back.
The pupil edges are precise again. The mouth has the small line at the corner that means he is considering something — not smiling, not pretending to smile, considering.
He looks at me the way he looked at me at the Greybar twelve days ago and seven days ago and a week ago and three days ago, except now he is letting me see him look.
He is not concealing it. The auditor's part of me writes: He has decided to stop concealing it.
"Tomorrow night," he says.
"Tomorrow night what."
"The Cold Vault. You have already seen it.
You will see it again with the empire's eyes on you this time.
I want you to know what you are inside before you decide what you want.
" He pauses. "And after the Cold Vault, when I have brought you back here, I will not come into the master bedroom.
You will sleep alone. I want you to sleep alone tomorrow night because I want any choice you make to be a choice you make in a room I am not standing in. "
"All right."
"Tomorrow night, the Cold Vault," he says, and the line is the line he has been giving me since Tuesday, when he promised the tour, and he is repeating it now because repeating it is the only way to put the night back inside the architecture of the audit, and we both need that.
"Tomorrow night," I say.
He nods.
He lifts the tumbler of water. He drinks.
He sets the tumbler down. He picks the suit jacket up off the stool.
He walks toward me — not at me, around me, with two feet of clear floor between his right shoulder and my left — and out into the Great Room, and on through the great room into the library.
The library door does not close. He has left it open as a courtesy, or as a discipline.
I do not follow.
I stand in the kitchen for two full minutes.
I do not drink the water. I run my fingertip across the marble.
The marble is cold. I think about the silver of the cup against his tongue and the way he flinched at the first sip and the way the flinch was the same shape as my flinch when I stood up from the folding chair.
He chose silver because Helene chose silver because the household chose, somewhere along the way, that hunger is an instruction, not a weather.
I think about my body still wet at the seam of my jeans and my body still cataloging itself two floors above the room where the cataloging started.
I walk to the master bedroom.