She lay in the dark and listened to the city.
Forty-three floors were elevation enough to muffle most of it the sirens, the traffic, that specific sonic frequency of a city too busy and proud to stop moving. What was left was a low ambient hum, almost geological: the sound of something gigantic breathing.
She'd gotten used to it during the weeks she was here. Most nights it was a kind of comfort, the reminder that life out there was plodding along in its routine, indifferent way no matter what might be going on between her temples.
Tonight it wasn't enough.
She looked at the ceiling. 1:14 AM.
She thought of James's hand holding hers. She thought of seventeen degrees and Eleanor's coffee and the radiator story folded around its meaning like a present in unprinted paper. She remembered Ares's eyes in the elevator bright in an abnormal way, not the ordinary charged coldness he wore but something to do with a thing he was refusing to let become itself.
She turned onto her side and closed her eyes.
She couldn't sleep that night.
She heard him at 2 AM.
Not loudly. Not in a way that would register to someone who hadn't spent weeks learning the particular sounds of this penthouse — the specific acoustics of rooms designed more for beautiful emptiness than habitation, how sound traveled differently up here than it did down in the apartment where she'd grown up, where every wall knew everything and privacy was mostly a theoretical construct.
It wasn't a sound, exactly.
It was the quality of silence through the wall shifting.
There were a foot of plaster between her room and his. She had realized this only in the first week — she'd run her hand along the wall in the middle of a night not so different from this one, not for any reason she was ready to interrogate, just like you charted new spaces when you lived with them. Twelve inches. The width of a contract.
The width of a decision she had made, in a diner parking lot, in a car with one window that worked, weighing the life of her mother against twelve months with a man she hadn't met yet.
On the other side of that twelve inches, Ares Miller wasn't asleep.
She knew what sleeping sounded like the particular quality of occupied silence, the specific absence that a resting body made. This wasn't it. This was the opposite: the charged, effortful silence of someone awake and working hard to be quiet about it.
He had been taught to mourn in secret. You could hear that in it the discipline of it, the long practice. This was not a man who had just figured out how to hold things inside. This was a man who had been stuffing things down so long he'd turned it into an art, made it efficient, made it nearly unnoticeable.
Nearly.
She sat up and swung her feet to the floor.
She hated his surveillance and his contract and his flat recitation of her life as though it were apples on a balance sheet, the way he said what I think doesn't matter to the transaction and really believed it. She hated the architecture of him, his impenetrability, the way he made her feel like an equation being solved even though she knew — now — that the solution had come out in her favor.
She hated him.
It was just more complicated than a week ago.
That was complicated by the forty seconds. Next to the coffee, precise and unsolicited, every morning. His arm under her hand by the elevator, his breath adjusting by that nearly imperceptible fraction. By a dead man's radiator story they'd both understood but neither of them had referred to on the drive home because referring to it would mean admitting it had landed.
By the fact that he stood behind twelve inches of plaster, mourning his father's imminent absence with the particular, lonely silence of a man who never learned to allow anyone in close enough to experience it.
She leaned back against the wall.
She drew her knees to her chest.
She tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling and she sat there, on her side of the wall, not entering she was not going to enter, that was a line she wasn't crossing, the contract had been explicit and her request had been explicit and she wasn't gonna cross into your side just because you'd offered it an invitation enough for both sides if there ever were both sides before; how dare you set that up so easy.
But she also didn't leave.
She sat against the wall.
Twelve inches.
She found herself, against every practical instinct she had: I'm here. I can't say it. But I'm here.
Forty-three floors below the city hummed its low enormous hum.
The silence on the other side of the wall gradually, over an hour's time, changed quality again not resolved, but not okay either, quieter now; the straining quality of it easing by degrees.
She fell asleep sitting up against the wall with her knees to her chest at 3:17 AM.
She awoke at 5:49 with a stiff neck and the peculiar disorientation of someone who had slept in a place their body was not intending to abandon, and she climbed back under the sheets of her actual bed and lay there in the leaden early light and looked up at the ceiling and thought: you are in serious trouble.
Not the Cole Mercer kind. Not the Marcus kind.
The worse kind.
The kind with no exit clause.
She slept until eight.
When she woke the penthouse had that quality it possessed when she was alone in it — that specific acoustic, the way the intrusiveness of silence reconfigured itself when his presence wasn't somewhere in it. She lay still for a moment and took it in, the absence of him, and hated herself for taking it in.
She got up. She went to the bathroom. She scrutinized herself in the mirror with the flat assessiveness of one taking stock, and this was survey: tired, clear-eyed and a situation she had been running out of ways to simplify.
She went to the kitchen.
She stopped in the doorway.
Two mugs on the counter.
Not one. Two.
Hers was on the left — the spot she'd claimed without ever having discussed it some time in the second week, as you "claimed" positions in shared spaces without so much as making it official. It was full. It was still steaming faintly, which meant he hadn't been gone long. She walked over to it, already knowing before she picked it up and inhaled, already sure, and a puff of one.
Exactly right.
Not close, not approximately correct — absolutely right, the exact ratio she'd reached through years of bad diner coffee and a certain sort of calibration that occurs when you were making do with things for so long that getting something exactly how you wanted it felt practically suspicious.
He had made her coffee.
He had already left.
He had stood in this kitchen at whatever hour it was early, she suspected, earlier than usual, because grief had a way of making sleep feel like a negotiation and he had made two mugs of terrible coffee and he had made hers exactly right and he'd gone.
Not for her to see. Not for her to thank him for. Just made it, and left.
She was standing at the counter, holding the mug with both hands and looking out over the city through all that glass and thinking about a man who had read forty pages in a book about her worst years and chosen her anyway, who had stayed beside his dying father's bed to hold her hand, who had spent the hours between 2 AM and whatever-this-was awake, quietly, alone.
She thought about the wall.
She thought about twelve inches.
She reflected on the existence of a feelings clause in their contract drafted by him, inserted against his attorney's advice, the architecture of a man who had feared this precise outcome long before he met her, and that performing disclosure performed honesty and any performance of honesty required admitting to something she'd been talking herself out of for three weeks with an intensity that was itself, if you asked her to be honest with herself information.
She took a sip of the coffee.