Closer
891 Words
It started with rain.
Velmora rain was not gentle. It came in from the east with the particular conviction of weather that had been building over open water for days and had opinions about where it was going. By Saturday evening it was coming down in sheets against the tall windows of Blackthorn Terrace and the house felt more enclosed than usual, smaller in the way that buildings felt smaller when the outside world became genuinely uninhabitable.
Sienna had been working in the sitting room, which she had started using in the evenings as a change from the working room, and she had fallen asleep on the couch somewhere after ten with a folder of Prague contacts on her chest and the lamp still on.
She woke to the sound of the rain intensifying and the lamp being turned down.
Damian was standing at the end of the couch. He had clearly just come from his study, still dressed, and he had turned the lamp down without waking her, which was such a quietly considered thing to do that it sat in her chest for a moment before she processed it.
"What time is it," she said.
"Half past twelve."
She sat up. The Prague folder slid to her lap and she caught it. Outside the windows the rain was loud and the room was warm and the lamp made a circle of light that held them both in it.
"Sit down," she said, because he was still standing at the end of the couch with the expression of someone who had intended to simply turn down the lamp and leave and had not quite managed to follow through on the leaving part.
He sat. Not at the far end. Not exactly beside her. The middle distance that was neither, which she recognized as the physical equivalent of the space they had been maintaining between everything else.
For a while neither of them spoke. The rain filled the silence comfortably. She had her legs tucked under her and the folder in her lap and he had his elbows on his knees and was looking at the lamp with the expression he used when he was thinking through something he hadn't finished yet.
"Can I ask you something," she said.
He looked at her. "Yes."
"Before me. The six months. Was there someone else you considered for this arrangement? Someone else in the network who could have done what you needed?"
He was quiet for a moment. "There were two other possibilities."
"Why me?"
He looked at her steadily. "Because the other two possibilities would have done what I needed. You do what I need and things I didn't know I needed until you did them." He paused. "There's a difference."
She looked at him for a long moment. The rain came down against the windows and the lamp held its warm circle and outside the city was dark and wet and entirely elsewhere.
"I've been thinking about what you said," she told him. "About it being different. Better."
He didn't move. She had learned that his stillness was not absence. It was the opposite, the quality of someone giving something their complete and undivided attention.
"I've been thinking that I came into this house ready to survive it," she said. "I had a strategy. Keep it professional, keep the distance, get through six months and walk out with the debt cleared and everything intact." She looked down at the folder in her lap. "The strategy stopped working around day seven."
"What happened on day seven," he said quietly.
"You remembered how I take my coffee."
The room was very still.
She looked up at him and he was looking at her with the expression that was no longer any of the ones she had catalogued because it was something new, something that had not been available to him in the early days because it required a level of openness he had not had then.
She reached over and took the folder from her own lap and set it on the table because she did not need something in her hands right now. She needed her hands to be free for whatever the next moment was going to require.
He reached out slowly, with the deliberateness he brought to everything that mattered, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers were warm against her temple and he left his hand there for a moment, just the slight weight of it against the side of her face, and she stayed completely still and let herself feel it.
"Sienna," he said.
"I know," she said.
She turned her face slightly, just enough, and his hand shifted with the movement, and for a long moment they stayed like that in the warm circle of lamplight with the rain coming down outside and the city far away and the space between them finally, finally closing.
His forehead came to rest against hers.
That was all. Foreheads together in the lamplight, both of them breathing, the acknowledgment of something that had been building for fifteen days without either of them saying it out loud.
It was, she thought, the most intimate thing that had ever happened to her in a room where nothing had technically happened.
She closed her eyes.
The rain came down.
- Writer
