Wanting You Willing

The folder is still open on my desk when she walks in.

I hear the door first, the soft click of the latch, then the pad of her bare feet on the hardwood. I don't look up. I've learned not to. There's a particular rhythm to the way Eliza moves through a room in the morning, unhurried, still half-wrapped in sleep, and if I lift my head now I'll lose the thread of the quarterly projections entirely.

"Did you eat?" she asks.

"Mm."

"That's not an answer."

She's behind me now. I can smell the soap on her skin, that clean citrus thing she uses, and something underneath it that's just her. The chair creaks as I shift my weight. I keep my eyes on the page. The numbers blur into a gray smear.

"I'll take that as a no," she says, and there's a smile in her voice. "I'll make you something."

"You don't have to."

"I know."

She drifts past my shoulder, and I catch it. Just a glimpse. Her hair is damp and twisted up off her neck, a few dark strands stuck to her collarbone. She's wearing the blue nightgown, the thin one that falls just past her thighs. She doesn't think about it. Why would she? It's her house too, her morning, her body. She's not performing anything for me. That's the whole problem. If she were trying, I could dismiss it. But she isn't. She's just walking to the kitchen to make me eggs, and I'm sitting here with my jaw locked, gripping a pen like it's the only thing keeping me in the chair.

I set the pen down. Carefully. Like it might go off.

The thing about Eliza is that she has no idea. That's what undoes me, every time. She has no idea that when she leans over the back of my chair to look at something on my screen, I stop breathing. She has no idea that when she laughs at something Chip said, that low surprised laugh, I feel it somewhere below my ribs. She kissed my cheek last Tuesday before she left for the library. Two seconds. A brush of lips on skin. I sat there for ten minutes afterward, staring at the wall, thinking about what it would've been like if she'd turned her head an inch to the left.

I'm forty-three years old. I run a company with four hundred employees. I've negotiated deals that made grown men cry.

And I can't get through a Tuesday morning because a woman kissed me on the cheek.

I get up. Move to the window. The street below is gray with early traffic, a delivery truck idling at the corner, a woman walking a dog that keeps stopping to sniff the same patch of grass. Normal things. Ordinary life. I press my palm flat against the cold glass and try to remember what it felt like to be a man who wasn't constantly on fire.

I can't. That man's gone.

The first time I saw her, really saw her, she was arguing with me about a contract. Her chin was up. Her eyes were doing that thing they do when she's decided she's right and she's waiting for you to catch up. I remember thinking she was difficult. I remember thinking I liked it. I didn't know then that she'd ruin me. That she'd move into my house and my head and my goddamn nervous system and rearrange everything without asking permission.

She's humming now. In the kitchen. Something tuneless, off-key, and I close my eyes because I can picture her exactly: hips against the counter, one foot tucked behind the other ankle, reaching for the pan on the high shelf with that little stretch that pulls the nightgown tight across her back.

I open my eyes. Look at the truck. Look at the dog. Look at anything that isn't the doorway to the kitchen.

It doesn't help. It never helps. The memory comes anyway, uninvited, the way it always does.

Her in my lap. That's the one that finds me most often. Not the first time, not the last, but one of the in-between nights, when she'd stopped being careful with me. She'd curled into me on the couch, her legs folded, her head against my shoulder, and then somehow she was facing me and her knees were on either side of my hips and her hands were in my hair and she was kissing me like she'd been thinking about it all day. I remember the weight of her. The heat of her through two thin layers of cotton. I remember her breath catching when I put my hands on her waist, and the sound she made, low in her throat, when I pulled her closer.

I remember her saying my name.

Not the way she says it now, across a kitchen, asking about breakfast. The other way. The way that meant she'd stopped thinking and started feeling, and I was the thing she was feeling.

My body reacts before my brain catches up. It always does. I'm hard against my zipper, standing at a window in my own study like a teenager, and the shame and the wanting are so tangled together I couldn't separate them with a knife.

I go to the bathroom. Close the door. Run the sink cold and press a wet hand to the back of my neck.

In the mirror, a man I barely recognize looks back. Tired. Hungry. Holding himself together with both hands.

You promised, I tell him.

He doesn't argue. He knows.

The problem isn't that I want her. The problem is how much, and how often, and how the wanting has stopped being a thing I do and started being a thing I am. She walks into a room and my whole body turns toward her like a plant to light. She sits too close on the couch, bare legs tucked under her, and I have to sit on my hands so I don't pull her into my lap. She falls asleep before me most nights, and I stand in the doorway of the bedroom watching her breathe, one hand on the frame, telling myself to walk away.

I walk away. Every time. Back to the couch, back to the cold sheets, back to the long dark hours of not touching her.

Because I remember what she's been through. I remember the man before me, the one who took without asking, and I remember what it cost her to trust anyone again. I remember the promises I made, and I meant them, every word. She will never lie beneath me wondering if saying no is safe. She will never offer me her body because she's afraid of what my face will do if she doesn't.

So I wait.

I take cold showers and I sleep on the couch and I let her kiss my cheek and walk away, and I tell myself this is what love is. Not the taking. The waiting.

From the kitchen, her voice rises, warm and ordinary. "Dean? How do you want your eggs?"

I look at myself one more time. Fix my collar. Breathe.

"Scrambled," I call back, and my voice comes out steady, which feels like a small victory.

I walk out to meet her.