Page 74 of Soft Erasure

I didn’t leave.

Thirty-one minutes wasn’t a number I had budgeted for either. The body that had learned to make peace with two now stood in a dead patch of floor with more time than it had ever been given and no instruction for what to do with it. I put my back against the plaster and did the seven-count. The seventh came the way it always came, unasked, and I let it stand there a second before I did anything about it.

Matthew was at the mouth of the corridor before I heard him.

No sweater. No dove-gray. He wore the suit he wore for rooms with Charles in them, and it didn’t fit the sound of his voice when he said my name, which meant he had come from one room and arrived in the wrong one.

“You knew about this hallway.”

“I know about every hallway,” he said. “I did not know you knew about this one until an hour ago, when a schedule crossed a desk with your name on the wrong line of it.”

He knew. Of course he knew. I’d stood in three feet of plaster believing I had found the one square of his building he had never walked. He had it before I was ever admitted. There was no seam. There was the part of the floor he had not yet decided to use.

“You checked.”

“I always check.” He didn’t come closer yet. Both hands loose at his sides, the same stillness he had worn in the courtyard for the record. A man who had not moved. “Thirty minutes, Amber. You have thirty minutes in a place nobody logs, and you spent the first nine of them with a woman I am not going to ask you about.”

“Then don’t.”

“I’m not going to ask.” He crossed the distance anyway, three steps, unhurried. “I came to tell you Charles is handling the transfer wrong. I have not corrected him. I have not decided whether I am going to.” His hand came up, not to my throat, not yet, to the line of my jaw instead, the same inch he had held on Wednesday. “I came because I knew where you would be before you did, and I could not make myself stay in the other room.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“No,” he said. “It’s a confession.”

I put my hand flat on his chest. He held still under it. He had never once done that for anyone with a clipboard in the room.

His mouth found the place it had found in the bathroom, low on my throat, slower this time. No tile at my back. No lens to perform for and none to hide from either. Only corridor light and cool plaster and his hand sliding into my hair. I said his name once, low.

He said mine back, plain, no clinic in it.

He had spent every session measuring me out in careful inches. I didn’t want another inch measured.

I took his wrist and put his hand where I wanted it, the same as I had put my own hand on his neck in the courtyard, and I didn’t wait to see what his face did about it. For thirteen months he had decided where every hand in my life landed and when it came away. In a patch of floor no lens could hold, I took the deciding off him. I moved it, and then the other one, and set the pace he used to set on me every morning, and he let me, which was the thing I had not known I was asking for until I had it.

He stopped with his mouth at my jaw and waited.

“Say it.”

I understood the wait. He would not move until I gave him the terms, because the terms were the one thing in that building that had always been his to set, and here he was handing them to me with a clock running.

“Don’t stop until I tell you to.”

“Then I won’t,” he said.

Nothing careful in him after that. His hand found the back of my head before it found the plaster, some instinct that outlasted every other instinct he owned. He got what I had worn for the walk off me, even now without hurry, his eyes on my face and mine on his, because I had come to watch the one thing his cameras never caught, and I was not going to close them for it. Thirteen months of distance spent against one wall with a clock running down under it.

I set the pace and he kept it. When I wanted it slower I made it slower, a palm to his chest. He held there, breathing hard, waiting on me the way I’d spent a year waiting on a number. When I wanted the rest of it I took his cock in my hand and put it where I wanted it, and he gave it. The sound he made went low into my hair, one the building had never been given, with nothing in its walls to log it.

He had spent thirteen months reading me off a number. There was none here, and I read him instead while he came apart in my hands. I said his name again, not for the shape of it this time. I said it to watch it land on a face that had no reset left in it.

He was not gentle and he was not careful, and neither was the thing I did back. The cold at my back had gone warm. The count reached for its six somewhere far under the noise and I didn’t go down to meet it. There was only what I chose and the second I chose it.

The seven-count never fired. There was only him, and the gap in a schedule already spending itself down, and my own hand at the back of his neck holding his forehead against mine.

He finished with my name broken in half in his mouth, and for three seconds neither of us moved, and all three of those seconds were mine.

The light clicked.