The calculation I run is not about risk. It is not about probability or outcome modeling or the seventeen contingency columns I built into the draft apology email I will now never send. It is the simplest mathematics I have performed in years.
She wants this. She came here for this. She is standing in front of me telling me with her whole body and her fierce, precise, accountant's voice that she wants all of it.
I close the remaining space between us.
I do not close it carefully. I do not manage my angles or moderate my height or perform the habitual, exhausting architecture of making myself less. I step into her and she has to tilt her head back and I cup her face in one hand, my thumb along her jaw, and her face is so small in my hand, so perfectly, specifically small, and I feel her exhale against my palm.
"Livia." My voice is not the office voice. It is not the bar voice, the careful measured tones I rehearsed on the commute. It is theother voice, the one that lives below the spreadsheets, and pupils dilate when she hears it. "Tell me again."
"Which part?" Her voice has gone slightly uneven.
"All of it."
"I want you," she says, without hesitation, holding my gaze she probably deploys on quarterly reviews. "Not the apologetic version. Not the one who holds the teacup with two fingers and looks terrified of the furniture. You. Last night, on the sofa, when you stopped being careful. That version."
I walk her backwards.
Not fast, but with complete directional commitment, my hands bracketing her hips and steering her toward the concrete wall of the landing, and she goes with the pressure of it, walking backwards with her eyes on my face, and then her shoulders meet the wall and the small sound she makes travels directly down my spine and I place my forearms against the concrete on either side of her head and lean down, and her head tilts back fully now, her glasses askew, and I feel the inadequacy of every careful, considered thing I have said to her all evening.
"I calculated," I say, very low, very close to her ear, "approximately forty-seven ways this morning that I had been too much. Too loud. Too heavy. That I had used too much of the air in your apartment."
Her hands find my shirt and grip. "You didn't."
"I know that now." I pull back just enough to look at her face, the color in her cheeks, the way her chest rises and falls with a new urgency. "I am updating the model."
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh and is entirely something else, and I close the last inch between us and kiss her, and it is not the careful, tentative thing I began with last night, the thing that had seventeen layers of restraint built into it. It is the kiss that comes after the restraint has been audited and found unnecessary, deep and unambiguous and tasting ofthe terrible coffee from the building's machine that she drank in my office while she was taking my carefully constructed defences apart one precise sentence at a time.
She kisses me back with both hands in my shirt and her body arching away from the wall toward me, and the scale of the difference between us is something I feel in every point of contact, her head barely cresting my collarbone, her hands gripping fabric they cannot fully span, her whole frame fitting against the front of my body in a way that does something entirely unreasonable to my composure.
I get my hands under her thighs and lift, and she goes up easily, her legs wrapping around my hips. She levels her with mine and her glasses are completely crooked.
"Hi," she says, from her new elevation.
"Hello," I say.
The concrete wall is solid behind her and I am solid in front of her and she is held completely, her weight negligible against me, and she rolls her hips once with a very deliberate quality, a communicative quality, and the sound that leaves my throat is not professional by any measurable standard.
"There," she says, with satisfaction. "That one."
My grip tightens. "Livia."
"Still not frightened," she informs me. Her fingers work at my collar button, and I feel the slight drag of it against my throat, and her hands are warm and unhurried in a way that demolishes my last operational reserves entirely.
I press my mouth to her jaw, her throat, the soft place below her ear, and she tips her head to give me the angle, her fingers stilling on my collar because she has temporarily lost the thread of what they were doing, and I feel her pulse hammering against my lips, rapid and certain and not even slightly afraid.
She smells like damp rain and the vanilla perfume and underneath it something warm and specific and entirely hers,and I catalogue it with the same precision I catalogue everything, which means I will never lose it, which means this is going directly into a protected cell in the model and I will not be deleting it.
"Narod." She breathes it against my head. "The twelve to eighteen minutes."
"We have used approximately four," I report, against her collarbone.
She laughs, full and bright, and the laugh in the concrete stairwell is the best actuarial outcome I have produced in eleven years of practice.
I bring her mouth back to mine and she kisses me with her hands finally achieving their objective on my collar, pulling the fabric aside, and I am done with careful architecture, done with managing my angles and my volume and the precise quantity of myself I allow to occupy any given space. She told me to stop. She came here and took apart my reference-numbered apology and pressed her hand to my chest and told me she wanted the version that doesn't calculate, and I am choosing, with the full weight of deliberate informed consent, to believe her.
Her cardigan, with her glasses neatly folded in the pocket, ends up over the metal railing. Her blouse is extremely well-pressed, which I note because Livia presses her blouses, she is that kind of person, precise and considered, and the contrast of her pressed blouse against the concrete industrial wall of the emergency stairwell is something I find unreasonably compelling.
She gets my shirt untucked with the efficient economy of someone who has audited this particular process already and knows where the inefficiencies are.
