I held her hand for four blocks and didn't say anything about it and neither did she and that was the most honest conversation we'd had yet.
Which was saying something, because we didn't have dishonest ones.
I let go when we reached the building because the doorman was there, and I still had some instinct toward privacy, but I felt the absence of it immediately, her hand, the warmth of it, the specific way she'd held back just enough pressure to feel deliberate. She wasn't passive about anything. Even that had been a choice.
I thought about it through dinner and through the evening, and at eleven, when I should have been sleeping, I was staring at the ceiling thinking about a woman twenty feet down the hall who read my legal documents at night and brought them to me in person and said,
