On Her Own Ground #2
The train took forty-one minutes and he did not complain about any of it, and stood the whole way because a woman with shopping got the last seat, and Jo watched a man who owned a building in Midtown hold a pole on the N and look out at the river.
At Astoria Boulevard he stopped on the platform.
“I’ve never been up here in daylight.”
“You’ve been here twice.”
“Both times after nine at night, both times for eleven minutes.” He looked down the length of the platform, at the ordinary Saturday of it. “You do this every day.”
“Twice a day. Forty-one minutes each way. Eighty-two minutes.”
“Every day.”
“Every day since March.” Jo started walking, and he came with her. “You’ve never once asked me about the commute.”
“No,” Alexander said, and did not soften it, and did not apologize for it either, which she preferred. “I’ve asked you about the eleven o’clock. Every day. For five months.”
Her building had a broken buzzer and a hallway that smelled of somebody’s cooking, and Dani’s bike in the stairwell, and Jo let him up ahead of her and watched him take all of it in and say nothing.
Her bedroom had a radiator that ticked, a window that did not close properly, and a view of the building opposite.
He did not comment on any of it, which she watched him not do, and which took him visible effort at exactly one point when the radiator started up.
“Say something,” Jo said. “You’re being extremely polite and it’s unnerving.”
“I like it.”
“You don’t have to —”
“Jo.” He turned around. “I have spent five months getting you to come to a building I own, on floors I control, in rooms I chose. I liked that more than I should have and I’ve known it for about a month. This is the first room I’ve ever been in with you where I don’t have a key.”
He sat down on the edge of her bed, which was too small for him, and looked entirely wrong there, and did not seem to care at all.
“Come here,” he said.
It was slower than Thursday and it was not less.
That was the thing she had not expected — that after the peak there could be something quieter that took more out of her.
There was no urgency in it. Neither of them had anything left to prove and neither of them was saying goodbye, and what was left when you removed those two things turned out to be the whole of it.
He undressed her sitting on the edge of the bed, taking his time, and he talked while he did it, which he had never done.
“I want to say things and I want you to let me.”
“You’ve never wanted to say things.”
“I’ve never had this much to lose.” He got her shirt off her shoulders. “Stop me if it’s too much.”
She did not stop him.
He said them into her skin, at her collarbone, at the inside of her wrist, at the flat of her stomach — a running catalogue in a voice she had heard maybe four times, none of them in a bed.
That he had known in the first month. That he had rearranged the forty-second floor and told himself it was about the sightlines.
That he had watched her walk out in the spring and had understood, standing in a room she had left, that he had built the entire architecture of his adult life around never feeling exactly that, and had felt it anyway, and had deserved it.
That the twelve days had been the worst twelve days he had had since he was twenty-nine.
That he had gone to a POPS because he had wanted, for one afternoon, to be somewhere he could not throw her out of.
Jo lay back on her own bed in her own apartment and let a man tell her the truth for eleven minutes.
Then she pulled him down.
“I want to do something,” she said, “and I want to say why first, which I’ve never done.”
“Say it.”
“Every time we’ve done this, one of us has been running it.
Usually you, twice me, once both of us badly at the same time on a counter.
” She sat up and got her hands on his shoulders.
“I don’t want that today. I don’t want to be handled and I don’t want to handle you.
I want to do it the way people do it when nobody’s proving anything. ”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Neither do I. That’s the offer.”
So they worked it out.
It was, in places, not smooth. There was a stretch near the beginning where neither of them was leading and it went briefly nowhere, and she laughed into his shoulder and he said “this is your fault” and she said “it’s entirely my fault” and it started again from there, better.
He got her out of the rest of her clothes and she got him out of his, and there was a moment on her too-small bed where his foot went off the end and he had to shift, and neither of them made anything of it, and that was somehow the most intimate thing that had happened between them in five months.
She put her hand flat on his chest and held it there.
“You’re allowed to want something,” she said. “Out loud. Say one.”
He was quiet for a second.
“I want to be here when you wake up,” Alexander said. “In this room. Tomorrow. That’s the one.”
“That’s not a sex thing.”
“No. You said say one. That’s the one that came.”
Jo lay there with her hand on his chest and did not have any way at all to answer that.
He went slowly and he kept his eyes open and so did she.
He had taken her apart more thoroughly on Thursday.
That was a fact and it stayed a fact. What happened in Astoria on a Saturday afternoon with the radiator ticking was a different thing entirely, and it undid her in a way the Heat Peak had not, because on Thursday she had been giving him everything except one thing, and here there was nothing left in reserve at all.
Nothing withheld. No ledger. No folded page in a bag in the hall, because there was no bag and no page and no plan and no job and no title and nothing at all between his skin and hers.
“Look at me,” she said, and he was already looking.
It took a long time and neither of them hurried it, and twice she had to stop and put her forehead against his shoulder and breathe, and both times he waited without asking whether she was all right, which she would have hated.
“Talk to me,” she said, the second time.
“About what.”
“Anything. I want to hear you while it’s happening. I’ve never asked for that.”
So he talked. Not filth and not declarations — the ordinary running commentary of a man who was paying attention, half of it about her and half of it about nothing, and it was the single most undoing thing anyone had ever done to her in a bed.
At some point she stopped being able to follow the words and only had the sound of them.
She came with her hands on his back and her eyes open and his name in her mouth, and afterward she did not turn her face away, and did not hide it, and let him see the whole of it while it was happening to her.
He came apart about a minute later with his forehead against her collarbone, saying something that was not a word.
Then he stayed. He did not move off her, and she did not let him, and for a long time the only sound in Astoria was a radiator and a man breathing.
When he finally rolled off it was onto about eight inches of mattress, and he made a sound of complaint, and she laughed and did not move over.
“This bed is a hostile environment.”
“It’s a full. It’s a perfectly normal bed for one adult.”
“I’m aware of exactly how normal it is.” He got an arm under her and pulled her over onto him instead, which solved the geometry. “I’d like the record to show I’m not complaining. I’m reporting.”
Jo put her chin on his chest.
“Is this the part where you offer to buy me a bigger bed.”
“It is not,” Alexander said. “I have thought about it, I want you to know that I have thought about it in the last ninety seconds and I have decided against it, and I’d like credit for that too.”
“You don’t get credit for the things you don’t do.”
“That is the least fair rule anyone has ever made and I accept it entirely.”
“I’ve got no plan,” Jo said, into his hair.
“I know.”
“That isn’t me being brave. I want to be accurate. I have four months of savings and a spreadsheet about eleven buildings I don’t work on.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to be extremely difficult for about six weeks.”
“I’m counting on it,” Alexander said. “I’ve never once seen you without a plan. I’ve been curious about her for five months.”
Jo laughed into his shoulder and it turned into something else halfway, and he held on and let it, and did not tell her it was all right, which was the correct decision and one she noticed him make.
Outside, Astoria did what it did on a Saturday afternoon.
She lay in her own bed, in her own apartment, on her own ground, with nothing arranged and nothing protected and nothing in reserve, and was — for the first time since she was nineteen years old — completely unprepared for whatever happened next.