Chapter 16 #3
He stood beside her in the glass. Both of them were in it, laid over the city lights.
A tall woman in sneakers and an old sundress.
A man with his tie loose and his hair going gray.
Standing where she’d stood a thousand nights with a squeegee in her hand, thinking someday, not knowing about any of it.
Not the bar, not the bet, not the dollar. Not him.
“I walked past this room for two years,” he said quietly. “I never came in. I never knew you were in here.”
“No.”
“I’d have liked to see it. You. Doing the window.”
“I know,” she said again, and leaned her shoulder against his arm.
* * *
The break room on twenty-eight was the same. Same buzzing light. Same round table with the chipped top. Same old vending machine in the corner, so ancient it still had a slot for dollar bills.
Amelia reached into her bag and took out the dollar.
She had carried it every day since April.
In her wallet, folded in half, behind her driver’s license.
She hadn’t known what to do with it. She’d thought about framing it and couldn’t stand the idea.
She’d thought about burning it, and that felt too much like something from a movie.
She’d thought about giving it back to him, and that was wrong too.
She unfolded it. The blue ink was faded now, soft from the year in her wallet. L.F. bets Z.K. one dollar. The small round handwriting. His signature. Zane’s.
She looked at it. Then she looked at him.
He smiled. He understood.
“It’s yours,” he said. “You earned it.”
She smoothed it out flat against the edge of the table, as he had on the podium in April. She fed it into the slot of the old coffee machine.
The machine thought about it. It hummed. It spat the dollar back out.
Lucas laughed. It was the real laugh, low and surprised, the one that had gone straight through her at two in the morning on this very floor six years ago.
She laughed too. She smoothed the dollar out again, harder, and fed it back in, and this time the machine took it with a grinding sound and a click.
A paper cup dropped. Coffee came out, thin and brown and steaming.
She took the cup out of the machine. They stood in the buzzing light of the break room on the twenty-eighth floor and looked at it.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s what it was worth.”
“One bad coffee.”
“One terrible coffee.”
She took a sip. It was awful. It tasted like the inside of a car. She handed it to him, and he took a sip, and made a face, and handed it back, and they stood there in the break room at midnight passing a terrible coffee back and forth until it was gone.
From the doorway, Marisol said, “What did you two just do?”
“We spent it,” Amelia said.
Marisol looked at the empty cup. Then at the machine. Then at the two of them, grinning like fools in a break room at midnight. She shook her head.
“Rich people,” she said, and went back to her cart.
* * *
He put the empty cup on the table. Then he turned to her, in the buzzing light, and took both her hands in both of his.
His hands were steady. They were warm and still, as they used to be, before any of it. The way they were again now.
“Amelia,” he said.
“Mm.”
“I love you.”
He said it plain. No podium. No room. No four hundred people. Just the two of them, and a vending machine, and the sound of Mike’s vacuum far off down the west hall.
“I love you,” he said again. “I’m going to love you every day until I die. Not because I owe you. Not because of any of it. Just because it’s you. It was always going to be you. It was you before I knew your name.”
She looked up at him. She didn’t hold anything back. There was nothing to hold it back for.
“I love you too,” she said. “I choose you. Today. And tomorrow, and the day after that. Every day. Out loud. Where anybody can hear.”
“Anybody?”
“Anybody.”
He grinned. Then he turned his head toward the door and raised his voice.
“Marisol! She says she loves me!”
From way down the hall, over the vacuum: “Everybody knows that, Mister F.! Go home!”
Amelia laughed so hard she had to hold on to him.
He held on to her. He was laughing too, with his forehead against hers, both of them laughing like kids, in the break room on the twenty-eighth floor, where she’d eaten a thousand lunches alone at two in the morning and thought someday without knowing the rest of the sentence.
She knew it now.
She pulled his face down and kissed him, long and slow, with the city lit up behind the glass down the hall and the old coffee machine humming in the corner. He kissed her back like there was nowhere else on earth he’d rather be. There wasn’t. There wasn’t for either of them.
“Take me home,” she said against his mouth.
“Which one?” He was smiling. “The terrible gray one near the tracks? With the wobbly chair?”
“That one,” she said. “Ours.”
He took her hand. They walked back down the long dim hall together, past the kitchen and the west side and the little corner room with the window, and at every door he said good night to somebody by name, and at every door somebody said good night back.
At the service elevator, Marisol waved at them with a spray bottle.
“Happy anniversary!” she called. “The good one!”
“The good one,” Amelia said, and the doors closed, and she leaned into her husband in the scratched steel box as it carried them down, slow and grinding and laughing, all twenty-eight floors, all the way home.