What She Didn’t Say #2
He came up. His mouth was wet and he did not wipe it, and he looked at her with the undivided attention that had cracked her open in a boardroom in her first month, and she took hold of the front of his open shirt.
“Take these off,” Jo said, “and get up here.”
“That’s two instructions.”
“You’ve managed two before.”
He managed two.
And then, briefly, he did the thing she had told him not to do. He slowed. He put a hand along the side of her face and looked at her long enough to be checking something.
“I said don’t be careful.”
“I’m not being careful.” His voice had dropped into the register he used almost nowhere. “I’m looking at you. Those aren’t the same thing and you know the difference.”
Jo did know the difference. She had spent twelve days on the other side of it.
“Then look,” she said, and pulled him in.
He set her down on the floor, turned her, and got her forearms flat on the stone, and she went where he put her because she wanted to be put there and for no other reason available to anybody. Her cheek against the cold marble. His hand between her shoulder blades, then gone, then at her hip.
“Say it again,” he said.
“Say what.”
“What you said in the kitchen. About being good at your job.”
Jo laughed, once, wrecked, into the counter.
“You want me to say that. Now.”
“I want you to hear yourself say it while somebody agrees with you.”
So she said it, and he agreed with her, and it went on for some time after that, and at no point in it did she stop knowing exactly where her bag was.
He got her back around and lifted her onto the counter again, and she got a heel braced on its edge and her hand on the back of his head and held him where she wanted him.
She came the first time on his hand and his mouth, hard and fast and undignified, and fully awake for all of it: aware of the marble under her, of the pan cooling on the stove, of her own voice, of this being the best thing that had happened to her all week.
It was Friday. On Thursday a woman had put a folder in her hands.
That last part did not cool it. She had expected it to. It did the opposite, and she knew, in the last instant before she stopped being able to hold a thought, exactly why: she was taking something she had already begun to price.
There was a word for what that made her and she declined to go and get it.
Because the alternative was available, and she could see it perfectly well from where she was sitting with her heel on his counter.
She could stop. She could say wait and he would stop inside a second, because he had stopped inside a second every time she had ever said it.
She could get her bag off the bench and put a folder on the marble between them and spend the rest of the evening being honest, and it would cost her exactly one evening, and she knew with total confidence that he would be decent about it.
She was not afraid of him. She had never once been afraid of him. She was afraid of the sentence I’d like to take it, and of finding out, in a kitchen, in the middle of a Friday, whether she meant it.
So she did not stop, and she wanted him, and both of those were the same decision.
“Now,” she said. “Don’t wait.”
He didn’t.
He pulled her forward off the counter, took her weight, and drove into her standing up with her back against the cabinet and one of her legs hooked over his arm, and it was too much and not gentle and precisely what she had asked for.
She had asked out loud. She kept that. Through all of it she kept that: I asked for this.
His hand came up under her jaw, not gripping, just there, thumb along the line of her throat.
“Look at me,” he said, and it was not the same as when she’d said it.
She looked.
“You’re somewhere else tonight.”
He said it flat, the way he asked everything, and waited.
“I’m right here.”
“You’re here.” He drove up into her and she lost the end of whatever she’d been going to say. “And you’re somewhere else. Both.”
“Then keep me here,” Jo said.
He put his forehead against hers and did that, and for a stretch of minutes there was nothing in her head at all but the arithmetic of her own body, which was the only sum she’d wanted all day.
She came the second time with her mouth on his shoulder and the heel of her hand braced on the cabinet behind her, and she was aware — the whole way through, at the top of it — that she had not answered his question, and that he had asked it twice, and that both times she had given him something true.
Afterward she sat on the counter she had just been taken against and drank the wine she’d abandoned, and he stood between her knees with his shirt gone and his hand resting on her thigh like it belonged there, and the pan sat on the dead stove with whatever he’d decided about it congealing in it.
“That’s dinner ruined,” she said.
“That was never dinner. That was a gesture toward dinner.”
“You’ve been reading about gestures.”
“I’ve been thinking about them.” His thumb moved once on her thigh. “What are you thinking about?”
Third time.
Jo looked at him for a moment. His hair was wrecked.
There was a mark coming up on his shoulder where her teeth had been.
He had cleared four hours on a Thursday for her eight days ago and had asked, out loud, in front of Priya, whether she wanted two hours back, and had said tell me in one form or another roughly a hundred times since the atrium, and he was asking her a direct question with his hand on her leg.
There were two sentences available.
A woman offered me a job on Thursday. It’s real, it’s Vivienne’s money, it’s not contingent on you, and I have been carrying it around in my bag since yesterday afternoon, including right now, it’s nine feet from where you’re standing.
Or the other one.
“I’m thinking that I’m very good at my job,” Jo said, “and that nobody at Kade Group is ever going to say it out loud, and that I’ve decided to stop needing them to.”
Every word of it was true.
Alexander looked at her the way he looked at a number that had come in better than forecast, and leaned in and kissed her forehead, which he almost never did, and said, “That’s the most Marlowe sentence you’ve ever produced,” and got the wine bottle to top her up.
Jo stayed where she was, with her legs around him, and let him be pleased with her.
It was a good evening. She would have trouble explaining that afterward to anybody, including herself.
Nothing about it was strained. She had wanted every part of it and had said so out loud and had got it.
He had asked her a direct question three times, like a man who actually wanted the answer.
By any measure she had, the evening was a success.
She had done this before. Not with him. With her mother, at nineteen, in a kitchen cleaned to the grout, saying it’s fine, you’ll get something better while running the numbers on the rent in the back of her head.
The skill transferred. You could be entirely present and entirely warm and honest in every individual sentence, and still be keeping a second set of books underneath.
Nine feet away, on the bench by the door, her bag sat with both documents in it — the page she had written on a legal pad and folded twice, and the folder a stranger had handed her on Fifty-Third Street.
Neither of them had moved all evening, and nobody in the apartment had touched them, and that was the whole of what had happened tonight.
She had been asked three times.
Later, in the dark, with his arm heavy across her and his breathing already gone long and even, Jo lay awake and did not do the arithmetic.
That was the strange part. She had the entire apparatus available and she left it in the drawer where it lived, and simply lay there, warm, thoroughly had, entirely awake.
Twenty-one days, she thought. Corinne Lasker had said two weeks was fine and three was fine, and four if she needed it.
There was time. That was what she told herself, and it was true, and it was the first outright useful lie she had told anyone all evening, including the one she had told out loud on the counter with his hand on her thigh.
She finished the wine.