Page 56 of Close Reading

I press send. Four feet away, her laptop pings. I watch her read it. I watch the flush that starts at her throat and the small, bitten-off smile that she directs at her screen. She does not look at me. She does not need to.

We work until 4:30. We say goodbye at the door with the careful distance of two colleagues, except that she touches my elbow when she passes me and the touch lasts one second longer than a colleague’s touch, and the second is a complete sentence.

On Thursday, we are back. The veneer is thinner. Her hand on my arm when she leans across to show me a citation. The hand lingers. My fingers on the back of her chair when I stand to refill the Chemex. They graze her shoulder on the way past. Small, accumulating.

At 3:40, my email pings.

Come over tomorrow night. I’ll teach you how my mother makes chai. She taught me in our kitchen in Portland when I was twelve. Mine is never quite the same as hers. She never measured anything. She’d done it so many times the precision had become invisible.

Also: I can’t stop thinking about you.

Also also: the chai is a pretense.

I hit reply immediately.

Yes. To the chai and to the rest.

I press send. I do not look at her. I look at my screen.

Four feet away, Priya laughs. The laugh is soft, a private sound, directed at her screen, yet the sound fills the research space completely, changing the temperature.

I do not look up. I am smiling. The smile is the uncontrolled kind, the kind the system cannot manage, from the place that has been opening all year.

Friday. Tomorrow. Her house.

The work is not getting done today.

She opens the door before I knock. Kali at the screen, tail audible from the sidewalk. Priya behind the dog, barefoot, lit from behind. “Hi.” My coat went on the hook by the door. The house was small and warm.

“Come,” she says. “I’m going to teach you something you will be very bad at.”

She is right.

We are in the too-small kitchen making chai from her mother’s recipe. The recipe requires crushing cardamom pods with the flat of a knife, a technique that sounds simple and is not. I place the pod. I place the knife. I press. The pod skitters off the cutting board and lands near Kali, who sniffs it and finds it unworthy.

“You have to actually press,” Priya says, arms crossed, mouth doing the thing it does when she is trying not to laugh.

“I am pressing.”

“You’re negotiating with it.”

I place another pod. Press. The knife slips. The pod remains intact.

She comes to stand behind me, her body against my back, her hand over my hand on the knife. “Like this,” she says, and presses down through my hand and the pod cracks open, sharp and warm.

“The variable I was missing was you,” I say, and the laugh she gives me is close. I feel it in her chest against my back.

We finish the chai together. The pods crushed, the milk added, the straining into mugs that do not match. The chai is sweet and strong.

I reach for the saucepan. My elbow catches her mug⁠—

“Oh—”

“Margot Voss.” She is laughing. She grabs a towel and begins mopping, and she is laughing and I am laughing. The chai has reached the floor and the towel is insufficient and Kali has arrived to investigate because Kali investigates all floor-level events with the thoroughness of a forensic team.

“You’re in so much trouble,” Priya says. She is grinning.

I respond without thinking.