Closer Than She Deserves To Be
They had the whole of Saturday, and it was, by any measure Jo could apply to it, the best day of the year.
That was the trouble. It kept being the best day of the year.
He woke her at nine by getting up, which he did badly and had never learned to do quietly, and she lay in his bed listening to a man who ran a company two floors below her attempt to make coffee without waking her and fail on every metric.
The grinder went at four minutes past. She kept her eyes shut and let him think it had worked.
At ten they walked to the market on Ninth because she wanted peaches and he had a theory about peaches.
At noon he took a call he should not have taken and apologized for it afterward, unprompted, in a sentence that had clearly been assembled while the call was still going.
At the market he bought four peaches and made her eat one standing up on Ninth Avenue, over the gutter, with the juice going down her wrist and into her sleeve, and it was an outstanding peach, and he was insufferable about it for the next twenty minutes.
“You want to say it.”
“I’m not going to say it.”
He had his hands in his pockets and was walking a half step slow, which was what he did instead of smiling in public.
“You’ve been not saying it since Twenty-Eighth Street.”
“I have the discipline of a Trappist,” Alexander said, “and I will take this to my grave,” and then, at the corner: “It was a good peach, though.”
“It was an adequate peach.”
The light changed. Neither of them moved for it.
“Jo.”
“It was a transformative peach and I have been changed by it, are you happy.”
“Very,” he said, and took the bag off her because it was heavy, which he did about four times a week and had never once made a thing of.
She thought about that on the walk back. It was such a small mechanism. He noticed a weight and moved it, and did not narrate having noticed, and did not need to be thanked, and had presumably been doing it since March without her registering it as anything at all.
She had spent five months logging every time he decided something for her. She had a whole private ledger of it, five months of tells, indexed.
She did not have a ledger of this.
At two she read on the sofa with her feet in his lap and he worked through a survey report with a pencil, and every twenty minutes or so he moved his thumb along her ankle without appearing to notice he was doing it.
Sixteen days.
She had stopped counting in weeks. Weeks were too coarse now, and days had a texture, as the twelve had. This was the sort of day that would come back whole. Peaches. The pencil. The grinder at four minutes past nine. The weight of his hand on her ankle.
“You’re not reading,” he said, without looking up.
“I’m resting my eyes.”
The pencil kept moving. It had been making the same small mark in the margin for ten minutes.
“You’ve had that page open since one.”
“It’s a difficult page.”
“Mm.” He turned his own. “It’s a Jodi Picoult.”
“It’s a complicated Jodi Picoult.”
He laughed, once, into the survey report, and Jo looked at the top of his head and thought, with total clarity: I am going to tell him tomorrow.
She had thought that on Wednesday about Thursday, and on Thursday about Friday.
They cooked, badly and together, which was new.
He was better than her and had the decency to pretend otherwise, and at some point she was holding a knife and being told she was doing it wrong by a man who had been shown by a chef in a hotel in Copenhagen, and she told him what he could do with Copenhagen, and it was, for about ninety seconds, uncomplicated.
Then he said, over the pan:
“Can I say a thing about you that you’re going to argue with?”
“That’s a hell of an opener.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since Wednesday.
” He turned the heat down. “You said you wanted to run something. And I said I wasn’t going to fix it, which I meant.
But I’ve been sitting with the other half of it, which is that you’re going to fix it, and I’ve been trying to work out how I’ll be about that. ”
Jo stopped with the knife in her hand.
“How you’ll be about it.”
“When you do it somewhere else.” He said it entirely evenly, as a fact he had worked out and was now reporting.
“You’re not going to get it here. I’ve thought about it properly and I can’t build you a version of it inside my own company that wouldn’t be a favor, and you’d know, and it would be poison inside a year.
So at some point you’ll go and get it, and when you do it won’t be at Kade Group, and I’ve been trying to be a person who has already made his peace with that rather than a person who finds out and reacts. ”
The kitchen went on making its ordinary noises.
“That’s a very long way of saying you think I’m going to leave,” Jo said.
