But that’s all unpredictable, qualitative—unknowable,Lili said, frustrated.Isn’t that saying that economics is a failure, then? If all it’s doing is expressing the mess of humanity, rather than shaping?
We need to express it first,Kerr replied.Think of your stats courses—you express the situation before you find its outcome.
The problem, you mean. Before we solve the problem.
He laughed, again.Our humanity is not a problem, Marwan. What we want, it’s not a weakness to solve.
Well, it’s irrational.
Push further. It’s a way to map logic—force some architecture of the rational—onto what is fundamentally irrational.
But you can’t make desire rational! You cannot make humanity a logical thing. It’s all uncertainty, all the way through.
Exactly,Kerr had said, snapping his fingers as if she’d finally found the answer.Exactly.
We are all of us, trying constantly to make sense of the world.
In the empty bathroom now, Lili presses tired fingers against tired eyes.
Cold water, hot skin. Uncertainty we can never soothe.
Aleksandr is standing by the open window when she comes out. He’s looking outside.
“Hey,” she says, soft. “I—I’m going to go.”
Aleksandr looks at her.
Something’s changed, in his face.
There isn’t sadness, resignation, that released defeat, anymore.
Instead, she sees focus—intent, intense—this frown of trying to understand, and uncertainty.
Uncertainty.
“What?” she asks. “What’s—”
He crosses the distance between them, grasps her face, and kisses her.
He kisses her, and there are transactions you can’t undo, positions you have to dig your heels into; no matter what the market says, no matterthe risk hazarded—you can only go forward. Lili gasps into it, fresh air filling her lungs, bright sun, because he’skissingher—he hadn’t before, not earlier; it had only been his mouth rough against her skin—
“I don’t know how to do this,” he breathes, holding her face. “I have no fucking idea—”
“Me either,” she whispers. “Me either, but—but do you...”
He brushes his thumb along the corner of her mouth, tracing her lips.
Forgiveness is a simple thing, in the end. It feels foreign, and it feels given, and when he kisses her again, Lili lets herself believe it.
His mouth against hers, heat and the taste of him, a sound almost like a groan from his chest, pushes a burn of her tears, again; because it is difficult to accept that this is happening.
He sits down on the bed, drawing her between his legs. His hand runs up the back of her thighs, a touch at her knees: soft, vulnerable flesh. Her throat feels tight. Gentle, her skirt falls down her hips, and he doesn’t let any skin reveal without kissing it; a painful contrast to how he’d torn her clothes off earlier, like every inch of her body made him angry—and how he pulls her shirt over her head now, like she’s fragile.
Drawing her closer, he kisses her throat. So gentle, it makes her wince.
Aleksandr pulls away at once. “Does that hurt?”
“No, not really,” she whispers. “But just—are you sure?”
