Scandalous

Chapter 22

The ceiling was the same ceiling it had been at midnight, at one, at some point after two when he had finally stopped being aware of being awake and had arrived at the pale, unsatisfying approximation of sleep that a mind in motion produces when it has been running too long to stop but is too exhausted to continue at full speed.

He came back to himself at half past seven to the grey, flat light of a California morning that hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet, and lay still for a moment in the particular disorientation of a man who hasn't slept well enough to reset properly.

The other side of the bed was empty.

He looked at it. The pillow undisturbed, the duvet flat and unoccupied, the specific absence of someone who had never come. He had fallen asleep — if it could be called that — waiting in some half-conscious way for the sound of the study door, for the creak of the hallway floor, for the evidence that whatever had needed to run its course through the night had done so. The evidence was not there. She had stayed.

He groaned. It was a private, unceremonious sound — the sound of a man registering, in sequence, the state of his head, the state of his back from a night in his clothes on top of the covers, and the state of the day that was presenting itself to him as something he was now required to navigate.

He sat up. His head throbbed with the specific, moderate quality of a man who had had two whiskies and not enough sleep — not a genuine hangover, but the dull, persistent reminder that the body keeps accounts. He ran a hand through his hair, which was not improved by this, and got up.

He dressed in the clothes he'd left out the previous morning for a Sunday — the dark jeans, the grey jumper, the automatic assembly of a man going through a routine he could perform without his full participation. He brushed his teeth. He looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror for a moment with the frank, uncharitable assessment of someone who is not, this morning, inclined to be generous about what he sees, and then looked away and went downstairs.

The kitchen held the ordinary quiet of a Sunday morning. He filled the kettle. Got out the coffee — French press, the routine of it, the specific deliberate engagement of a process that requires minor attention and provides, in exchange for that attention, the thing he needed most.

He was waiting for the kettle when he opened the cupboard for the sugar and found the bag more light than it should be. He checked it. A third, maybe. He looked at the coffee beside it and made the same calculation. He pulled open the fridge and the bread was done and the milk was running low and the eggs were two, which was insufficient for any ambition larger than a single person's breakfast.

He got a notepad from the drawer. He found the pen that lived in the drawer next to the notepad. He started writing — coffee, sugar, milk, bread, eggs — with the faintly therapeutic effect of putting order to something, of having a list when you have one, the minor authority of knowing what is needed and being the person who will go and get it.

He had added four more items when the sound reached him.

The shuffle. The particular, unmistakable shuffle of a woman who has slept in a study chair and is now navigating a kitchen in the aftermath of it, wearing the previous evening on her person and not entirely at peace with the process of being vertical.

Maryanne appeared in the kitchen doorway.

She had the throw blanket from her office sofa wrapped around her shoulders in the manner of a woman who had committed to it. She was in the black silk blouse and the tailored trousers from the night before, which were creased in the specific way of clothes that have been slept in, and her hair had what could charitably be described as architectural ambition in several unintended directions. The mascara had migrated. Her eyes were reduced to their minimum operational aperture, squinting against the mild, entirely unremarkable light of the kitchen as if it had personally offended her.

She made her way toward the coffee without acknowledging anything that wasn't the coffee.

Nathan had learned, at some point in the first few years and refined through all the ones that followed, that there was a category of Maryanne morning that rewarded silence. Not every morning — she was not, in general, someone who required careful handling over her first cup. But this specific morning, this particular configuration of the previous night's events and the study chair and the mascara situation, was a morning in which speech was not indicated.

He pressed the coffee without speaking. Poured a cup. Slid it across the counter to her side with the small, quiet economy of a man performing a gesture that both of them understood.

She stopped in front of it.

She looked at it.

There was a pause — brief, functional, the pause of a woman deciding whether to accept the terms — and then she picked it up.

She took a long, slow sip. He watched her face change in the minor, incremental way that good coffee changes faces that need it — the slight easing of something around the eyes, the fractional relaxation of the jaw.

She turned and walked back down the hall with the throw blanket trailing slightly behind her.

The study door closed. Quietly this time.

Nathan looked at the closed door. He pressed his lips together against the thing that was almost a smile, and turned back to his list.

He added pasta and olive oil and the good balsamic that he'd been meaning to replace for three weeks.

The grocery store on a Sunday morning was its own specific ecosystem — the early arrivals who were either intensely practical or trying to beat the crowd, the families with children in the cereal aisle, the older men who navigated with the deliberate, unhurried confidence of people who have been doing this long enough to have a system. Nathan moved through it at his own pace, list in hand, with the mild restorative effect that errands with clear parameters tend to produce. This needed to be done. He was doing it. The parameters were legible. It was fine.

He found the coffee. The good one — the Ethiopian blend the small roaster on Colorado Boulevard did their version of, which he'd discovered in his third week here and considered one of the more successful outcomes of the relocation. He put it in the basket and moved on.

He found the sugar. The bread. The milk. He was consulting the list for the next item — he'd written balsamic and then second-guessed which aisle — when he turned the corner from the pasta section into the condiments, and stopped.

His heart did the thing.

It was involuntary and immediate and over in the time it took him to register and suppress it, which was not as long as he would have liked. A brief, specific flutter — the physical response of a body that had apparently established a pattern of response to a particular stimulus and was now executing it without consulting him.

She was standing in front of the vinegar section with her back three-quarters to him, a small basket over one arm, reading the label on a bottle with the concentrated attention she brought to anything she was actually reading. Her hair was down, the dark mass of it, and she was in the casual clothes of a person running Sunday errands — high-waisted jeans, a cream-colored knit top, the simple arrangement of someone who was not thinking about how they looked and therefore looked exactly right. She had earphones in one ear.

