Touch

by Courtney Maum

  And yet, and yet, and yet. She wasn’t wrong, the fire in her head and the nervousness in her belly told her that she had stumbled upon something that others couldn’t see.

  Maybe, for the first time, something good could come from her heart speaking for her head. Perhaps she wasn’t only right about intimacy making a comeback, she was in a position to make intimacy trend.

  16

  In her office, Sloane summoned the courage to start preparing for the rest of the day’s meetings when her work line rang. Her heart stopped momentarily: she prepared herself for a talking-to from Dax.

  But when she peered at the computer screen on the phone’s base, she saw the call was from a JACKSON. Baffled, she picked up.

  “This is Sloane Jacobsen?”

  “Sloane.” A man’s voice. “It’s Jin.”

  “Jin?” she repeated, her heart speeding up. “But the line said ‘Jackson.’”

  “I know,” he said, “it’s a glitch in the system. All the incoming calls look like they’re coming from Jackson Robert’s phone.”

  “A consumer electronics company and they can’t get that fixed?”

  “Right?” Jin laughed, then paused. “So I wanted to ask you, you want to step out for a minute?”

  “Did you leave Sparkhouse early, too?”

  Jin made a little humming sound into the phone. “Come out for fifteen minutes. Twenty. I have something to show you. It’s relevant, promise.”

  “I don’t know.” She did.

  • • •

  Standing in front of the café he’d chosen, Sloane had to check the faded address on the deli’s awning to make sure she had it right. It wasn’t an anything—the place was free of codes. It was just a deli with a self-serve section of hot and cold foods, as well as a counter where you could get sandwiches, refrigerators full of drinks. It was a completely neutral space and she loved it for being so. She would have felt even more vulnerable than she already did if he’d chosen a place with a menu of craft cocktails and cheese flights.

  Sloane was still observing the café’s noticeable lack of pretension when suddenly Jin was at her side, wrapped up in the same giant cardigan he’d had on the day before. He had this hi/low thing she’d always been attracted to: white sneakers, gray pants. A rectangular, 1960s timepiece tight around his wrist. Perfect navy socks.

  “Hi,” she said, trying to sound professional. I.e., a little cold.

  “Hey,” he said, with a slight smile. A moment passed which might have been filled with a handshake or an awkward hug. Instead, he pulled the door open for her. “I know it looks like nothing,” he said, his hand lightly at her back. “But they’ve actually got great food.”

  “No, it’s perfect,” she said, her entire back feeling like it had come into contact with a meteor. “A place that doesn’t serve acai bowls is a fucking dream.”

  “Hot buffet?” Jin asked, gesturing toward the steel troughs of food banked between two walls of veggie chips once they were inside. His neck was so appealing. A muscle, so alive. What was she doing there? Was he—it seemed impossible—were they trying to be friends?

  “Have you already eaten?” Jin asked, because she hadn’t answered yet.

  “Uh, no, actually,” she said.

  “Fantastic.” He walked over to the buffet. “The eggs have cheese in them. They’re actually really good. They’ve got all this Korean stuff, too—if you like Korean pancakes.”

  Salty, oily pancakes—she was hungry once again. Had she eaten breakfast? No, just coffee. See, this was the heart of all her recent waffling. She was actually perfectly happy at Mammoth—it’s just her blood sugar was off. She was going to put on a trends summit the likes of which they’d never seen. She just needed to consume protein and stay out of the subway.

  Once they were sitting (it had not escaped her notice that he waited for her to sit first), Jin picked up his fork, then put it down again. He shook his juice but didn’t drink it.

  “Okay,” she said, “I know.”

  Jin started to laugh. “What?”

  “It maybe didn’t come out as polished as I’d planned.”

  “Or maybe it did,” Jin said.

  “What happened afterwards?” Sloane asked, ripping off a piece of pancake with her fingers. Then she held her hand up. “No, actually, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Well, you kinda stole the show, actually. Kombucha guy said that the cardio tour wasn’t working on one of the ellipticals and that was more or less that. It was pretty clear that not much else was going to happen. You couldn’t be topped.”

  She was flattered. She was nervous. The outsourcing of affection—why had she gone and said something like that? Normally, she organized meetings, prepared PowerPoints, said that kind of thing into a microphone while guests cut saltimbocca into manageable pieces at tables whose tickets cost fifteen hundred dollars a head. She was not someone who winged it—wung it, as it were.

  “It was a mistake,” she said, pushing at her pancake, not really tasting the food. “I’m gonna get heat for it. I don’t do outbursts.”

  “You don’t.” It didn’t sound like a question.

  “Well, no,” she said, raising pancake to her teeth.

  They ate in silence for a while. She tried not to dwell on the elegance of his fingers, which she’d already noticed before.

  “You know, I think you’re right, though,” he said, putting his fork down. “About the return of physical contact. As a trend.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it a trend.”

  “But you did.”

  “It’s a possibility,” she corrected. “The quest for human contact. The marketing of it. The professional outsourcing of affection, that could be a trend.”

  “Okay,” said Jin, his smirk back. “But that would stem from humans wanting more physical interaction.”

