What Tomorrow Is For
1127 Words
He is in the lobby when I arrive.
Not upstairs. Not in the project room or at his desk or in any of the professional spaces where I am used to finding him. He is in the lobby, standing near the elevator bank, and he looks at me the moment I come through the glass doors.
He says: “Good morning.”
Not Ms. Sinclair. Not the careful professional version with the distance embedded in the syllables. Just good morning, the way you say it to someone whose presence in your morning is something you are glad of, something you were waiting for.
I say: “Good morning.”
We go up together in the elevator and neither of us speaks and the silence is the comfortable kind, the kind that does not need filling, the kind that only exists between people who have stopped performing ease and are simply at ease.
In the project room we work and the work is good, focused and real, and for the first time in longer than I can easily count there is no crisis sitting on top of the day. No filing to manage, no hearing to prepare for, no mole to identify, no formal challenge pressing on every conversation. Just the design, which is almost complete now, and the two of us, and the thing between us that has been building for months and is no longer pretending to be anything other than what it is.
At one point he says: “The lobby ceiling height. The drawings show four metres but I think you originally specified four point two.”
I say: “I changed it. The extra twenty centimetres read as empty on the elevation study, not generous. Four metres feels more held.”
He considers this. He says: “Held.”
“Yes,” I say. “There is a difference between space that feels generous and space that feels abandoned. Twenty centimetres is sometimes the difference.”
He looks at the drawing. He says: “You are right. Four metres is correct.”
“I know,” I say.
He looks up at me and almost smiles. I see it, the beginning of it, and I file it the way I have been filing every version of it for months. One day it is going to become a full one and I am going to be in the room when it does.
We work through the morning and into the early afternoon and the conversation moves naturally between the design and other things, and everything between us is lighter today than it has ever been, the way the air is lighter after something that has been building finally breaks.
At half past two he says: “I want to show you something. On this floor, the north end. I want you to come and see it when you are ready.”
I look up. He is already standing, his jacket still on, and his expression is the open one, the real one, and there is something in it today that I have not seen before. Something that looks like anticipation.
I cap my pencil. I say: “I am ready now.”
He leads me out of the project room and down the corridor to the north end of the floor, a space I have passed before but never entered because it is not part of the floors I was contracted to design. He opens the door.
I stop in the doorway.
It is a full scale physical mock-up of the Pinnacle Tower lobby entrance. Not a rendering on a screen, not a miniature model, an actual built space, full scale, with the correct wall finishes in the correct materials and the lighting configuration I specified and the floor laid with the exact stones I shortlisted. And in the centre of the floor, exactly where I specified it should be, placed with precision in the position I drew and redrew and agonised over for weeks, is the silver-veined tile.
I stand in the doorway and I look at it.
He says: “I wanted you to see it in real light. Real scale. Before the installation happens I wanted you to see what you actually built.”
I walk in slowly. My footsteps are quiet on the floor and I move to the centre of the space and I look down at the tile and the light is coming through the north-facing window at the angle I planned for and it catches the silver vein exactly the way I imagined it would catch it when I was sitting on the cold floor of the sub-basement holding this exact piece of stone in my hands and understanding for the first time what I was building and for whom.
The scar at my throat pulses.
Warm and steady and certain, the way it has been since he stopped fighting it and I stopped pretending I was not feeling it. The same frequency it has been running at for months, patient and present and entirely sure.
I stand there for a long moment with the tile beneath me and the light coming through the window and months of work and choice and difficulty present in the room around me.
Then I turn around.
He is standing close. Closer than the room requires. He is looking at my face, not at the tile, not at the ceiling height or the wall finishes or any of the design work surrounding us. Just my face, with his expression fully open and nothing about him held back.
I say: “You did this for me.”
He says: “I wanted you to see it the way it will actually look.”
I step toward him. He does not move back. There is no distance left between us that either of us is maintaining and we both know it and have both known it for a long time.
I say: “Damien.”
He says: “Yes.”
I kiss him.
Not tentatively. Not the careful version that leaves room to retreat. The true version, the decided version, the one that says I have been certain about this for longer than I admitted and I am done waiting for a better moment because this moment, this room, this light, this man is the right moment and I am not letting it pass.
He kisses me back.
Like he has been waiting since the conference room on the first day when the suppressant cracked and the glass thinned and the thing he had spent eight years refusing to feel came through anyway and would not stop coming through no matter what he did.
The silver tile catches the light beneath our feet.
- Writer
