by Bec Linder
She offered me a smile. “Following me?”
It was too close to the truth. I didn’t respond. I walked into the room and stood at her shoulder, gazing at what she was looking at: a photograph of a woman diving underwater, the sea dark blue around her and shattered by light.
“Nice picture,” I said.
“I just read an article about freediving,” she said. “If you dive deep enough, you don’t have to keep kicking. Gravity takes over, and it just tugs you straight on down.”
“Sounds terrifying,” I said.
She shrugged. “It sounds kind of peaceful to me.”
“Sadie,” I said, and she turned to look at me, her eyes wide and dark, and bright as the sun.
I could have turned away, in that moment. I should have. I should have returned to the auction and left Sadie to examine her pictures in peace.
I didn’t.
I raised my hand and touched her cheek.
Her breath caught.
The familiar urge rose within me: to claim her, to make her mine. To show her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she belonged to me.
She looked up at me, her eyes wide and shining, her lips parted. She wanted me to kiss her. The desire was written on her face and in the way she trembled, ever so slightly, at my touch.
It was a terrible idea, and it would probably get me sued—but I had done worse and survived it. But I wanted her, and I was tired of waiting.
“Sadie,” I said, and moved my free hand to her waist.
“’Scuse me, is there a bathroom up here?”
I jerked away from her like I had been burned. The man behind us, slumping in the doorway, glassy-eyed, clearly drunk, was no threat. But his interruption dumped metaphorical ice water on my ardor. Reality returned. Sadie was off limits. Kissing was out of the question.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down, touching her cheek where my hand had been. She brushed past me, squeezed past the man still leaning against the doorframe, and disappeared toward the stairs.
SIXTEEN
Sadie
I went to my favorite spinning class on Sunday afternoon. Afterward, when the guy who always smiled at me flashed his pearly whites, I smiled back.
It was just a smile, but it gave me a little thrill to be so forward. I had never paid much attention to him before—never let myself pay attention—but he was a good-looking guy, all dark curly hair and brown skin, and he had been devotedly trying to flirt with me for at least six months. It felt good to be interested.
He started making his way across the room toward me, and I wiped my sweaty face on my towel, hoping I looked at least somewhat presentable. Then I decided it was stupid to worry. He’d been looking at my sweaty clothes and wild, sweaty hair for months now, and it hadn’t scared him off. If you weren’t a disgusting mess after spinning, you weren’t doing it right.
Then he was there, standing beside my bike, looking at me with one eyebrow raised, smiling. “I thought you would never give me the time of day.”
I laughed, embarrassed and happy, and wiped my face again. “I guess I didn’t miss my window, though,” I said.
“For you,” he said, “the window never closes.” He extended his hand, and we shook. He had a firm grip, and his palm was just as sweaty as mine. “I’m Tavares.”
“Sadie,” I said. He hadn’t let go of my hand.
“Sadie,” he said, rolling my name around in his mouth. “Look, I’m going to be straight with you. I want to take you out. Let’s go get something to eat.”
“Right now?” I asked, laughing, a little overwhelmed.
“Right now,” he agreed. “Spinning makes me hungry enough to eat an entire cow. There’s a good burger place down the block. What do you think?”
I hesitated. I was thinking of Elliott, of his hand on my face, of his other hand touching my hip. I shoved those thoughts down deep, tamped them down where they couldn’t bother me. Tavares was attractive, interested in me, and not my boss. Okay: game on. “I think a burger sounds really good right now.”
We bundled into our coats and went down the street to the burger place. It was 5:00, too early for dinner in New York, and we were able to claim two prime seats at a long counter by the window, looking out on the pedestrians bustling around in the lowering dark.
Tavares talked more than he ate. I knew his entire life story within about fifteen minutes. He was a marketing director at an ad agency in Dumbo, volunteered at a nearby community center, and called his mother every weekend. He was funny, engaging, and easy to talk to. We got into a heated debate about the relative merits of PhotoShop versus Lightroom.
It was like Jesus had sent him to earth to be the perfect boyfriend for me. Okay, Lord: I could take a hint.
But I felt like I was hanging out with my brother.
I tried to feel a spark. I really did. I even “accidentally” brushed our hands together. And still: nothing.
Elliott had ruined me for other men.
After, standing on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, he said, “I’d like to see you again.”
I felt terrible. Who did I think I was, to turn down this kind and interesting man? But I had to do it. I couldn’t leave him to languish in false hope. “Look, you’re really great…”
He groaned and hung his head, shaking it slowly. “Right. Say no more. At least tell me that you think I’m great and you’re just hung up on another man.”
“I mean, you won’t believe me now, but that’s actually the problem,” I said. “I wish I could date you. You are great. My mother would love you.”
“Well, if you ever change your mind,” he said, “or if the other guy ends up breaking your heart, I’ll be at spinning every Sunday.”
I smiled at him, wishing that I felt something, wishing that life could be less complicated than it always, inevitably was. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
And then I walked home in the dark.
* * *
Monday marked the start of our final week before the conference. Elliott knew it too, because he was already in a frenzy of work by the time I arrived at the office, and he barely looked up to greet me when I set my things down on my desk—just glanced up and grunted before he went back to rifling through a stack of paperwork.