She must have registered movement in her periphery, or something else — the particular social awareness she carried — because she looked up before he'd done anything to announce himself.

Her face did the thing it did. The expression that arrived before she'd decided on an expression — the unguarded, immediate version, the real one. She pulled the earphone out.

"Hey, Mr. Kingston."

The smile was already there when she said it. Not the social smile, not the careful one she produced in classrooms and corridors. The uncomplicated, slightly surprised smile of someone running into a person they're pleased to see in a context where they hadn't expected to see them.

"Miss Madison," he said, and returned the smile — which arrived, he was aware, without the usual fraction-of-a-second lag that professional courtesy required. "Didn't expect to see you here."

"Same." She glanced at his basket. "Grocery run?"

"Running low on a few things." He glanced at hers — and here, because he had formed an expectation, he noticed the gap between what he'd expected and what he was looking at.

He had expected, without quite articulating the expectation, the basket of a seventeen-year-old running a Sunday errand. Snacks. The bright packaging of things designed to appeal to people who are not yet thinking about ingredients. Crisps, perhaps. Something carbonated. The practical caloric requirements of a young person who hasn't developed a relationship with cooking.

Her basket held a bunch of fresh thyme. A lemon. A good olive oil — the proper kind, the one in the dark bottle. What looked like a small container of capers and a piece of salmon wrapped from the fish counter. A head of garlic and a container of crème fraîche.

He looked at this for a moment. He looked at her.

"How's the weekend been?" he asked. Casually. The register of a person making conversation in the condiments aisle on a Sunday morning.

Shae shrugged — the small, economical lift of one shoulder. "The usual. Reading. Starting to get through my current stack." She paused. "Listening to Claire complain about a string of things that are technically unrelated but somehow her grievances about them all circle back to the same core issue, which she hasn't identified yet and I've decided not to point out."

He laughed — the real one, the short, unguarded version. "Diplomatic."

"Strategic." She adjusted the basket on her arm. "And I started on the assignment."

He raised an eyebrow. "Already?"

"Already." The corner of her mouth moved with the small, contained satisfaction of someone who has done a thing and is not going to make too much of it but is also not going to pretend they haven't. "Two pages. It's moving."

"Two pages in two days," he said. "That's a reasonable start."

"That's two pages more than everyone else in that class, I'd imagine," she said, without particular judgment. The observation of someone assessing a situation accurately.

He inclined his head. He was not in a position to confirm or deny this on professional grounds, but she was not wrong, and she knew she was not wrong, and they both knew the other knew it.

"One question," she said. She hesitated — the brief, held quality he recognized as her version of approaching something carefully. "About the assignment."

"Go ahead."

"Free range, you said. On the form it can take." She looked at him. "You mean that. There are no — implicit restrictions. Things that would technically be permitted by the stated parameters but that you'd actually prefer not to see."

He thought about this for a moment. It was a good question — the kind of question that revealed something about the asker, the level of specificity with which they were thinking, the degree to which they were already deep enough into the thing to be thinking about its edges.

"Free range," he said, "means free range. The only thing I want is honest work. Your work. Whatever that looks like." He paused. "Is there a reason you're asking?"

She held his gaze for a moment. "Just wanted to be sure," she said.

She smiled — and it was the full version, brief and real, the one that arrived and departed quickly and left the room slightly different from how it had found it.

Her phone buzzed. She looked down at it, then back up. "That's my ride." She shifted the basket to her other arm. "I'll see you tomorrow, Mr. Kingston."

"See you tomorrow—" he began.

Miss Madison was the completion. It was the correct completion. It was the professional, boundaried, entirely appropriate completion of that sentence in that context with that person.

"—Shae," he said.

It arrived without authorization. Not precisely without thought — he had formed the shape of the correct word and this was not it — but without the usual, reliable intervention of whatever mechanism was supposed to be in place for exactly this kind of moment. He heard himself say it and it was already said.

She looked at him for half a second — something moving briefly in her eyes that he could not name and that was gone before he could attempt to name it.

Then she turned and walked toward the front of the store.

He looked after her for a moment. He was going to look away. He was looking away now, the intention of looking away fully formed and in progress, and in the process of executing it his eyes completed their brief transit of what was in front of them.

He noticed, with the involuntary biological attention of a man who has not successfully stopped himself in time, the specific arrangement of her. The line of her waist and the curve below it — the particular geometry of an hourglass that was not hidden by the high-waisted cut of the jeans but framed by it, the proportions of a figure that would have registered as objectively notable on any person in any aisle of any grocery store. The movement of her walk — the unhurried, unconscious sway of a person who is not thinking about how they move, which was the kind of movement that operated without performance and was, for that reason, worse.

His eyes drifted.

The heat arrived before he could prevent it — immediate, spreading, the specific warmth of a physiological response that has been triggered before the oversight system engaged, settling with the particular, unwelcome specificity of a body making clear that it does not require his permission to react.

He cleared his throat.

He turned. He looked at the shelf in front of him — the vinegar section, the balsamic, the specific bottle he had come here to replace — and he picked it up and put it in his basket and did not look toward the front of the store.

He stood in the condiments aisle for a moment longer than the balsamic required.

He thought, with the grim clarity of a man who has just lost an argument he was conducting internally: Maryanne wasn't entirely wrong.

He put the thought down. He picked up his list. He continued shopping with the deliberate, forward-facing attention of a man who has somewhere to be and things to find and is not, under any circumstances, going to look back toward the exit.

He did not look back.

He added two more items to the basket that weren't on the list, which was what happened when he was not thinking about what he was doing.

He paid. He drove home. He put everything away with methodical, careful attention, and when Maryanne emerged at noon looking marginally more human and asked what he'd gotten, he listed each item with the thoroughness of a man who is very focused on the specific question in front of him.