The suitcase in Adrian’s hallway was not large enough to justify the feeling it gave her.
Celia had come to his house on December 11 with a bag for Nell, a small bag for herself and a paper sack containing the good cheese she had found in the market. She had expected to be ridiculous about staying. She had not expected to see his travel case standing open beside the stairs and want, absurdly, to turn around.
“Next week,” he said, following her glance. “One night. I was hunting for the adapter.”
“I remember.”
“It’s probably still in there.”
He took her bags before she could reorganize herself into apparent ease. Nell slept in her carrier; the drive had defeated her lengthy objections to leaving the apartment. Adrian lowered his voice as if she had issued a personal decree.
“I made room in the refrigerator.”
“For me?”
“You sounded serious about the cheese.”
Celia smiled. She could do this. She could arrive at the house of the man she loved without letting an open suitcase become a prophecy. She put Nell in the bassinet they had brought on earlier visits, took off her boots and followed him to the kitchen.
The room held the warm smell of onions. He had bought flowers and left them in the paper sleeve beside an empty vase, apparently interrupted halfway through the thought. She loved that too: the intention still visible, unperfected.
“You’re allowed to put those in water,” he said when he saw her looking.
“I was admiring the arrangement.”
“It’s a restrained style.”
“Very horizontal.”
She filled the vase. At the sink she could see the garden, dark already, the wet branches moving against the lit window. There was a whole house beyond the kitchen. Space for her books, space for Nell, space in which Adrian might walk past her on his way to another room and put a hand on her back without it being a visit.
She had spent the past week wanting to tell him that. Now that she was here, the desire seemed huge and presumptuous.
He handed her a glass. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
Adrian waited.
“Everyone keeps asking.”
“I can ask whether you want the potatoes peeled instead.”
“I do.”
“An answer at last.” He took the peeler from the drawer.
She watched him for a moment, then picked up a knife and began trimming the flowers. A petal fell onto the wet counter. Quentin would be back in the country tomorrow. The fact had the persistence of a sound in another room. She could go on with anything she liked and still hear it.
“You don’t have to come on Sunday,” she said.
Adrian looked up. “I wasn’t coming to the meeting.”
“I know. I meant afterward. For dinner. If you’d rather give it a miss.”
“Would you rather?”
“No. I just know it’s a lot. For you.”
He set the potato down. “Is it?”
She couldn’t read the question. It made her clumsy.
“Somebody else’s baby. Her father arriving. You could have something easier. I don’t want you to feel you’ve promised things you didn’t understand.”
His face closed, not dramatically, but enough that she put down the scissors.
“What?”
“I don’t know whether you want me to reassure you or leave.”
“Neither.”
“Then what am I supposed to do with that?”
Celia stood very still. He was angry. She had meant to be generous, and somehow she had put them back inside a conversation in which he was waiting to be admitted.
“You haven’t met him,” she said.
“I’m not in love with him.”
The answer was so immediate, so practical, that it should have made her laugh. It didn’t. Her throat tightened instead.
“I don’t know what he’ll ask for. I don’t know how this is going to look.”
“I know.”
“You say that, but—”
“Celia, stop explaining my life to me.”
She flinched. He saw it and breathed out through his nose, stepping back from the counter.
“I don’t mean to bark at you.”
“You did.”
“Yes.” He put his hands on his hips. “I’m trying to understand why you’ve offered me the door before you’ve told me what you want.”
She looked toward the hallway. Nell slept on. The flowers lay across the counter in a disorder she had created, their stems not quite long enough for the vase.
“Because I don’t want to find out later that you were being kind.”
His expression changed. He came closer, but did not reach for her.
“I’ve been kind to people I didn’t want to spend my life with,” he said. “It didn’t feel like this.”
Her hands started trembling. She folded them, then unfolded them again.
“I want to live with you,” she said.
There it was. Not dressed as concern for his convenience or Nell’s need for another room. The bare, greedy thing.
“I want to be here when you come home. I want to put my things somewhere and not have to collect them afterward. I want Nell here. And I want to go to work and argue about what we’re watching and sometimes be in a bad mood that isn’t an emergency.”