  “Sure.”

  “So humans wanting human contact would be a trend.”

  “Listen,” Sloane said, flustered. “It’s a tech company. Like I said, I think it was a poor decision for me to blurt out what I did.”

  He nodded at something she wasn’t sure she’d said. Then he pushed his plate aside, which wasn’t close to finished. “So, let me show you something. This is what I called about,” he said and leaned over his chair.

  Sloane felt her pulse race as he rifled through his bag. What did she think he was going to pull out, a human heart? She forced herself to eat more pancake, but it felt spongy in her mouth.

  “So here you go,” he said, pushing a folder toward her. “That’s one of my passes for the fall ad campaign. For one of our new phones.”

  She put her hand on the folder and looked at him.

  “Go ahead.”

  She opened the folder to find a single image. Vivid greens, harsh orange. The shot was taken on the inside of the New York subway. The subway line was elevated, there were all-glass apartment buildings and water towers outside the windows. There were wiry young people looking into their cell phones, holding on to poles, but the camera’s attention was focused on an elderly African American woman seated off center, her knees closed tight together, her hands folded on the purse across her lap. She was immaculately dressed, but that didn’t help the fact that she looked pressed in and menaced by the distracted crowd. Pretty clothes couldn’t help the world in which she was living as a black woman. Couldn’t help her growing old.

  Sloane pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, but couldn’t follow it with words. Her throat felt tight and dry.

  “This is—” she started. “It’s . . . very powerful. Have you shown Dax?”

  He pulled back in his chair. “Sloane.”

  “What?” She inhaled, sharply. She was annoyed with him, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. “It’s wise,” she said. “It’s ba
llsy. It’s political.”

  “Dax isn’t going to run it,” Jin said, folding his hands together.

  “I can’t say that I’m surprised. It doesn’t give a very . . . positive image of cell phones.”

  Jin tilted, scratched the top of his head. Then he shifted in position and contemplated her.

  “What’s going on with you?” he asked. “You’re going back and forth.”

  “How’s that?” she asked, her naïveté too forced.

  “Do you not trust yourself? Or what?”

  Sloane put her fork down. Plastic, it made an unsatisfactory plink.

  “Listen, Jin,” she said, pushing aside her plate. “I can’t tell what you want from me. It feels like you’re prodding me a lot. I don’t know why . . . I mean, if you want to be in some kind of cahoots, or—I don’t know. And also, look, there’s ketchup. On your elbow.”

  Jin scrunched up his face distastefully at the dollop by his sleeve. “Shit,” he grumbled, wiping it up with one of the thin napkins they’d been given.

  Meanwhile, Sloane felt jumpy, as if something wrong had passed between them. She wasn’t sure if she’d offended him, or he’d offended her, but she could tell that the current of the conversation had been altered.

  Jin looked off toward the open refrigerator with the many colored juices.

  “I’m afraid I have to be blunt again.”

  Her belly tightened. “Great.”

  “You’re in, and then you’re out of here. If you could just . . . be honest.”

  “Be honest?” she snapped, her nerves turning to anger. “What do you think I just was? This isn’t some romper room, you know. Dax has a bottom line. And I am honest. I always do my job. Frankly, I’m not convinced you understand yet what that is.”

  She pinched her lips together. Her chest was burning, her hands were almost shaking. It was disingenuous, what she had said to him, sticky and unpalatable as a polluted day. Sure, she was professional, but she’d never been a pawn. Worse still, she could tell from the way Jin was holding himself that he was disappointed, too.

  “I do want something from you,” he said, his hands clenched. “You’re right about that.” He looked off toward the stocked juice fridge again.

  “Jesus,” he said, breathy, returning his gaze to hers. “Okay, here it goes.” He leaned in. “I want to fight for you and the things you’re seeing. And I think you should admit them. But I also feel a . . . I mean, from the first minute I saw you. It was just there—and it’s here, now. And I guess that it’s worth mentioning.” He brought a hand out to sweep the space between them. “I’m attracted to you. There.”

  He fell back in his seat again, leaving Sloane to contemplate the units of matter that made up the countertop between them. The crumbs on the table and the ketchup that had been left there by somebody else.

  “Listen,” he continued, his face a heightened color. “I just had to get that out. You don’t have to act on it. You don’t even have to react.” He picked up his plastic fork and stuck it in a now-cold hash brown. “I just thought—well. It’s yours.”

  Sloane looked into his face which was so healthy and so handsome, and her sinuses hardened with both disbelief and the beginning of a cold. Sloane was so disassociated from the Sloane Jacobsen she’d once been that she couldn’t even inhabit the mind and body of the person this person was saying he was attracted to.

  So stupid! A grimy deli! And her about to cry! Sloane clutched the napkin in her hand and looked at the people waiting in line for the cash register. The man closest to her was holding a super-sized Red Bull and a grape lollipop.

  “Should I not have said anything?” Jin asked.

  “But there’s nothing here!” she said, louder than she’d meant to, waving her hand in front of her chest. She wanted to add: My partner doesn’t touch me! My family doesn’t know me. “I’m not even a good person!”

