Page 72 of Soft Erasure

He waited.

“Don’t stop.”

He undressed me the way he did everything, without hurry, watching my face and not his hands. He had never needed to look at his hands. He took what I had dressed in off my shoulders and let it fall. It stayed where it fell on the tile, the first thing in thirteen months he had let stay where it landed. I catalogued that. I catalogued it and wanted him in the same breath, and neither one canceled the other.

“Mine,” he said, like it wasn’t a question.

When I reached for him he let me. He didn’t correct where I put my hands. I got the sweater up over his head and put my hand where I’d put it in the courtyard, the side of his neck. The pulse under it was going fast, and his face had not changed. Only that. I read him off the one thing he could not hold still, the way the band read me, and he stood there and let himself be read.

His mouth went down my throat to the place his hand always stopped. It didn’t stop. It went past the hollow the finger had hovered over in a chrome box with two witnesses, lower, and there was no inch left anywhere on me he was keeping to a rule. His hands were frank now, no measured distance in them, one at the small of my back and one between my legs, and the sound I made was one the smoke detector would have filed as a notable vocal event if the smoke detector had reached this room. It didn’t. Nothing here reached anything.

He was not gentle. He was not cruel. He got a knee between mine and I opened for it. Then I was the one drawing him in, my hand around his cock, and he made a sound into my mouth that no session had ever produced.

When he pushed into me a sound came out of him first. Low. Not built. A man who had never let himself be heard in that building. I felt the stretch of it and the tile cold at my shoulders and his hand spreading me for it. I didn’t brace, and I didn’t go up out of my body, the trained way I left everything the machine did to me on the floors below. I stayed in it. That was the part I wouldn’t be able to account for after. I stayed.

He moved slow at first, and then not slow. His hands took my hips back against the tile hard enough to leave a mark I would find that night and not mind finding. The count reached for its start under all of it, the old reflex feeling for six, and there was no six. There was the next and the next, nothing measured, no rhythm he was keeping for a readout, and I stopped listening for the seven because the seven was not the thing my body was doing anymore. It was doing a thing with no number at all.

He said my name. Not the way the building said it. Nothing in his mouth had a form attached to it. I kept my eyes open more than I closed them. I had watched him reset his face in an elevator, in a gallery, in a hall with two officers in it. I wanted the one version nobody had ever been in the room to see. It came at the end. His forehead came down on mine and his breath went ragged and stayed ragged, and he didn’t take it back. I watched the man who had built a machine to read every reflex I owned run clean out of his own, inside me, behind a door that logged nothing. No server in that building would ever hold a frame of it.

I finished with his name in my mouth and his hand fisted in my hair, hard enough to hurt, exactly hard enough. The seven arrived. I couldn’t tell whose hand was on the count. Mine. His. I didn’t stop to find out. Just the two of us and the cold tile and a green foil matchbook watching from the closed lid.

After, the tile was cold again in a way it hadn’t been for a while.

He sat with his back against the tub, and I sat against the door, and the matchbook sat between us on the closed lid where I had left it, green foil catching the paperback light. Neither of us reached for our clothes right away. I do not know what he was thinking. I know I was doing the thing I always do after, which is take an inventory, except this time the inventory would not settle into columns. There was no cost line. There was no gain line. There was just a fact sitting in the room with us, plain as the tile: I had wanted this before he ever touched me, and nothing that happened on the floor had been done to me.

“They’ll have logged the door,” I said. “Twelve minutes, closed, no visual.”

“They’ll have logged it as a resident using the bathroom.”

“Will you file it that way.”

He took his time answering. “I don’t know how I’m going to file today at all.”

I almost believed that was the truest thing he had said to me since the dock.

I checked my wrist once we were both dressed, both of us doing the small silent work of putting the room back to how it needed to look before either of us opened the door on it. The band was cool. Steady.

Adherence: 68. Unmoved.

Whatever the kitchen had cost me, this room had paid back, and the machine that paid it had no idea what it was paying for. Nothing on it said what had happened on this tile, because nothing in this room could say it. Every other room in that building had a number for what it saw. This one had a number that meant nothing had happened in it.

The wire was still coming Thursday night. The letter still moved against them, whatever was left of it once Charles read it a fifth time. I checked, as I check everything now, and the leverage was still mine. I had not traded it for this.

I didn’t know if the same was true of the rest of me.

I’d walked into that bathroom to keep one thing off a readout. I came out unable to say whether I had kept it or handed it to him with both hands and called it a door closing.

CHAPTER TWENTY

South Alcove

The wire cleared at nine forty-one on Thursday night, and my phone didn’t ring.

That was the first wrong thing. Charles Voss called about everything, and eleven thousand dollars leaving a family account should have brought a call inside the hour. It brought four hours of nothing, then one line through the legal portal, no name attached.

TRANSFER CONFIRMED. RECIPIENT PENDING PER YOUR FRIDAY COMMITMENT.

He had paid it, and he had not asked me to explain it first. Somebody had told him not to ask. The letter had been read upstairs before Charles decided anything about it.