Belch Between Kisses

The first time I burped into a woman's mouth, I was nineteen and it was an accident.

Her name was Denise. We were in the back of my Camry in the parking lot behind the Odeon, and she had her tongue halfway down my throat when something shifted in my chest, a carbonated rumble I'd been ignoring since the second beer at the pub. I tried to swallow it. You can't swallow a burp. That's not how physics works. It came up hot and loud and right into her, and she jerked back like I'd tased her.

"What the fuck," she said.

I should've apologized. I should've blamed the beer, blamed the nachos, blamed anything. Instead I sat there with my mouth still tasting of her and felt something click into place, like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was there.

I said, "Sorry," and I meant it, but not the way she thought.

She got out of the car and walked back to the bar. I never saw her again. I sat in the driver's seat for maybe twenty minutes with the engine off, replaying it. Not the embarrassment. The other thing. The way her mouth had been open and warm and then suddenly full of me, not just my tongue but my whole gut, my whole body, everything I'd eaten and drunk and held inside coming up and into her. It felt like giving someone a piece of myself I couldn't give any other way.

I know how that sounds. Trust me, I've spent ten years knowing how it sounds.

I don't do it to strangers. I'm not a monster. I don't do it on first dates or at weddings or in the middle of a nice restaurant. It's a thing I've learned to keep in a box, and the box stays shut unless someone opens it with me. That's the part people don't get when they hear the word. They picture a guy in a pub, belching into some poor girl's face for a laugh. That's not it. That's not it at all.

It's about trust. It's about being that close to someone that the line between your body and hers stops meaning anything. It's about the moment right before, when you feel it coming and you know you could turn your head, you could swallow it down, you could do the polite thing. And you don't. Because she's looking at you like she wants all of you, even the parts that aren't pretty.

I've only told three women. Two of them left. The third one married me.

Then she left too.

Anyway. That's the history. That's the baggage I brought with me to the offices of Hargrove & Sloane on a Tuesday morning in March, where I was about to meet the woman who would spend the next six months making my life a specific kind of hell.

Her name was Priya Shah and she was already in the conference room when I got there, which told me everything I needed to know about her.

I'm not proud of the way I think about people sometimes. I make snap judgments and I'm usually right, which is worse than being wrong. Priya had her laptop open and her back straight and a cup of tea beside her that she hadn't touched. She was wearing a blazer the color of wet slate and her hair was pulled back so tight it looked painful. She didn't stand up when I walked in.

"You're late," she said.

"Traffic."

"It's 9:02. The meeting was at nine."

"I'm two minutes late."

"You're two minutes late to a meeting about a project that's already three weeks behind. That's not two minutes. That's three weeks and two minutes."

I sat down across from her. The conference room smelled like lemon cleaner and old carpet. There was a water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida. I looked at it instead of her.

"I'm Kit," I said.

"I know who you are."

"Then we can skip the part where we pretend to like each other."

She smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who'd already decided how this was going to go and was just waiting for me to catch up.

"I don't pretend," she said. "I fix things. That's why they brought me in. Your team has been sitting on this launch for a month and nobody's shipped anything. So here's how this works. You give me everything. Every file, every email, every half-finished idea in your head. I go through it. I find the rot. And then we either fix it or we kill it."

"And if I don't want to give you everything?"

"Then I go to Sloane and tell him you're obstructing, and you can explain to him why the project he's staked his reputation on is being held hostage by a guy who can't show up on time."

I leaned back in my chair. The thing about Priya was that she was right. That's the worst kind of enemy. The kind who's right.

"Fine," I said. "You want everything? You can have it. But I'm warning you, it's a mess."

"I eat messes for breakfast."

"That's a weird thing to say."

"It's a figure of speech."

"It's a gross figure of speech."

She looked at me then. Really looked. And I felt something shift in my chest, not a burp, not yet, but something adjacent. A pressure. A recognition. The feeling you get when you meet someone who's going to matter and you don't know yet if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"Are you always this difficult?" she asked.

"Only before noon."

"It's 9:05."

"Then I've got three hours."

She didn't laugh. But something moved at the corner of her mouth, a twitch she shut down fast. I filed it away. People who don't laugh are the ones you have to watch. They're saving it up for something.

The meeting lasted forty minutes. She asked questions I didn't have answers to. I gave her answers she didn't want. By the end of it I had a headache and she had a list of action items and we both had the distinct sense that we were going to be seeing a lot of each other.

She stood up first. She was taller than I expected. She held out her hand and I shook it, and her grip was firm and dry and brief, the handshake of someone who'd been taught to do it right.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Nine sharp. Bring the files."

"I'll bring the files."

"And Kit?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't be late."

She walked out. I sat there for a minute in the lemon-smelling room and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. Florida. It looked like Florida.

I thought about the burp. I thought about how it would feel to do it right then, in that empty room, with nobody watching. Just to let it out. Just to feel that release.

I didn't. I got up and went back to my desk and started pulling files.

But I thought about it. That's the thing. I thought about it.