  Sloane speared a piece of oily green pepper with her fork. She had no desire to eat it. She was an okay person. But she wasn’t whole.

  Jin sat quietly while she gathered herself. After a stretch of silent seconds, he asked if he could clear their plates. She couldn’t read his expression. She was so worried that she’d find pity there that that is what she found.

  Jin got up with his leanness and his lankiness and threw their lunches out. The possibility that he really did harbor some attraction to her couldn’t pierce her core. It wasn’t in the realm of things that were feasible these days. Bombings, bankruptcy, coastal flooding, all of these things, yes, but that he could feel some tenderness for this broken person, no.

  “As I said, we can just move on,” Jin said, once he sat back down. “I know we’re colleagues. I know that we just met. I haven’t asked if you’re married. Or even single. I’m just sharing this thing I feel. Which is selfish. But there you go.”

  “I live with someone,” Sloane said, knotting the extra napkin he hadn’t picked up.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He prefers running around in an eyeless catsuit to penetrative sex.”

  Jin looked unblinkingly at her. Then he burst out laughing.

  “It’s been like this for years now,” she continued. “So.”

  To his credit, Jin didn’t laugh again. With the sudden silence, Sloane was forced to consider how sad her confession sounded; how pathetic, beige. She looked at the yellow egg curd that remained there on the table, optimistic that it would find its eggy friends again.

  Her head swimming, Sloane looked up at the dimples above Jin’s lips.

  “I haven’t wanted to ask you this. I really haven’t,” she said, with an exhale. “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” Jin said, unfazed. “As of last week.”

  “Okay then.” Sloane reached quickly behind her to pull her jacket off the chair. “What I think is that we take your original suggestion and pretend this conversation didn’t take place. You’re talented. I’m talented. We work in a talented place. Good for us.” She stood to get one arm through her coat sleeve. “Let’s do the best we can and see if we can’t push things. You know, in new directions, artistically, without things getting complicated”—she waved her hand back and forth between them—“here.”

  “Fine,” he said, nodding somewhat sheepishly. “Agreed.”

  She nodded. He nodded. Then he leaned over and reached for his wallet.

  “No,” she said. “Please.”

  “It isn’t money,” he said, handing her a card. “This is something else that you don’t have to comment on.” He was standing now as well. “But she’s honestly very good.”

  Sloane stared down at the slip of cardboard stock. All it said was “Jodi Brunell, Energy Therapist,” with an address and a phone number. She looked back at Jin with even more surprise.

  “I do some energy therapy stuff, sometimes, on the side. I used to do more of it, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I just feel like—what you have is so big, and it’s so important, but you’ve got these . . . clouds. I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes dark. “I know some people don’t like to hear it. They don’t like to be called out. But she could help you. Oh, and in the spirit of full and even more inappropriate disclosure, she’s also my mom.”

  Sloane grasped the card so hard she almost got a paper cut. “Are you entirely sane?”

  “Not entirely,” Jin said, “no.”

  “Well!” she nearly shouted. “This has been very, very, very awkward!” She thrust her hand out to be shook, unable to think of any other way to put an end to the glow between them.

  Sloane scrambled out of the restaurant without allowing herself to affix any meaning to the heat that overtook her when his palm met hers, instead focusing her efforts on getting herself away from the heat’s source. When she’d made it to the corner of Sixth and 19th Street, she called Deidre: she was sorry for the
inconvenience, it had just come upon her. She’d be out sick for the rest of the day.

  17

  Deidre met Sloane at the curb where she was huddled inside of Anastasia, not sure whether to weep or laugh. There were days like this, weren’t there, when everyday mechanics didn’t function as they should. New tension with her mother, an outburst at work, and now, a confession of attraction from someone ten years her junior? No, eleven years her junior. She’d always been bad at math.

  Deidre approached the backseat and Sloane rolled down the window. She saw that Deidre was holding a paper bag, and for a moment she wondered if it was possible that Dax’s executive assistant had actually made her soup.

  “You bring me back my dignity?” Sloane joked, reaching for the bag.

  “What? No! Of course not!” exclaimed Deidre, taken aback. “It was so interesting what you said! It’s just you left your phone charging, and your scarf is in there, and also, there were already some suggestions in your box. So I took the liberty of putting those in there, too.”

  “Wow,” said Sloane, peering happily inside. “People already wrote things?” Deidre’s face also brightened. Neither of them were fools: Deidre knew that Sloane was bluffing about her sudden illness, and she knew that Sloane knew. Some kind of understanding passed between them as they silently acknowledged this.

  Once Deidre left them, her car spoke up. “Sloane? I’ve been alerted that you will be out sick for the rest of the afternoon. Just to reassure you, the temporal lobe sensors in the seatbacks are registering a normal temperature of ninety-eight degrees.”

  She couldn’t even fool her car.

  “It’s not of grave concern, of course,” Anastasia continued, “but is there something I can get or do for you?”

  Sloane suddenly tasted the chamomile and lemon tea her mother used to make for her when she was feeling funny; syrupy with honey, laced with the lemon seeds her mom forgot to separate out. Even her father couldn’t make it taste like that.