Page 40 of Close Reading

The discussion lasts eleven minutes. I know this because the spreadsheet has a timestamp in the header and I note the time when the contact begins, 4:34, and the time when it ends, 4:45, when she leans back to stretch and the contact breaks. The air where her shoulder was is cold. I want the warmth back.

Eleven minutes.

We return to our desks. The afternoon passes. At some point the January light through the window shifts from grey to the deeper grey that means the afternoon is ending. She gathers her things. The bag, the laptop, the cables. She pauses.

“The paper is good, Margot.” She closes her laptop. “It’s better than good. It’s the best work I’ve done.” She pauses. “Working on it with you has been the best part of my year.”

The sentence is simple. The sentence is Priya: direct, warm, unprotected. She is not talking about the paper.

“I know,” I say.

She leaves. The door closes.

I am not pretending anymore.

I do not know when the pretending stopped, whether it was the holiday party or the emails or the also also or the eleven minutes of shoulder contact. I do not know the moment. I know the result.

The result is: I want her. I want her in my life. I want her shoulder against my shoulder and her coffee on my desk and her laugh in my kitchen and her presence in the mornings and her. I want her. Completely, specifically, in the way that reorganizes a life.

I close my laptop. I go home. Sophia is at the kitchen table with her homework. She looks up.

“We dissected owl pellets in science,” she says. “I found three bones. How was your day?”

“No bones, just working on the paper.”

“Was Dr. Anand there?”

“She was helping with the data.”

Sophia holds my gaze for exactly one second. Then she goes back to her homework with the faintest smile. She already knows, and is choosing, generously, not to say so.

“Cool,” she says.

20

PRIYA

It is a Thursday evening in late January and the work is finished.

We are proofreading the final section. It is 8:00. The dark outside the ground-level window is total, January dark, the kind that starts at 4:30 and settles in until morning. The lamp is on. The fluorescents are off.

She reads the last paragraph aloud. It is mine, the closing argument about ecological narrative as literary form, the metaphor that has been the paper’s spine since September. She reads it with that voice—low, measured, the attention to rhythm, the care that makes my words sound better than I wrote them—and I listen the way I have been listening to her for five months, with my whole body, leaned forward, the listening a physical act.

She finishes. She looks up. The lamp lights one side of her face.

“It’s done,” I say. “It’s good, Margot.”

“It is good.”

I am looking at her. I am not managing the looking.

For months I have been calibrating how long, how directly, how openly I allow myself to look at Margot. The careful glance that lasts two seconds and redirects. The sidelong attention that observes without confronting. Tonight I am not calibrating. The work is done and the lamp is on and she read my words aloud and the room is small and warm and ours and I am looking at her without any of the machinery I have built to regulate the looking.

She is looking back. The look that appears when the analysis stops and the woman behind it becomes visible.

“Margot,” I say.

Just her name. Two syllables. But the way I say it. I can hear it leave my mouth and I know, even as the sound enters the room, that I have said her name differently than I have ever said it before. Fuller. The name carrying five months of weight: the research space and the Chemex and the also also and the emails and the holiday party and the strand of wet hair and the eleven minutes and the shower I have never been in and the wanting I told Marcus was present and that is, tonight, in this room, in this light, so present it has a gravity.