Adrian looked at her with such concentration that she almost filled the silence.
“I want that too,” he said.
She laughed then, briefly and shakily. “You could have said it faster.”
“I was enjoying it.”
“Oh.”
He caught her hand. “I was trying not to leap all over it and tell you which room we could paint.”
Her fingers closed around his. The relief was so physical she felt tired.
“You can have ideas,” she said.
“I have several.”
“Of course you do.”
“And I want you to ask me when you need me. Not decide I’ll probably be busy, then tell me afterward that you’ve done something difficult alone.” He glanced at the hallway. “That doesn’t mean I can always come.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure you do. I think sometimes you hear no as the start of goodbye.”
She wanted to object to how well he had seen her. Instead she looked at their joined hands.
“I’m trying,” she said.
“So am I.”
He leaned his forehead against hers. There was no kiss yet. She breathed the warmth of him, the faint smell of onions and soap, and let herself stand inside what she had asked for.
“I’d like you to come for dinner on Sunday,” she said. “I don’t want to spend all evening discussing Quentin. I want to see you.”
“Then I’ll come.”
This time she believed the answer without improving the offer.
Dinner had to wait. Nell woke indignant and hungry, the potatoes sat in their cold water, and Adrian overcooked the onions while finding the clean cloths. Celia settled on the couch with the baby and watched him bring their half-made meal back from the edge of disaster.
He put on music, then turned it down, then stood beneath the speaker looking irritated with himself.
“You can have music,” she called.
“I know.”
“Nell has no opinion about this song yet.”
He turned it up one cautious notch. When he came back he carried two small plates of cheese and bread. He set one beside her and took the other to the chair opposite.
“I thought we should eat something before ten.”
“Wildly impulsive.”
They ate in turns while Nell fed.
They had managed Sunday, too. The December sixth showcase had lasted the agreed two hours, the bus parked where Imogen had approved it, with Celia answering questions because she’d chosen to be there. At the end Gavin had asked whether they could keep it another half hour. Imogen had said no, and Adrian had helped close the doors. The company had paid the trust’s extra costs as agreed, as well as its own bills for unused venue space and a replacement demonstration. The original sponsorship contribution had reached the trust’s winter fund; the larger offer tied to four days was gone. Celia remembered Adrian catching her eye as he carried the last folding chair away: tired, faintly rueful, pleased to see her. She had been pleased too.
Celia told him about a boy at the bus preview who had hidden the sequel he wanted behind a dictionary so nobody else could borrow it. Adrian asked whether she had confiscated it.
“I made him check it out.”
“Ruthless.”
“He was disappointed in me. He had a whole system.”
Adrian laughed. It was an ordinary sound, unguarded and slightly too loud. Celia had missed being the person who made it happen. She had been so afraid of needing him that she had forgotten he might need something as simple from her.
“You know what I like about you at work?” he asked.
“My terrifying efficiency?”
“That doesn’t terrify me. I’ve seen you spend twenty minutes looking for a pencil you were holding.”
“It was a very small pencil.”
“You always think there might be something better. A book they haven’t seen. A thing they haven’t tried.” He shifted forward in his chair. “I used to do that. Build things because I wanted to see if they would work. Now I spend whole days talking about what people will think of them.”
She looked at him over Nell’s head. There was weariness in his voice, but something more restless too.
“Do you miss it?”
“Making something badly and starting again without six people explaining what it means?” He smiled. “A little.”
“What would you make?”
He considered the question seriously enough that she felt the pleasure of having asked it. Then he described another little model boat, begun as an adult and never finished, a useless thing with a stubborn motor, abandoned in a cupboard because the useful things had become so urgent.
“Get it out,” she said.
“It might be terrible.”
“I’m not asking you to float the bus.”
He laughed again, and she wanted to reach across the space between them and touch his face. He was wealthy enough to buy almost any kind of leisure, yet here he was looking shy about wanting to waste an afternoon on a boat nobody would see. She recognized the embarrassment. It made her love him with a fresh, almost painful curiosity.
