Closer Than She Deserves To Be #2
“I trust you more than I have trusted anybody in my adult life,” Alexander said. “I wanted you to hear that in a room where you couldn’t file it.”
And Jo, pinned to a wall by a man who was telling her the truth, took the whole of the last sixteen days at once.
It did not arrive as guilt. Guilt would have been simpler, and she would have known what to do with it.
It arrived as the unbearable weight of being seen accurately by somebody working from incomplete information.
He was right about all of it. That was the obscenity.
Every word he said about her was true, and he had earned every word by looking at her properly for five months, and the one fact that would have changed the arithmetic was sitting nine feet down the hall in a canvas bag with a buckle she had done up herself.
“Say something,” he said.
She could not.
There was a sentence. It was four words long and she had it in her mouth: I have to tell you. Not the whole thing. Just the door. Just enough to make the rest of the night impossible, which was the entire function of it and the reason she could not produce it.
He was still moving in her. He had his forehead against hers and his eyes shut now, and he had given her the truest thing he had and was waiting, without any impatience at all, to see whether she would give him anything back.
“Jo.”
“I know.”
“That’s not an answer, that’s an acknowledgment.” He said it into her hair. The almost-laugh went through his chest and into hers before the sound of it reached her. “You do that.”
And there it was again. Right about her. Right about the mechanism she was using on him, in the moment she was using it, without any idea he was describing it.
So she did the other thing. She put a hand in his hair and pulled his mouth down onto hers and kissed him hard enough to end the conversation. He made a low sound and took the invitation. Whatever else he had been about to say went out of him and did not come back.
That worked. It was going to keep working.
“Bed,” she said, against his mouth. “Now.”
He took her there without letting go of her, which involved a collision with the doorframe that neither of them acknowledged, and put her down on it and stripped the rest of her clothes off with a competence that had taken months to acquire and which she had watched him acquire.
“Wait.” He caught her wrist when she reached for him. “Look at me a second.”
“Alexander, I swear to God.”
“One second.”
She gave him the second. He took all of it, and whatever he found in her face he did not comment on. Then he let go of her wrist and said, “All right,” and stopped asking her for anything for the rest of the night.
After that she took it.
She closed a hand around his cock and worked him until his breath came apart, and she did it watching his face as he had spent Wednesday watching hers.
There was an ugly satisfaction in that. She recognized it and did not put it down.
He said her name once, low, and she said “shh,” and he laughed and then stopped laughing.
She put him on his back and took over, because she needed the angle and because she needed him quiet, and for a while it was good and entirely wordless. The only sounds in the room were the bed and his breathing. She kept her own quiet. That took work, and she did it anyway.
She rode him with her hands flat on his chest and her hair in her face and her eyes open, watching him come apart underneath her by degrees, and she was aware — the whole way through, with the double awareness that had not let go of her since a bakery on Fifty-Third Street — that she was using this.
Not cruelly. Not even consciously, at first. She was using the one channel between them that did not require her to say anything, and she was using it well, and he was enjoying every second of being used and had no idea it was happening.
She came like that, hard, with her hand braced on the headboard and his fingers digging into her hips. She did not close her eyes. She watched him watch her. Afterward she stayed where she was, because moving would have meant talking.
He was not finished. He turned them over without asking, which she had wanted for about ten minutes, and hooked her knee up over his shoulder and went at it properly. She stopped being able to hold a shape. It was the one part of the night she had not arranged.
He got a hand under her jaw and made her look at him. He was gone by then, past the point where he could construct a sentence, and what came out was not constructed.
“Tell me,” he said. Wrecked. Nearly gone. “Tell me you’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“Say it again.”
“I’m here. I’m here.”
And that was true, and it was the only true thing available to her in that bed at that hour, and she said it four more times before he came, and she said it as loudly and as honestly as anything she had ever said out loud, because it was the one sentence in the whole apartment that had nothing underneath it.
Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and let him hold her.
He was asleep in twelve minutes. He always was, after; it was the only part of the man that was uncomplicated. Jo lay awake and did not do arithmetic, because there was no arithmetic left to do.
She had done the math days ago. She was taking the job. She had known it on a subway platform on Tuesday and had confirmed it in a lobby on Friday and had checked the compensation band on a Friday morning like a woman who had already decided and was assembling supporting documents.
What she had not done, and could not now locate a reason for, was say it.
The reasons had been running out for two weeks and had finally run out entirely tonight, in a kitchen, over a pan, when a man told her he had already made his peace with her leaving and then held the door open and waited.
There was no reason left. There was only that she had not done it.
Jo lay in the dark and made herself look at that directly for the first time, because Dani had been right and Reagan had been right and the pattern was not complicated once you stopped refusing to see it: she had not told him because telling him would end the version of this where she still had everything.
And she wanted everything for one more day. And then one more after that.
That was just wanting it, and taking it, and knowing what it cost, and doing it anyway.
And there was one more piece, and she made herself pick it up, because she had gone this far and stopping now would have been the same move in a smaller room.
Every hour she did not tell him, she was also collecting evidence.
Not on purpose. But the kitchen tonight was going in the ledger the way everything went in the ledger, and so was the peach, and so was the bag off her shoulder on Ninth Avenue, and by the time she finally said it there would be a stack of these — proof of exactly how good he had been while she was not telling him.
Which would make it worse when it came out. And she knew that. And she was still doing it.
That was the part with no defensible sentence attached, and she had been walking around it for sixteen days the way you walk around a room in the dark.
She had spent five months certain that if this ever broke it would break from his side. That he would decide something for her, or seal her off, or manage her out of a room for her own protection. She had built an entire apparatus against that day.
He was asleep with one arm across her and had spent the evening making room for a future he could not see the shape of.
She thought about the apparatus. Five months of it. Every tell logged, every unilateral decision noted, every date and hour of it, the whole private case file she had been building against the day he did the thing he was always going to do.
It had been good work. That was the joke of it. The instrument was sound, the observations were accurate, and she had been right about him in the spring and right about him again in June. The ledger had earned its keep twice.
And she had pointed the entire thing in one direction for five months and never once turned it around.
There was no page anywhere in that bag about what she was capable of.
Not one line. She had built a surveillance system of considerable sophistication and aimed all of it at a man who, tonight, had stood in a kitchen and dismantled his own best argument in front of her because he did not want to win it quietly.
Sixteen days, and the person in this apartment who could not be trusted was not the one asleep.
She thought about getting up and getting the folder and putting it on the pillow beside his head, so that the decision would be made for her by the time he woke, which was the coward’s version and also the only version she could picture executing.
She got as far as sitting up.
The floor was cold. Somewhere below them the building did the thing it did at night, a low shift in the ductwork that she had stopped hearing in March and could hear now.
The room was dark and the bag was nine feet down the hall and he made a small sound in his sleep and moved his arm to find her again, and Jo sat on the edge of his bed at two in the morning with her feet on his floor and did not go and get it.
She lay back down.
Tomorrow, she thought, and heard how worn the word had got in her own head, the way a coin goes smooth.
Jo turned her face into his shoulder and lay there, wide awake, at the top of the best day of the year.