What She Didn’t Say
Jo left the folder in her desk drawer on Friday morning and felt better for about forty minutes.
It was the correct call. She had spent Thursday night with a bag by her bedroom door containing two documents that both ended the life she currently had, which was not a sustainable arrangement, and the drawer at least had a lock.
She put the folder in, turned the key, put the key in her pocket, and went to a nine-fifteen about scaffolding permits.
By ten she had the key out on the desk beside her keyboard. By eleven she had put it back in her pocket. At no point did she open the drawer.
“You’re doing a thing with your pocket,” Priya said, going past with an armful of binders.
“I have a headache.”
“You don’t have a headache. You’ve got the face you get when you’re solving something in the background.” Priya kept walking. “It’s fine. You’re allowed. Just eat lunch, because the last time you did this you forgot for two days and then cried at a printer.”
“That printer had it coming.”
“It absolutely did.”
Jo ate lunch. Mara found her doing it, which was rarer than it should have been, and sat down across from her with a sandwich she had clearly bought as a pretext.
“You’re eating.”
“Priya threatened me.”
“Priya’s the only functional adult on that floor.” Mara unwrapped one corner and did not eat. “You’ve got a thing.”
“I’ve got a scaffolding permit.”
“You’ve got a thing, it isn’t the permit, and I’m not going to guess, because the last four times I guessed I was close enough to be annoying and wrong enough to be no help.” She looked at Jo levelly. “So I’m going to say the one useful sentence and then talk about something else.”
“Do I get a choice?”
“You do not. Here it is. Whatever you’re deciding, you’ve already started deciding it, and right now you’re deciding whether you’re allowed to be deciding it.
That’s the expensive stage. That’s where you burn two weeks.
” Mara finally bit into the sandwich. “Right. The facilities man has bought a standing desk with money that was allocated to chairs.”
Jo laughed, and let herself be moved on from, and spent the rest of lunch listening to an excellent story about a standing desk.
She also spent the middle of the day being unusually good at her job, which was the tell she had learned to read in herself and could do nothing about: the remediation variance note co-signed and filed by one, three days of Alexander’s calendar rebuilt around a lender’s travel, an inspection window renegotiated with a contractor who did not know he had been outmaneuvered, the scaffolding permits closed out before anyone thought to ask her twice. Competence as a place to stand.
At four-forty Alexander stopped at the edge of her desk on his way past, close enough to mean it and not close enough to be anything anyone could report.
“Tonight.”
“You asked me yesterday.”
“You said tomorrow. It’s tomorrow.” He had not put a hand on the desk or leaned in or done any of the things a man does when he wants something. He had stopped walking, which for him was the entire gesture.
“So it is.” She did not look up from the screen, which was its own answer, and heard him wait a beat before he took it.
“Eight,” he said, and went.
At six-fifty Jo unlocked the drawer, took the folder out, and put it in her bag.
She would not have been able to say why. The drawer locked. Nothing in the apartment upstairs did. Carrying it meant carrying it, and she had spent the whole day proving to herself that she was capable of leaving it somewhere. She took it anyway, and she noticed herself taking it, and she went up.
His apartment always smelled faintly of nothing, which had taken her a year to identify as expensive.
Jo put her bag down inside the door, where she always put it, on the low bench beside a bowl he never put anything in. It sat there looking like a work bag.
“I’m half an hour late,” she said.
“You’re twenty. I built in twenty.” He was in the kitchen with his sleeves up, doing something to a pan that suggested he had again decided to cook. “There’s wine open. Don’t look at the pan.”
“Why.”
“Because I’ve made a decision about the pan and I don’t want to hear a second opinion.”
Jo poured wine and stood at the counter and watched him not look at her while he worked, and let the twelve days and everything after them come down out of her shoulders. This part was easy. That had always undone her a little: how easy the ordinary version was.
He got two plates down from the cabinet with one hand, which he could do because he was tall, and which she had teased him about for the better part of a year and would presumably keep teasing him about for as long as this went on.
She stood there with the wine and let it get her.