“I’d like to watch,” she said.
“You might be bored.”
“Then I’ll go and do something else. You won’t have to make it interesting for me.”
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “I’d like that.”
When Nell was finished, he took her while Celia went upstairs to wash. On the landing she paused outside his bedroom. The door was open. His bed was unmade, a book facedown beside it, one sock abandoned at a distance that suggested a failed throw.
She went in and picked up the sock. Then she put it back exactly where it had been.
In the bathroom mirror her face looked tired, her hair flattened on one side. She took off her earrings and put them in the little dish by the sink. Her bare ears, the quiet room, her own things resting among his—she felt shy about all of it. At thirty-eight, after seven years of domestic familiarity with another man, she could still be undone by being wanted in somebody’s bathroom.
Downstairs, Adrian was walking Nell toward the window, pointing out nothing she could possibly understand. “And that is a tree. We have established that. You remain unimpressed.”
Celia leaned in the doorway and listened.
He glanced back. “She’s a difficult audience.”
“Try the sock.”
“What sock?”
“The one upstairs, making a break for freedom.”
His expression of guilt was so immediate that she laughed. He came toward her, Nell balanced against his shoulder.
“I’ve been told it’s important to leave signs of life.”
“By whom?”
“Nobody reliable.”
She kissed him over Nell’s soft head. He closed his eyes for a moment. When she drew back she saw he was smiling.
They ate their late dinner with Nell drowsing nearby. Adrian asked what Celia would do with a completely free afternoon. She began to answer with things she needed to finish, caught his expression, and stopped.
“A boat,” she said. “Somewhere. Not a lesson. Just being on the water without having to be good at it.”
“In December?”
“You asked.”
“I did.”
“What would you do?”
He considered. “Stay here, I think.”
“You have a very boring imagination.”
“You haven’t heard the rest.”
“Go on.”
He looked at her across the table, letting the silence last until she felt warmth rise through her chest. “You’d be here.”
“That’s all?”
“I’m trying to be polite while the baby is awake.”
Celia put down her glass. Desire moved through her with a force almost comic in its timing. She had spent all day anticipating Sunday’s difficult hour. Now she wanted to skip the rest of dinner for an entirely different reason.
She left the dishes where they were.
Later, Nell settled upstairs in the bassinet near the bed. Celia stood at Adrian’s window watching the garden lights blur in the rain. Behind her he shut the door quietly, then checked the baby with a glance that was already familiar.
“You look very serious,” he said.
“I was hoping for mysterious.”
“That too.”
He came to stand beside her. Their reflections were faint in the glass: his bent head, her dark hair, the lamp behind them. She turned to him and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.
“Is this helping?” she asked.
His hand closed over hers, then released it. “Enormously.”
She opened the next button slowly, looking at his face. He let her, though the effort showed in his jaw. When she put her palm against his chest he caught her at the waist and kissed her with a hunger that made her forget the glass and the rain and the respectable woman who had brought cheese.
“I want you,” she said when she could speak.
“Good.” His voice had gone rough. “Because I’m doing very badly with the mysterious standing.”
She laughed into his mouth. He drew her away from the window, and the room beyond the lamplight became theirs.
In the small hours Nell woke them. Adrian sat up first and collided gently with the lamp shade. Celia lay still for a second, grinning in the dark while he muttered at it, then reached for the baby.
Later, after Nell slept again, she turned to find him awake. His hand moved over her hair, smoothing the strand caught against her cheek.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“For which part?”
“The waking.”
“I was here.”
“Yes.”
She moved closer, fitting herself against him. In the darkness it was easier to feel the enormity of what they had said downstairs, and easier not to run from it. Sunday would come. Quentin would stand in her apartment and see the daughter he had never known to miss. She would have to be braver than she felt.
But this was Friday night. Adrian’s hand was warm at the base of her spine. When he kissed her forehead, she lifted her face and asked for a better kiss.
He gave her one, smiling against her mouth, and she fell asleep before she could think of anything else to apologize for.