Three Floors, Thirty-Eight Seconds #2
“I keep thinking there’s a version of this where I ask you something honest and you don’t have to manage your answer for my benefit.
” He aimed it at the numbers again, fifteen, fourteen, the admission easier to make at a wall than at her face.
“I don’t know how to ask the question without it sounding like I’m asking for reassurance I haven’t earned yet. ”
“Ask it anyway. I’ll tell you if it’s a question I can’t answer honestly.” She kept her own eyes on the numbers too, matching his angle, some old discipline in both of them reaching for the same evasion at once and neither one calling the other on it.
“Are we actually fine, or are we both just very good at performing fine at each other?” Ten, nine. “I don’t need the reassuring version. I’d rather have the true one, even if it’s worse.”
Jo let the question sit the length of two more floors before she answered it, because it deserved that much honesty at least. “I don’t know yet.
I think we’re fine in the sense that nothing’s broken.
I don’t think we’re fine in the sense you actually mean.
” She watched the number roll to five. “I think we’ve both gotten very good at being careful with something that used to just be true without either of us managing it. ”
“That’s the answer I was afraid of.” He said it without flinching from it — the rare gift, even now, of a version of him that told her the truth about being afraid instead of pretending he wasn’t.
“I don’t have a fix for it standing in an elevator.
I wanted to at least stop pretending I didn’t notice. ”
“I noticed too. I just didn’t know how to say it without it turning into a bigger conversation than either of us has time for tonight.
” The doors opened on the lobby before she could finish the thought properly, ordinary marble and evening light spilling in, the whole small, charged privacy of the last minute and a half dissolving back into a building full of other people’s business. Neither of them stepped out right away.
He reached for the folder he’d carried down without once opening it.
“We should talk about it properly. Not tonight, in a lobby, standing in everyone’s way.
” Some careful distance reasserted itself now that the doors had opened on the rest of the world.
“Soon, though. I don’t want thirty-eight floors of honesty to be the only kind we manage to have. ”
“Soon,” she agreed, and meant it, some small, unfamiliar relief moving through her at having said any of it out loud at all, even standing thirty-eight floors of silence away from fixing anything. “I have somewhere to be tonight anyway. Mara’s dragging me to dinner whether I want to go or not.”
“Go. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He held the door for her out of old habit, nothing performed in it, and let her walk out first into the ordinary evening crowd without reaching for her hand or closing the last of the distance either.
His attention followed her the whole length of the lobby, the same weight she’d carried across the floor that morning, and this time she didn’t look away first. The small, complicated relief of that stayed with her into a night that still had eight more careful hours left in it before day nine finally, fully ended.
She told Mara most of it over dinner two hours later, the taco truck’s evening counterpart, a diner booth sticky with other people’s spilled coffee, in a place that asked nothing of her and never had.
“So you had The Elevator Conversation.” Mara said it with visible capital letters, unimpressed and delighted at once. “Every relationship in this building eventually has one. I’m surprised it took you two this long.”
“It wasn’t a conversation. It was an admission that neither of us has been handling this well, followed immediately by both of us agreeing to handle the actual conversation later.
” Jo turned her coffee cup a slow half-circle on the table, working through the shape of it out loud for the first time.
“I don’t know if that’s progress or just a more articulate version of the same avoidance. ”
“It’s progress. Barely, but it counts.” Mara studied her, something warmer under the usual teasing. “You told him the truth. That’s new for this version of you. Usually you’d have just said ‘we’re fine’ and meant approximately forty percent of it.”
“I did tell him the truth. I also let him walk all over a scheduling call this morning because I didn’t have the energy to make him explain himself.” Jo watched Mara’s face for the reaction she already expected. “I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds like you’re tired, Marlowe. Not like you’re broken.
” Mara reached across and stole a fry off Jo’s plate.
“Being tired enough to let one thing slide isn’t the same as going back to letting everything slide.
You caught it. You’re sitting here talking about it instead of pretending it didn’t happen. That’s the whole difference.”
“I keep waiting to feel like myself again. The version that didn’t have to think this hard about a scheduling call.
” Jo pushed the rest of her fries toward Mara, an unspoken concession she made a dozen times a month and never once regretted.
“I don’t know when exactly I turned into someone who does the math before she argues. ”
“You turned into someone who does the math the day you decided this was worth protecting instead of just enjoying.” Mara said it without any of her usual bite, watching Jo take that in.
“That’s not a flaw, for what it’s worth.
That’s just what it costs to actually care whether something survives instead of just whether tonight’s good. ”
“I hope so.” Jo believed it a little, the diner’s ordinary noise settling around them, and thought, not for the first time today, that nine days had cost her something she hadn’t fully priced yet.
Not trust. Not love. Just the enormous, invisible effort of being careful with someone she’d once been effortless around, an effort nobody else in the building could see her spending and nobody was going to reimburse her for.
“I think tomorrow I’m going to ask him to actually have the conversation. Properly. Not in an elevator.”
“Good. Go home and sleep on it first.” Mara raised her water glass in a small, dry toast. “To thirty-eight floors of honesty. May the next conversation happen somewhere with chairs.”
Jo laughed, the first easy sound she’d made all day, and walked the rest of the way home tired, still careful, but carrying something new now too: the fragile relief of having finally said one true thing out loud, even if it hadn’t fixed anything yet.
Her phone buzzed once on the walk back to her apartment, a single line from Alexander with no context attached.
Tomorrow. Somewhere with chairs. I’ll find the time if you will.
She read it twice on the sidewalk, the evening crowd breaking around her without slowing down, and typed back a single word before she could talk herself into something more careful. Deal.
Day nine ended with her shoes by the door and the deal still on the table. Thirty-eight floors, one at a time, and somewhere in the middle of them two people had stopped managing each other long enough to tell the truth.