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“Don’t,” he said, again. “I know you’re curious, and last night went—good God, but—oh,” he moaned. He rolled over onto his back, his entire body doing its best impression of an eighty-year-old man. “I promise, I will never ask you for more than you’re ready to give, but you must trust me when I say that you’re not ready for what’s in that drawer.”
“How do you know?” she asked, going over to him.
“Do you trust me?”
She nodded. “Then trust me,” he said, sitting up. He twisted his back. Vertebrae cracked like fireworks. His demeanor changed instantly. “Wow,” he said. “I don’t know what you did last night, but damn…”
“Are you all right?”
“My back may beg to differ, but yes,” he said. He glided to his feet, found his own bathrobe, and asked, “So, to Scotland or not?”
She gasped, wondering how he could be so blase about this whole thing. She’d just slept with him—on a first date that she never intended to go on. I am not that woman, she wanted to say, except that she kind of was, now, wasn’t she? “What is it?” he asked. “You’re feeling guilty about something, aren’t you? Let me guess—you’re not the kind of woman who sleeps with men on the first date?”
She could only nod mutely.
“And do you think I care about that?” he asked.
She shook her head, no.
He took her hand and squeezed it, looking into her eyes, holding her gaze. “I don’t care if you want to get back into bed with Reid today. I don’t care if you go out and fuck every member of Congress—which, by the way, is not a bad way to go about ensuring that votes go your way—”
How he knew that was something she decided not to dwell upon.
“I only care that you will be honest with yourself—and honest with me. You did feel it last night, didn’t you?”
Trust. Acceptance. Love? She had never believed that love after one date was possible, and yet she couldn’t deny that the thought of flying back to LA in three days without him already made her more weepy than she even knew was possible. How can it be love? You don’t even know what his favorite color is—where he buys his shoes from, how he takes his coffee—
The color of your eyes, Milan, black.
She blinked, wondering how those answers had popped into her head, how she’d known these things. He smiled and said, “You can take a shower first. I think I have enough eggs to make a couple of omelets.”
He seems to know me better than I know myself, she thought. The bathroom was spare—the most notable feature was that the bathtub and sink were both carved out of one solid block of white marble, streaked with gray. Or at the very least, they were very convincing fakes.
The water pelted her body, hot and cleansing. When she was finished her hair smelled like his orange-mint shampoo and her body smelled like the cucumber-lemon body wash, but somehow the guilt had been washed away. She was a grown woman, there was nothing to be ashamed of—
But you liked it.
And what if I did?
One wall was a full-length mirror, and she stood in front of it for a long time when she got out, wondering how she could have become the person she’d been last night and still look exactly the same as she did this morning. Her body was the same it’d always been, her face was the same it’d always been—
But her eyes—she realized that she’d been staring into her own eyes in the mirror for almost the entire time. There was an intensity about them that Malcolm had somehow managed to unlock, a strength that she found both extraordinary and yet unsettling. She dressed, feeling strangely out of place in her clothes, as if they belonged to someone else, even though they fit perfectly.
How can one night change me so much?
There was a new clarity of purpose, now, and as she walked into the kitchen her feelings about Reid and Rigel and Bill and Eco Energy became clear: she had control. That was what mattered. Malcolm was waiting for her in the kitchen, an omelet, perfectly folded and browned, on a plate. “I hope you like cheese,” he said, as he handed her a plate. His phone, which he’d left on the counter the night before, pinged. On it, she noted, was a news bulletin: the Matrix had failed to get Congressional approval.
“Aren’t you going to have some?” she asked.
“I already ate. You were in there for a really long time,” he added. “Is everything all right?”
She blinked at him. She didn’t think the changes were that obvious. But then again, he wouldn’t have offered himself the way he did if he couldn’t read her like an open book. “Everything’s fine,” she said.
He squinted at her as he poured her a cup of coffee. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You seem, well, different.”
“I feel different,” she said. “I feel like I’m in control of things for the first time in my life. It’s kind of scary, but—I think I like it,” she said.
Malcolm raised his eyebrow and smiled at her over his coffee cup.