Fine. We could ignore each other. I still felt awkward about what had happened at the fundraiser on Saturday night, and I didn’t want to talk to him either. I needed some time to lick my wounds: humiliation, anger, a little bit of wistful sorrow about Tavares. Fear that I was betraying Ben, guilt for my disloyalty, and also a hot, tense, claustrophobic feeling, like I was suffocating, like I was lying beside him in the coffin and unable to fight my way out.
He still haunted me. Little ghost, little lost love. That hollow place in my chest that would never be filled.
These were melancholy thoughts for a sunny Monday morning. I made a big pot of coffee and got to work.
When I took a break for lunch, Elliott approached my desk and said, “We’ll need to work late tonight.”
I paused in unwrapping my sandwich and looked up at him. “Why’s that?”
He met my eyes, a quick hot glance like wildfire, and looked away again. “It’s the website,” he said. “I heard from the conference organizers today. They want a working website by tomorrow evening.”
“But I’m still doing the—”
“I know,” he said, stiff and distant as the North Pole. “It isn’t your fault. I’ll help you. I’ll finish the coding. Let’s finish it tonight, and then you can sleep in tomorrow morning.”
“I guess so,” I said. It was so strange to feel awkward around him again, as uncertain as I had been when I first started working for him. I didn’t know what he was thinking, and I wanted to talk about Friday, to have him reassure me that everything was okay, but I didn’t know how to ask him for that. “Okay. You’re going to order pizza, right?”
He raised an eyebrow, and for the first time that day he actually seemed like himself. “Pizza,
” he repeated. “How… proletarian. Surely we can do better.”
“Indian food,” I said, and then, “Korean barbecue?”
“Now you’re talking,” he said.
After my initial rush of panic, I had to admit to myself that the website really was almost ready, and that finishing it tonight was within the realm of possibility. I stayed hunched over my computer through the late afternoon, until the light faded so much that I had to get up and turn on the lamps. My spine cracked. I stretched my arms over my head, working the stiffness out of my body, and turned my head to see Elliott watching me.
I couldn’t read his expression. He stood directly beneath one of the floor lamps, and his face was half-hidden in shadow. He looked mysterious and remote, like he was a stranger and not the man I had grown so fond of over the past month. I was fond of him. There was no point in denying it anymore. My failed date with Tavares had shown me that much.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. He took a step toward me, and the light shifted on his face. It still didn’t tell me anything useful. His expression was mild, pleasant, meaningless.
I shook my head. “Soon, probably. Maybe another hour. I’ll keep working. It was just getting too dark to see.”
He nodded. “I’ll order the food now. They always take a while.” He paused, and I waited for him to continue, but after a long moment he turned away.
I worked. I was dimly aware of Elliott rustling around at his desk, and then, after some time, putting on his coat and leaving; and then, some time after that, I heard the elevator doors open, and the smell of Korean barbecue wafted toward me.
My mouth watered. I rolled my chair back from my desk, instantly starving. “Is that dinner?”
Elliott came around the low divider that blocked the elevator from my sight, a big paper bag in his arms, his cheeks red from the cold. “It’s dinner,” he said. He set the bag on his desk and began pulling out plastic containers of food. “And. A bottle of wine.”
“Drinking at work?” I asked. “Human Resources won’t be too happy about that.”
“Oh, I’ve done far worse,” he said, which was entirely too intriguing.
We sat at his desk and ate. I was too hungry to care about good manners, and I spent the first several minutes shoveling food into my mouth at a rapid clip without making any attempt at conversation. When the worst of my hunger was satisfied, I slowed, drank a few sips of the really quite good wine, and studied Elliott’s profile as he worked on his ribs.
He was a bad idea, the worst I’d ever had, and I was still a mess over Ben. I needed to get my house in order before I invited anyone inside.
But I wanted him.
Impulsively, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
He finished chewing, swallowed, and said, “Apparently you can.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s just a figure of speech, Elliott.”
He gave me a thin smile and poured some more wine into his coffee mug. “I know. Yes, you can ask me a question.”
Well, I didn’t really want to ask him after all that, but I was still curious, so I bit the bullet. “How did you end up in Uganda?”
He wiped his fingers on a napkin and leaned back in his chair. He gave me a long, narrow look, and I half-expected him to tell me to mind my own business, but he only said, “It’s a long story.”
“I’m not in a hurry,” I said. “Indulge me.”
He frowned. I knew I was pushing him, especially when things between us were still so raw and unsettled after the silent auction. But I wanted to know. I held his gaze, refusing to look away or admit defeat, and after a few moments he shrugged and said, “I dropped out of Harvard partway through my junior year.”
I leaned closer, already entranced. I still knew so little about him. “You went to Harvard?”
