Page 68 of The Drifter

Being seen. She'd said it without knowing she was saying his word, the exact word, the one he'd stood naked in my bedroom and made me survive. And it went through me twice, once from each of them. I put my face down into my own hands on my best friend's grip and I didn’t cry, but I came so close that the not-crying was its own kind of storm. She held on and let me stand at the edge of it and did not once tell me to step back.

We sat like that a while.

The coffee went cold. The light moved across the floor. Somewhere down on the water, a boat went by. I didn’t get up to look at it.

"Can I tell you something," I asked, finally, "that I've never said out loud?”

"Anything."

"I want more." It came out small, and then it came out whole. "I don't want to stand at that desk for the rest of my working life being good about it. I love that hotel, Izzy. I love it more than I can make anybody understand and I’m not complaining about one hour I've given it. But I want—a seat. I want my name on something. I want to build the thing I can see, the one nobody's built, the good bones and the good bar and a back-of-house that doesn't make the people who run the place feel like they're not supposed to be seen. I've been carrying that around for years and I've never said it to a living soul, and the first person I ever said it to was a stranger in a hallway, because it was safe to want things in front of somebody who was leaving."

Izzy was looking at me with her whole face open.

"Why didn't you ever say it to me?" she said. And there was hurt in it. Real. "I'm your best friend. I own the building. Why would you carry that alone when I'm right there⁠—"

"Because you own the building," I said.

And that landed on her. I watched it land. I watched her understand, maybe for the first time, that the thing that made her the natural person to ask was the exact thing that made it impossible. That I couldn’t stand at her desk in her hotel and tell her I wanted out from under her. That the friendship and the ownership had gotten braided together so tight I couldn't pull on one without the other coming. That every time I opened my mouth to want something bigger, the wanting felt like a betrayal of the woman who'd hired me and covered for me and loved me.

"Oh, Sash," she said. Quiet. "Oh, we did this all wrong, didn't we? Both of us."

"Little bit."

"A lot bit."

And that pulled something loose in both of us. We laughed, wet and broken and real, two women on a sofa who had loved each other badly and well and were only now, on the worst morning of it, starting to do it right.

"Here's what I can give you today," Izzy said, when we'd come down. She held up a hand, ticking it off, and I recognized the gesture because it was mine, it was the desk, it was a woman making a thing solid. "One. I hear you. Not the smooth way. The real way. You want a seat, and you're going to have one. We are going to figure out what that looks like—partner, GM, your own place with my money behind it, I don't care, we'll build it. That's real. I'm not managing you."

"Okay."

"Two." Her face changed. The smooth started to come down over it again and she caught it, visibly, and pushed it back. "There’s a reason I can't put your name on paper right now. This week. And it has to do with Byron, and with something that's happening around him that I can't hand you—not because you couldn't take it, but because the last few people who got close to it got hurt. I’m not going to be the one who walks you into that with your eyes closed. That's the one thing I'm going to ask you to trust me on without the whole story. So, I'm going to carry it myself for a few days. That's me trying to do it right. Even though it looks like the old thing. It isn't the old thing."

I looked at her a long moment.

Every reading instrument I own was going, and all of them said the same thing—that she meant it, that it cost her, and that whatever she was holding back was big and near and had a shape I could almost see. The same shape as a pistol going into the back of a man's pants. The same shape as a flick of his eyes toward my window.

"Does it have to do with him?” I asked. "The man in the Magnolia Suite? And whatever's got all of you smooth this week?”

Izzy didn't answer.

But her jaw did a thing, and her eyes went somewhere for half a second. She came back and took my hand again instead of saying no, which is not the same as no.

"Ask me again in a few days," she said. "I'll tell you everything. I swear it on my life, Sasha, and you know I don't swear things I don't mean. A few days. I just need—we need—a few days."

Ask me another day. It was the thing I'd said to him, in my own bed, about the promise. Now she was handing it to me, and I understood for the first time how it must have felt to be on the other end of it. To love someone and be told not yet, and have to decide whether not yet was a wall or a gift.

I decided to let it be a gift. One more time. Because she'd earned it that morning, more than she knew.

"A few days," I said.

She squeezed my hand. Then, she looked at me, and her mouth curved, and some of the old lightness came back into her, the friend who carried the coffees.

"Now," she said. "The actual important question. And you're going to answer it.” She leaned in, conspirator, the years falling off both of us. "Is he good?"

And I laughed. It came all the way up out of me. I put my hands over my face, and Izzy whooped like a girl and grabbed my wrist and pulled it down.

"That's a yes," she said, delighted, scandalized, radiant. "Oh, that is a yes, look at your face⁠—"