The apartment had never managed it. Neither had the view, or the man’s ability to clear an afternoon by existing.
The two plates did it. That there was a version of a Friday where somebody took a second plate down without being asked, and she had one, and she had spent three years not having one and had built an entire personality out of being fine about it.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he said.
“I’m drinking. It’s a whole activity.”
“Mm.” He set the plates down and looked at the pan and made an executive decision about it that she chose not to interrogate. “How was your week?”
There it was.
It had been coming since Monday and she had known it would come, and she had not decided what to do about it, because deciding would have meant admitting there was something to decide.
“Long,” Jo said. “The Chicago thing ran over again.”
“The contractor.”
“The contractor cannot read a calendar. I’ve stopped believing it’s a language issue and started believing it’s a lifestyle.” She turned the glass by its stem. “I got the variance note co-signed. Farrah’s side had us within eleven thousand.”
“That’s very good.”
“It’s extremely good, and nobody’s going to say so, because I’m the person who was always going to get it right.
” She heard how that came out. So did he; she watched him hear it, and watched him decide not to make it a bigger sentence than she’d meant it to be, which was new for him, and correct, and the worst possible outcome, because it meant the door stayed open.
Ask me again, she thought. Ask me a second time and I’ll tell you.
He turned the heat down under the pan.
“Nobody said so to me either, for about nine years,” he said. “It doesn’t get better. It gets differently distributed.”
And that was the moment gone.
Jo set the glass down.
She crossed the kitchen and took a handful of his shirt at the waist and pulled him off the stove and kissed him, and she did it because she wanted to and because he had just said something kind about her work with a folder sitting in her bag by the door, and both of those were true at once and she was not going to pick between them.
“The pan,” he said, against her mouth.
“Turn it off.”
He turned it off.
It was not slow.
She had come up here with the whole day in her and it went into her hands: the shirt, the belt, the counter edge behind her that she used to shove herself up against him rather than waiting to be moved.
He got a hand into her hair and closed it and she made a sound she did not bother managing, and not bothering was the first honest thing she’d done since four-forty.
“Bedroom,” he said.
“No.”
He stopped. Just for a second, and the recalibration went through him under her hands, and she lit up at being the variable, at being the thing that had to be adjusted to.
“Here,” Jo said. “I’ve had a very long week and I don’t want to walk anywhere.”
“Then don’t.”
He put her on the counter. Her skirt went up and his mouth went to her throat and she got her hands between them and had his belt open before he was finished with the first button of her blouse, and there was a graceless minute of two people working in opposite directions at the same problem, which she preferred to the choreographed version.
She got a hand around his cock and his breathing came apart, and she watched that happen from six inches away with her eyes open.
That was the register she wanted. Not to be swept but to be there, to see the second his control stopped being a policy and started being an effort, and to know she had done it on purpose, with a grip she had not thought about first, after a day of being told what she was worth by a stranger.
“Look at me,” she said.
He did.
“Don’t be careful tonight.”
“Jo—”
“I’ve had twelve days of careful and so have you.
Then you sat in a public atrium and told me the truth and I have spent every day since being handled kindly and I want.
” She stopped, because the sentence was heading somewhere she couldn’t follow it, and rerouted.
“I want you to not decide anything for me for the next hour. Including whether I can take it.”
The whole shape of him changed.
“All right,” Alexander said.
He got her underwear off with one hand and no ceremony and put two fingers in her and she was already so wet that the sound of it was audible in the kitchen, and she did not flinch from it, and neither did he.
“Say that again.”
“Don’t be careful.”
He wasn’t.
He got his mouth on her and it was not a negotiation.
She had one hand flat against the cabinet door behind her head and the other in his hair, and she was making noise in a kitchen with the windows open above a street too far down to hear her, and she did not care.
The not-caring had come from somewhere and she left it where it was.
She was spending something. All week she had been valued correctly by strangers and correctly undervalued by the building she worked in, and she had come up here and put her bag on a bench and decided to spend the evening on herself.
“Stop,” she said. “Not like that. I want to be able to see you.”