His mouth twisted. “Of course. Only the best for my father’s only son.” His voice had a dry, hard edge to it that I didn’t understand. He took another sip of wine. I thought maybe that was all he was going to say on the subject, but then he shrugged again, like he was making a decision, and said, “We traveled a lot when I was a kid. Mainly in Europe. I saw all the sights. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the world. But then I took an anthropology class on a whim, just to fill a requirement, and we read an essay by a man, a medical doctor, who opened a hospital in rural Haiti. He treated a lot of people with tuberculosis, and he talked about the barriers to treatment, how the medicine cost more than an entire extended family made in a month, how his patients would spend ten hours on a bus to get to the clinic, and most of them died anyway. I didn’t know anyone still got tuberculosis. I thought it was something tragic young poets died of in the 1800s. I realized that I didn’t know anything about the world at all.”
“So you dropped out,” I said, a little awed, at least in part by Elliott stringing that many sentences together in a row.
He nodded. “I backpacked for a while and gazed at my navel. I felt very sorry for myself for a long time. Then I decided that even though I had no actual skills, I was smart and could follow directions, and surely there was something I could do to make a difference. I started volunteering with various international aid organizations, and after a few years I got a job with MSF.”
“What’s MSF?” I asked.
“Médecins Sans Frontières,” he said. I kept looking at him blankly, and he sighed and said, “Sorry. Doctors Without Borders.”
“Wow,” I said. “They won the Nobel Peace Prize, right?”
“Several years ago,” he said, nodding, and then shrugged. “I was involved with clean water work for several years, and I spent a lot of time digging wells that caved in a year later. It seems to me there must be a better solution.” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “I don’t mean to bore you. I don’t talk about this very much, so I don’t have my one-minute summary perfected.”
“I don’t want a summary,” I said fiercely. “I asked you because I’m interested. I think it’s really cool that you’ve been so many different places, and that you’re so determined to help people. I’ve never been anywhere, and I’ve never helped anyone, except maybe my downstairs neighbor who can’t figure out how to use the internet.”
“Hmm,” he said. “You’re helping me.”
“That doesn’t count,” I said. “You’re paying me.”
He looked at me, and I looked back, studying his face in the dim lamplight. I felt like we were the only two people alive in the whole world, safe and warm in our cocoon, in the warm glow of the light, with the wine and food settling in my belly and making me glow. I didn’t care about the conference or the website. I just wanted to be alone with Elliott.
“What’s your family like?” I asked. If he’d answered one invasive question, maybe he would answer another.
“Rich,” he said. “Complicated.”
I smiled. “Isn’t everyone’s? I mean, not the rich part, obviously.”
“Obviously,” he said, dry as the desert.
“My family’s pretty complicated,” I said. Give a little to get a little. “My brother’s gay, and my parents still haven’t really accepted it. They’re trying, and my dad’s really making an effort, but my mom keeps acting like he’ll grow out of it and settle down with a nice girl.”
“That must be hard for him,” Elliott said.
“I think he’s used to it,” I said. “They haven’t stopped inviting him for Sunday dinner, so he’s just waiting them out. Sooner or later they’ll have to admit defeat.”
“What does your brother do?” Elliott asked, so polite, so carefully interested, and I wondered who had taught him these social graces. I was sure he had been taught: he was too abrupt and taciturn to have an innate gift of small talk.
“He teaches high school math,” I said. “In East Harlem. He’s getting pretty fed up with the administration, though, so I’m not sure how much longer he’ll last.”
“I imagine that’s a challenging job,” Elliott said, smooth as t
he surface of a still pond, and I realized he was doing this on purpose: getting me to talk about my own family to avoid having to talk about his.
Very sneaky.
He finished his ribs and poured the rest of the wine into my coffee mug. “We need another bottle,” he announced.
I would be on the floor if we finished another bottle, but maybe the alcohol would help ease the strange tension crackling between us. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll have a little more wine.”
He went out again, bundled into his coat, and I made some final tweaks to the website’s style sheet. The wine made me feel blurry, as if some great invisible hand was taking an eraser to my edges. We would finish tonight, somehow, miraculously, if Elliott finalized the coding as he said he would.
The elevator doors opened again, and Elliott came toward me, bearing wine.
“Great,” I said, holding out my mug. “Let’s do this.”
We did it. I worked, took a quick break to eat a little more, worked again, drank another mug of wine, and finally, close to midnight, I cropped a few pixels from the last image file and was done.
I sat back and rubbed my eyes. Elliott was still typing. I was tired, but also full of unexpected energy, the adrenaline rush of finishing good work. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anytime soon.
I stood up and took my wine mug over to Elliott’s desk. He typed for a few more seconds and then looked up at me, a question in his eyes that I didn’t know the answer to.
“I’m finished,” I said instead.
His smile was a slow burn. “Then we’re done. I’ll finish this coding. You should go home and sleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “I’m too wired.”
“Hmm,” he said. He closed his laptop and gave me a searching look. “Then we’ll just have to finish the wine.”
He made it a ritual: arranging my chair beside his desk, pouring the wine into our mugs, toasting solemnly and drinking. “To our success,” he said.
“May it be long-lasting and, uh, fertile,” I said.
He laughed. “What an odd thing to say.”
I couldn’t think of a reply. We sat in silence, drinking our wine. Outside, a siren blared and faded into the distance.