Chapter 17 #3
The old thing had been comfortable and fast and had happened in the ten minutes before sleep for the better part of a decade, two people who knew the route.
This was slow and it was extremely uncomfortable in the way that mattered, because he would not stop looking at her and would not let her go somewhere else in her head, and every time she tried he said something specific and true and appalling into the dark until she stopped trying.
"You priced the Norwood job in a truck."
"Gordon—"
"With a flashlight. In four hours. And I stood in a parking lot and let a man from the bank shake my hand about it."
"Stop—"
"No," he said, and she said, "Gordon," and it broke apart into something that wasn't words at all.
She got a hand between them at some point and pushed, and he went over onto his back without any argument at all, and she came up over him and took the whole thing away from him.
That was the part she had not known she needed until she had it.
Twenty-four years and she could count on one hand the times she had been the one setting the pace — not because he had ever refused her, but because she had never once asked, and it had not occurred to either of them that the not-asking was a shape they had built.
She set it now. Slow, then not. Her hands flat on his chest and his hands on her hips, not steering, just holding on, and his eyes open the whole time because she told him to keep them open and he did.
"Nic—"
"Don't you dare."
"I'm not — " His head went back into the pillow. "You have to — I can't—"
"Look at me."
He looked at her.
And Nicole Doran, forty-six years old, in a rented room in Charlestown with orange light coming off a parking garage, watched her husband come apart underneath her, entirely, with his hands shaking on her hips and her name in his mouth — and then went over herself a moment later with his thumb pressed exactly where she had put it, folding forward onto his chest with her face in his neck.
Afterward she lay across him in a bed that was too small with her ear over his heart, and he had one hand in her hair and the other flat on her back, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
The parking garage lights buzzed.
"I have to be at St. Anselm's at seven," she said eventually.
"Okay."
"I'm not moving back into the house tomorrow. Or next week."
"Okay."
"I mean it. I've got a lease until December and I'm going to keep it, and there are going to be nights I sleep here on my own because I want to, and you're not allowed to be wounded about it."
"Nic." She felt him laugh, low, under her ear. "I've been sleeping over a vape shop. You could keep the apartment for a decade and I'd have no standing whatsoever."
"It's not a vape shop anymore. It's empty."
"It's empty," he agreed.
Nicole lay in the dark and thought about that.
"What are you going to do with it?" she said.
"With what?"
"The lease. You've been paying three hundred and forty dollars a month for twenty years for a room you sit in on Sundays." She propped herself up on his chest. "It's empty downstairs. The whole building's empty."
Gordon looked up at her in the orange light.
"What are you thinking?"
"I don't know yet," Nicole said. "But I've got a division with nine people in it and nowhere to put them, and a company that has never once had a place where somebody could walk in off Dorchester Avenue and ask a question."
He laughed.
"What?"
"Nothing." He put his hand over his eyes. "You've been in this bed forty minutes and you're doing a feasibility study."
"I'm doing a rough order of magnitude—"
"God, I've missed you," Gordon said, and it came out of him so plainly and with so little performance in it that Nicole stopped talking entirely, and put her head back down on his chest, and stayed there.
They did not sleep much.
At about four she woke up and he was awake, on his back, looking at the ceiling with his hand still in her hair.
"What is it?"
"Nothing bad."
"Gordon."
"I was working out whether to tell you something," he said, "and then I remembered that's the whole term, so I'm telling you." He turned his head. "At about two o'clock I woke up and the first thing I thought was that I wanted to ring somebody and say this had happened."
Nicole went absolutely still.
"And then," Gordon said, "I worked out that there isn't anybody. There's genuinely nobody. And I lay here for about an hour being frightened of that, and then I realized what I actually wanted was to wake you up and tell you, which I wasn't going to do, so I've waited."
She was crying, quietly, and she let it happen.
"That's the term," she said.
"That's the term."
"You did it in one night."
"I'll get it wrong in about a fortnight," Gordon said. "I want that in writing too."
And Nicole laughed — the undignified one, the one from the print shop room, the one that had always been his — and lay in the dark in a rented apartment in Charlestown with her husband's arm around her and the parking garage going orange through the blinds, and did not feel, at any point in the whole of that night, that she had given anything up.