He wasn't sure how long they stayed like that.
Time in the specific, suspended quality of that room had stopped operating on its ordinary terms somewhere around the point where she had come around the desk and put her arms around him, and he had lost the thread of it — the particular, dissociative quality of a man who is exhausted and has been held by another person and has, against every available instinct, allowed it. The December light through the south windows had not moved perceptibly. The building around them continued its muffled, institutional business. In Room 214 nothing moved.
He became aware, gradually, of the specifics. The weight of her arms across his chest. The warmth of her against his back — her torso, her presence, the specific reality of a person pressed against him.
