CHAPTER 5 — ALREADY KNEW
1090 Words
"You knew," she said again, louder this time because his silence was not an answer she was willing to accept.
"I knew," he said simply.
He moved to the chair and picked up his shirt and pulled it on, starting the buttons from the bottom up, like they were discussing something completely ordinary. His tie was on the desk. He reached for it.
She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall opposite. She was still in last night's dress. Last night's makeup smeared under her eyes and halfway down her cheeks. She looked like exactly what she was, a woman who had made a series of increasingly catastrophic decisions and was now standing in the wreckage of them in broad daylight.
She looked around for her bag and found it on the floor near the window, next to her shoes from last night. She dug inside it and found a makeup wipe and dragged it under her eyes while he looped his tie in the mirror.
"When did you know?" she asked.
"Sometime in the night," he said. "You talk a lot in your sleep and I saw my nephew’s posts online with your photos.”
She stopped wiping her face. "And you said nothing."
"I thought about it," he said.
"That is not the same thing," she said.
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
She pulled her shoes on and stood up and crossed to the mirror and did what she could with what she had, which was not much. The mascara was beyond saving. She wiped it off completely and looked at her own bare face and thought that this was probably the most honest she had looked in about a year and that was a depressing thought.
"You should have told me the moment you knew," she said to his reflection.
"You would have left," he said to hers.
"That was my choice to make," she said, turning to face him directly now. "Not yours." Her heart was pounding at a million beats per second. Of all the people in the world she could have bumped into!
He looked at her. "You're right," he said.
She waited for something to follow that. A qualification. A but. Anything she could push back against, there was nothing. He just said you're right and reached for his jacket and she felt the frustration climb higher because she had her arguments ready and he was not giving her anything to use them on.
"Stop agreeing with me," she said. "It's infuriating."
"Would you prefer I argued?" he asked, and there was something at the edge of his voice that was almost dry humour and that made it worse.
"I'd prefer you acted like this was a problem," she said.
"It is a problem," he said. "I'm aware of that."
"You don't look aware of it," she said. "You look like you're getting ready for work."
"I am getting ready for work," he said.
She stared at him.
He put his jacket on and straightened the collar and looked at her in the mirror and whatever he saw in her face made him turn around properly and put the jacket down on the chair again and look at her without the mirror between them.
"What would you like me to do?" he asked. "Panic? Fall apart? Would that make this easier?"
"Yes," she said honestly. "A little bit."
Something shifted in his expression then. Something that was not calm and not composed and not the careful stillness he had been wearing since he walked out of that bathroom. Just a man in a hotel room looking at a woman he should not have touched.
He crossed the room.
She knew what was happening. She could see it coming clearly and she was a psychology student who understood impulse and consequence and she stood there anyway.
He stopped in front of her and looked at her bare face in the morning light, no makeup, hair from last night, still in the burgundy dress that had been meant for someone else's party, and he looked at her like she was the most interesting thing he had seen in a long time.
He kissed her.
It was not gentle. It was the kiss of someone who had been holding something back and had run out of reasons to keep holding it. She grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him back just as hard because she was furious and he was impossible and somehow those two things did not add up to stopping.
His hands found the zip at the back of her dress, the same zip he had found the night before without fumbling, and drew it down slowly and she let him because her brain had apparently decided to take the morning off. The dress loosened around her and he pushed it off her shoulders and she pulled back just enough to look at him.
"We're fighting," she said, breathing harder than she wanted to admit.
"I know," he said, and kissed her neck.
She tipped her head back for a moment. Then she put her hand flat against his chest and pushed.
He stopped immediately. Stepped back. Looked at her.
She pulled her dress back up and held it close as if shielding herself from him. She looked at him standing there, jacket off again, tie slightly undone now, and for the first time all morning he looked less than completely composed and she noted that with some satisfaction.
"No," she said. Her voice was steady. "Not again."
He nodded once. He did not argue. He picked his jacket up off the chair again and put it back on and straightened his tie and she watched him reassemble himself in real time and found it both impressive and deeply irritating.
She zipped her dress back up herself and picked up her coat from near the door and her bag from the floor and turned to face him.
"What do you plan to do about this?" she asked. "Actually. Not the sarcastic answer. What do you actually plan to do?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
She waited. She was good at reading people. She had been taking him apart piece by piece since she found that journal and she was fairly certain she had enough of him mapped to predict the answer.
She had nothing.
She looked at his face and came up completely empty and realised she had absolutely no idea what he was going to say.
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