“I think you’re going to outgrow a job. Those aren’t the same thing and I want to be precise, because I’ve watched myself be imprecise about you before and it cost me twelve days.
” He tipped the pan. “I’m not asking you anything.
I’m telling you I’ve done the thinking, so that when it happens you don’t have to manage me through it. That’s all.”
Jo put the knife down.
There was a version of the next four seconds where she said: it’s already happened, it happened sixteen days ago, the folder is in the bag by your door and I have read the shareholders’ agreement twice.
He had built her the door. He had spent his week walking around a problem she had not told him existed, and had arrived, on his own, at a doorway wide enough for her to walk through, and had held it open with both hands and said whenever you’re ready.
“How long have you been sitting on that?” Jo said.
“Since Wednesday night. You were asleep.” He said it to the pan.
“I lay there and worked out that there were two versions of me available. One of them starts quietly making the case for staying, over about eighteen months, in ways you’d never be able to point at.
Small things. A better project, a title that isn’t quite the right title, a bonus structure that only makes sense if you stay, a reason every spring.
” He moved the pan off the heat. “I know that man extremely well. I’ve been him.
And you would have stayed, and it would have worked, and you’d have been forty-one and very good at this job. ”
Jo’s hands had gone still on the board.
“And the other version?”
“Says it out loud in a kitchen so that it can’t be done quietly.” He looked at her. “That’s the entire technology. There isn’t a clever part. If I say it in front of you then I can’t do the other thing without both of us noticing.”
“You’ve made it harder for yourself on purpose.”
“I’ve made it impossible for myself on purpose. That’s the point of saying things out loud, it’s the only reason anyone does it.” A small shrug. “You taught me that, in a hotel in Boston, at some cost to yourself.”
“You’d hate it,” she said.
“I’d hate it enormously.” He said it without any weight on it at all. “I’d get over it. I got over worse in the spring and that one was my fault.”
“Alexander.”
“Mm.”
She had it. It was right there, it was three sentences, and she had a clear run at it in a kitchen with a pan on and no crisis anywhere in the building.
The extractor fan was going. He had his back half turned, doing the thing to the pan he always did, and the room was as safe as a room was ever going to get.
She counted the sentences out. Three. She had said harder things to worse men in worse rooms than this one.
“Thank you for thinking about it,” Jo said.
He looked over at her then, and smiled, and it was the good one, the unguarded one that maybe six people alive had ever seen.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
He went back to the stove. Jo picked the knife up again and went on with the onion. Her hands were steady. That was the worst thing about her and she had known it for years.
She took him to bed at eleven and it was her idea, and it was not gentle.
She got his shirt off at the door. She did not let him get as far as the lamp, and when he said her name in the tone that was a question she said “don’t,” and put her mouth on his throat, and felt him decide to let her have it.
The decision took about a second. It arrived in his hands before it got anywhere near his face.
It was better than Wednesday. She could not get that out of the way. It kept being better.
He backed her into the wall beside the bed and she wrapped a leg around him and let him take her weight.
He was already hard against her. She was already gone.
There was a stretch of about two minutes in which she was not thinking about anything at all, and that was the closest thing to relief she had had in sixteen days.
Then he slowed.
He did it on purpose, one hand flat on the wall beside her head, and put his forehead against hers and just breathed for a second, and Jo’s whole body went tight, because he was about to say something true.
“Hey.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I’m not stopping.” He didn’t. He shifted his grip and worked his other hand under her and went slower instead, which was worse. “I want to say a thing while you can’t be efficient at me.”
“That’s cheating.”
“It’s completely cheating.” His mouth was at her ear.
“You’re the best thing that has happened to me.
Not the best thing since Vivienne, or the best thing this year.
The whole list, all of it, going back. All of it.
You’re the top of the list and it isn’t close, and I’ve never said it in those words because you make it very hard to say things in those words. ”
Jo made a sound that she could not have classified.
He took it for what it looked like and kept going, and she let him, and every stroke was better than the one before it and every word was worse.
“You came into that building and you saw me in about four minutes,” he said. “Nobody has ever done that. I have spent — Jo. Look at me.”
She looked at him.