The Width of Glass

Chapter Thirteen — The Notepad

Mara pov

I had left the notepad on purpose.

I want to be honest about that. It was not carelessness and it was not distraction and it was not the absent-minded oversight of someone whose head was elsewhere. It was a deliberate act dressed up as an accident, which was, I was aware, not my most straightforward moment. But I had been straightforward about a great many things over the preceding weeks and I was finding that the closer we got to the thing that existed between us the harder straightforward became.

I woke up on Wednesday morning thinking about it. About whether he had found it, whether he had looked at it properly, whether the line I had written and crossed out at the bottom of the page was legible through the crossing out, which it probably was because I had used a single line rather than the kind of thorough obliteration that would have required me to admit how much I didn't want it read.

The line said, I think I am in considerable trouble.

It was not, in the cold light of Wednesday morning, a particularly revealing thing to have written. It was the kind of thing that could mean anything. Financial trouble, professional trouble, the trouble of a situation that had not yet fully resolved. He would have to be very certain of his own read on things to interpret it the way I had meant it.

He was, I had come to understand, someone who was very certain of his reads.

I went to work. I sat at my desk and looked at the Gloucester correspondence and thought about the love story hidden in the gaps, the careful coding of feeling into the choice of certain words, the discipline of saying something without saying it in a context where saying it directly was not available.

I thought about all the things Eliot and I had said without saying them over the preceding weeks. The notes that were practical in content and something else entirely in fact. The evenings at his kitchen table that had started as briefings and had become, without either of us formally deciding they should, something considerably more personal. The way the distance across the table had felt smaller last night than it had the first evening, the two of them not a measurement of furniture anymore but of something more deliberately maintained.

I left work at five thirty and walked home slowly, which was new. For weeks I had moved through the city with the purposeful speed of someone who wanted to limit their time in exposed spaces, and today I walked slowly and looked at things and felt the specific lightness of a city that did not currently contain an immediate threat.

It was a strange feeling. Not entirely comfortable yet. The habits of the preceding months did not switch off because the circumstances had changed. But underneath them, underneath the scan of the street and the check of the parked cars and the awareness of who was walking behind me, there was something new. A tentative and somewhat cautious version of ease.

I bought flowers on the way home. Yellow ones, which I stood and looked at in the bucket outside the shop for a long moment before I bought them, because yellow had meant something specific for the past two years and I was consciously and deliberately reassigning it.

I put them in a glass on my kitchen table and looked at them and decided they looked like a Tuesday, which was what they were supposed to look like.

I had a shower and changed and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the half packed suitcase in the corner.

Then I got up and opened it.

It took twenty minutes to unpack. Most of it was winter clothes, a spare pair of boots, some books I had grabbed without thinking on the way out of my old flat and hadn't looked at since. I put the clothes away and lined the boots up in the wardrobe and stacked the books on the shelf in the order I would read them, which was a thing I did with books, ordered them by the sequence in which I intended to get to them rather than alphabetically or by size.

When the suitcase was empty I folded it flat and slid it under the bed.

I stood up and looked at the room.

It looked like a room someone lived in rather than a room someone was temporarily occupying.

I went to the kitchen and looked at the yellow flowers and felt something settle in my chest in a way that was quiet and definitive, the way things settle when you have been waiting for them to settle for a long time.

Then I crossed the street.

He buzzed me in. He opened the door. He had my notepad in his hand.

I looked at it and then at him.

He said, you left this.

I said, I know.

He looked at me for a moment and then stood back and let me in and I went to the kitchen table and sat down and he put the notepad on the table between us and sat across from me and we both looked at it.

I said, did you read it.

He said, yes.

I said, all of it.

He said, yes.

I said, including the bottom of the last page.

He said, yes.

I looked at the notepad and then at him and said, and.

He said, and I think the feeling is mutual.

The kitchen was very quiet. Outside the window the evening was doing its ordinary things, the amber light coming up, the street settling into its after-work rhythms, the city going on without any awareness that something was happening in a seventh floor apartment that felt, to the person sitting in it, considerably larger than its square footage.

I said, this is the part where I should probably say something measured and sensible about the circumstances and the timing and the fact that it's been a complicated several weeks.

He said, yes. You probably should.

I said, I'm not going to though.

He said, I know.

I looked at him across the table, at the expression he had that was almost neutral and gave away almost nothing except in the very controlled quality of it, and I watched that control loosen slightly, the careful composure that he wore the way other people wore clothing shifting just enough that I could see underneath it, and what was underneath it was warm and certain and entirely focused on me.

I said, I unpacked the suitcase.

He said, I'm glad.

I said, and I bought yellow flowers. They're on my kitchen table.

He said, yellow.

I said, I'm reassigning it.

Something moved across his face that was brief and warm and this time didn't disappear.

He reached across the table and turned the notepad over so the crossed out line was face down between us and I understood that as the gesture it was, the setting aside of the coded and the indirect, the closing of the distance that had been maintained by circumstance and caution and the careful management of a situation that no longer required managing.

He said, Mara.

I said, yes.

He said, I have been watching you from across a street for ten weeks and I have been sitting across this table from you for two and I would very much like to stop maintaining a professional distance that stopped being professional approximately eight weeks ago.

I looked at him.

I said, that was remarkably direct for someone who communicates primarily through anonymous notes.

He said, I'm adapting my methods.

I stood up and walked around the table and he turned in his chair to face me and I stood in front of him and looked at him properly at close range for the first time, close enough to see the specific dark of his eyes and the line of tension in his jaw that was not the restrained tension of the preceding weeks but something different, something that was restraint of a different and more immediate kind.

I said, you can stop adapting now.

He stood up.