Somewhere With Chairs #3
She didn’t. Not yet. She sat there at two in the afternoon on a chair that anyone off the street was legally entitled to sit in, with a coffee going cold in front of her, and catalogued, with total clarity, what she wanted and how long she had been not having it: his hand, the weight of it, the pressure of his thumb where her neck met her shoulder, which he had learned in the first month and had used since like a man who had found the one lever.
Twelve days. She had gone twelve days and been fine, and she was not fine now, and the not-fine was so much better than the fine that she had to put her cup down.
She wanted his hands. The weight of them, the stillness they could hold her in, the moment where he stopped asking and started deciding, which was the thing she had spent five months refusing from him everywhere except in a bed and had never once refused there.
And she was fully, unhelpfully awake to all of it.
She could feel her own wanting and watch herself feel it at the same time, could clock the flush moving up her throat and know exactly which sentence of his had put it there, and the double awareness didn’t cool a single degree of it. It made it worse. It made it hers.
A man walked past their table with a laptop bag and did not look at them.
The coffee cart hissed. Six feet of ordinary Thursday afternoon in every direction, and Jo sat in the middle of it with her thighs pressed together under a metal table and her breath doing exactly what she told it to, wanting to be taken somewhere with a door, and choosing — out of nothing but appetite for the wanting itself — not to say so yet.
“You didn’t ask,” she said.
“For what?”
“For any of it. This whole conversation. You didn’t decide what I could handle and then hand me the version that fit.” She turned her head, and he was closer than the turn had accounted for. “Twelve days ago you’d have managed this. You’d have come to my desk with three sentences and a solution.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.” His hand still hadn’t touched her. Not touching her was the loudest thing at the table. “You told me in the spring that if I ever did that again you’d take it as an answer. I’ve thought about that sentence roughly once a day since.”
“That’s not why, though.”
“No, it isn’t.” And this was the part she would keep, later, when she needed something to hold: that he didn’t take the credit that was offered.
“I didn’t manage it because I didn’t have a version to manage you into.
I’ve been the one who doesn’t know what happens next.
That’s new for me and I’ve handled it badly and mostly by being extremely available at work. ”
“You’ve been unbearable at work.”
“I’ve been efficient at work.”
Six or seven minutes now with his arm behind her, and neither of them touching, and neither of them mentioning it.
“Alexander. You reorganized the entire remediation filing structure at eleven at night on a Sunday.”
“That needed doing.”
“It did not need doing on a Sunday.” And she was smiling, and so was he, barely, and the last twelve days were sitting on the table between them looking considerably smaller than they had at seven-fifty-two that morning.
His hand came down then. Not on her shoulder. On the back of her neck, at the top of her spine, warm and certain and entirely still, and Jo closed her eyes for exactly one second and let herself have it.
“Okay,” he said, near enough that she felt it.
“Okay.”
Neither of them moved for a while. The coffee cart man was arguing with a different courier.
The ficus trees kept being watered by somebody on a schedule.
Above them the glass held six floors of gray afternoon and let it down soft over twenty round tables that a developer had been required to provide, and a hundred metal chairs, of which they were using two.
“I’m not going to be uncareful by Friday,” Jo said. “I want to be honest about that. I don’t think it works like a switch.”
“No.”
“I think it’s going to take a while and I think I’m going to be bad at it in ways neither of us can predict yet.”
“So will I.” His thumb moved once, slow, at the base of her skull, and the breath went out of her and she let him hear it. “I’d rather have twelve days of you being bad at it than one more afternoon of you being excellent at it across a floor from me.”
Jo opened her eyes.
“Then take me back to the office,” she said, “before I do something in a legally public space.”
He laughed again, properly this time, and stood, and picked up her bag before she could reach for it.
She let him carry it. It weighed almost nothing.
Inside it, folded twice and pushed into the inside pocket, the page she had written on Tuesday went along with them, and Jo did not think about it once on the four-block walk back, which she would come back to, later, as the last hour of the last easy day.
They walked. He didn’t take her hand until they were two blocks from the tower, and then he did, in daylight, on a public street, without checking who was looking.
Twelve days ended at two-forty on a Thursday afternoon, in a room nobody owned.