Chapter Fourteen
SAINT
PROPOSED AMENDMENT (for review):
Comment: this is a limited-time offer from a serious counterparty. If declined, the counterparty will never mention it again and will deny drafting it under oath.
I typed my reply in the document itself, in the comment margin, where amendments belonged.
L. Lindell: Counterproposal. Accepted, with one revision: strike “no rollover minutes.” I don’t want a clause in this document that assumes I’ll be watching the clock.
The reply came in eleven seconds.
J. Bloom: revision accepted. room 617. the door is open. that’s not a metaphor, I unlatched it, don’t knock, knocking is loud and Pickle is in 615.
L. Lindell: noted. per rule 6a, the door is the wall.
J. Bloom: per tonight, the wall is OPEN, Lindell, are you coming up or should I ratify alone
I did not run. I want that in the record. I walked to the elevator like a professional, rode up six floors with my heart doing nothing reportable, walked past 615, where the rookie slept the sleep of the unaware, and let myself into 617, and eased the door shut behind me, and turned.
She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed in a Chupacabras T-shirt and sleep shorts, hair down, no sunglasses, no ring light, lit by one lamp and the storm, and she had her phone in her hand with the document open, and she held it up like a subpoena.
“For the record,” she said, and her voice was doing the sideways thing, “I drafted that at 11:30 and sat on it for twenty-two minutes.”
“I know. I watched the document say you were typing at 11:30.” I crossed the room. “Twenty-two minutes. What was the holdup?”
“Legal review. I ran it past myself. I found myself a hostile reviewer.” She looked up at me, all the way up, and the volley wobbled. “Saint. Say something unscheduled.”
So I said the thing that had been assembling itself since a pillow wall in Denver, maybe since a taco line in January.
“Twelve hours is the worst deal I’ve ever signed,” I said. “I’m signing it anyway. Come here.”
She set the phone on the nightstand, face down, which from her was a vow, and came up on her knees on the bed, and I put my hands on her face the way I’d rehearsed once out loud in a diner like an idiot, like it forgave me, and kissed her with no cameras anywhere, which made it the first one that was legal under no rule at all, ours outright, unlicensed, and she made a small sound against my mouth like a stat she hadn’t meant to publish.
“Okay,” she breathed, pulling back an inch, eyes bright, “point of order, that’s already better than the eleven-million-view one.”
“The eleven-million-view one had a time limit.”
“So does this, sunset clause, noon,”
“Then stop calling points of order,” I said, and kissed her again, and she laughed into it, actually laughed, and I felt the laugh with my mouth, and filed it: better than the tunnel.
What I can report about the next while, and I will report it, because she deserves a witness who paid attention:
She was funny in bed. I don’t know why this surprised me, she was funny everywhere else, but somewhere I’d assumed the volleys would stop at the border, and instead she narrated pulling my shirt off like a draft analysis, “good frame, moves well for his size,” and I got even by being slow, because slow, it turns out, is my native register there too, and she does not do well with slow, she starts negotiating.
“Saint.”
“Present.”
“You’ve been kissing my collarbone for a geological era.”
“There’s no rollover minutes. I struck the clause. I’m using the minutes.”
“Use them FASTER, oh my God, this is the taco crawl all over again, complete sentences, everything rated, no urgency,”
“Nine point five,” I said, against her collarbone, and moved down, unhurried, and she stopped negotiating.
I asked before everything. Not gallantry.
I wanted her voice on the record. “This?” and her yes.
The shirt, hers: “yes, obviously, it’s been yes since Denver, keep UP.
” Her shorts: a yes that came out half laugh.
And when we were down to nothing and I settled over her and asked one more time, quiet, an inch from her mouth, “Junie. Yes?”, she took my face in both hands, the way I held hers on a kiss cam, and said, “Yes. Ratified. Witnessed. Signed,” and then, softer, with the town all the way back behind her eyes, “please,” and that one word did more damage than the entire document.
She was loud, and then remembered Pickle, and got quiet in a way that was louder.
She kept one hand in my hair like she’d planted a flag there.
When I slid into her, both of us stopped, actually stopped, foreheads together, breathing, the storm going off over the runways like a crowd, and she whispered, “okay, that’s, hm, I had projections, and they were conservative,” and I laughed, out loud, an actual laugh in an actual bed, a sound I think I made maybe twice the whole time Olle was gone, and she caught it against her mouth like it was hers now.
We moved slow first, because I outvoted her, and then not slow, because she filibustered, hips and heels and a stream of commentary that degraded beautifully from complete sentences into my name, and I learned her the way I learn a shooter, where she went when she was about to, what she did with her breath, the tell in her hands, and when she finished the first time she pulled me through it with her, eyes open, hers on mine, nothing performed anywhere in the building, and said my actual name, not Saint, “Lars,” which nobody used, which she had saved, apparently, for this, and I came undone like an amateur, like a first-year, like a man whose scouting report on himself was years out of date.
After, she lay on my chest doing the thing where her fingers tapped it, twice, left then right, and I felt her grin when she felt me notice.
“Respect your elders,” she said.
“I’m two years older than you.”
“The left post is older,” she said, into my sternum, and tapped it again, and I lay there in room 617 holding the entire arithmetic of my life while it reorganized, and outside, the storm moved off east like it had somewhere to be.
We did not sleep much, and the second time, near four, was slower and quieter and worse for me, worse in the sense of further past saving, her half-dreaming and warm and unfunny for whole minutes at a stretch, saying unbudgeted sentences into my neck, and if the first time was an amendment, the second was, and I knew it while it was happening, precedent.
At 6:40 the sun came up on a drowned runway.
At 8:00 the airline announced a 1:30 flight.
We had breakfast sent up, and she sat in my T-shirt eating migas, corn tortillas, double avocado, no onions, hot sauce on the side, from a room-service tray, delighted, appalled, “they’re a 6, the eggs are apologizing for something,” and we did not talk about the clock.
That’s the item for the record. Noon came while we were both watching it not come.
She was packing her ring light case, I was pretending to read about naval disasters, and the phone on the nightstand said 11:58, 11:59, 12:00, 12:01, and the sunset clause sat there in the document, in force, expired, fully executed per its terms, and neither of us invoked it.
Nobody said “well.” Nobody said “so, noon.” She zipped the case.
I turned a page I hadn’t read. 12:04. The rule 7 suspension had ended and rule 7 was back in force and both of us stood in that room violating it in continuous, flagrant, undocumented fashion, and we packed, and went down to the bus separately per protocol, four minutes apart, and Dale checked us off his list with visible relief, and the team pretended magnificently to be blind, and Tuna, who travels in a carrier now because Gus lost that war, watched me down the aisle with the folded ear like an auditor.
The ledger, then. I keep one nowhere, in no notebook, the same place Olle kept his, behind the sternum where the load path runs, and on the bus, somewhere north of Waco, I made the entry I’d been refusing to make since a hallway at 4:40 and a scatter plot and a hand over a wall in Denver:
The rituals have a new entry, and it is a person. It happens at 4:40 and in the tunnel and now, God help me, at 11:52. It is load-bearing. It cannot be removed without the whole machine coming down, I checked, I did the inspection at two a.m. with her asleep on my chest tapping my ribs like pipe.
And Olle would have liked her. He would have liked her immediately and completely. He’d have rated her tacos, shown her the shop, taught her welding just to watch her narrate it. He would have looked at the pillow wall in Denver and laughed until he coughed and called it my finest construction.
That’s the catastrophe. Not that this breaks the machine.
That it’s the best thing anyone’s built on it since him, and it’s fake, per a document, per her own load-bearing clause, and the clock I struck from the contract is running anyway.