Twice His, Once Deceieved

The Mechanical Night

Sandra's:

The first Friday of the month arrived on a Thursday, as far as Sandra was concerned.

She found the note slipped under her bedroom door when she came upstairs after dinner not handwritten, which somehow made it worse. Printed,Brief,Tonight at ten, signed with a single A. She read it twice, put it in the nightstand drawer face down, and spent the next two hours in the library not reading anything.At nine forty five she went upstairs, showered, and sat on the edge of the bed in her robe and told herself with absolute firmness that she was not going to make this into anything it wasn't.She had agreed.This was the arrangement.She was not going to cry.A knock at ten exactly.She crossed the room and opened the door.Alexander stood in the hallway in a dark shirt with the collar open, and she registered, unwillingly, that he was extraordinarily good-looking. This had not stopped being true simply because he was also cold and clinical and had typed her a printed summons for their wedding night.He looked at her with that same measuring quality, the one she was starting to recognize as his resting state. "May I come in."It wasn't quite a question.

She stepped back from the door.

Alexander's:

He had told himself this was no different from a contract obligation.He had been telling himself that since he printed the schedule three weeks ago, and he was still telling himself that now, standing in the doorway of a room that smelled like the library she'd been reading again, he could tell from the particular absence of any other scent, just old paper and her while she stood with her hands loose at her sides and looked at him with an expression that asked for nothing.

That was the thing about Sandra, he was learning.She never looked at him the way women usually looked at him.She looked at him the way she looked at everything else: squarely, steadily, like she was deciding what was real.He crossed the room.He was efficient about it. Methodical. He did not make it cruel he was not that, whatever else he was but he did not make it anything other than what it was, either. He kept his face turned away. He did not say her name.

He was very careful not to notice anything.

Afterward, he was out of the room in under three minutes.At the door, without turning: "Thank you." The words came out wrong and he knew it even as he said them and he couldn't retrieve them.He didn't look back.He walked the length of the corridor to his own wing, closed his door, and stood with his back against it in the dark for a long time.His hands were not entirely steady.

He noted this the way he noted everything: clinically, without interpretation, and filed it away where it could not do any damage.

Sandra's:

She lay in the dark for eleven minutes and then got up.She didn't turn on the lamp. Just sat on the edge of the bed, then stood, then crossed to the window and pushed it open because she needed something air, space, the feeling of a world that was larger than this room and this night and the particular silence he'd left behind him.'Thank you'..She pressed her forehead briefly against the cool glass.'Thank you' like she'd passed a dish at the table. Like she'd held a door. Like this was the most ordinary

transaction in the world and she was just a variable in it, useful and temporary and entirely beside the point.She pushed the window wider and stepped out onto the balcony.The night was cool and enormous, the garden spread out below in dark shapes, the city a low distant glow beyond the estate walls. She gripped the iron railing and looked up at the skyclear tonight, actually clear for once and found the stars the way she always found them, left to right, the familiar ones first.Her grandmother had taught her the constellations when she was seven.

She used to think that was a gift.Tonight it felt like the only thing that belonged to her.

She heard his door close somewhere down the corridor.Then the muffled sound of the shower.

Then nothing.Sandra stayed on the balcony.

The tears came eventually, the way they always did when she stopped holding them back not in a flood, just steadily, like a slow leak she hadn't been able to find the source of. She let them go. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Looked back at the stars.She was still standing there twenty minutes later when she heard a sound behind her.Not from inside the room.From the balcony itself.From the shadow to her right, where the balcony curved around the corner of the house, where the light from the bedroom window didn't reach.She spun around.

A man stood at the far edge of the balcony, entirely still, dressed in dark clothes with a black mask covering the upper half of his face. He was tall broad shouldered, hands open and loose at his sides in the deliberate way of someone trying not to look like a threat.He had clearly been there for some time.Sandra's hand found the railing behind her.She opened her mouth.

"Please don't scream," he said. His voice was low and unhurried, and it carried something in it she hadn't expected. Not menace. Something closer to exhaustion. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'll go, if you want. I only...." A pause. "I saw you from the garden. I didn't mean to intrude."

She stared at him.The reasonable thing was to scream. The reasonable thing was to go back through the door and call for security and let the house handle it the way the house handled everything: efficiently and without her input.

She didn't move."You've been standing there the whole time," she said. Not a question.He was quiet for a moment. "Yes."

"Did you see...." She stopped. Reset. "How long have you been on this balcony?" "Long enough." His voice was careful. "I'm sorry. For what it's worth, you shouldn't have to cry like that. Alone. Like that."The words landed somewhere she wasn't prepared for.Sandra looked at the masked man on her balcony, at the open hands and the exhausted voice and the thing he'd just said, which was the most honest sentence anyone had directed at her all day.She still hadn't screamed.She wasn't sure she was going to.