Okay, she said. He turned back to face the ceiling. Outside the light was beginning the earliest gray edge of it through the curtain. The ocean shifting from black to dark blue in the way it did before the sun arrived. Malcolm, she said.
Yeah, when we get back, whatever this is, whatever we decide it is, she paused. It can't be a secret. I won't do that. I've done enough managing of how things look. If something is real, I need it to be real all the way.
Agreed, he said. That means the office will know. People will have opinions. People always have opinions. They'll say it's she stopped.
He knew what she wasn't saying. The version of the story that wrote itself automatically when a black man and his white female boss ended up together. The assumptions, the narratives, the opinions that had nothing to do with what was actually true between two people. They'll say things, he said. Some of them will be wrong.
Some of them will be said to my face and some behind my back. And I've been navigating that my entire professional life. A pause. I'm not worried about what people say. I'm asking you if you are.
Silence. No, she said I'm not. Another pause. But I want to name it. I don't want to pretend it won't exist.
It will exist, he said. And we'll handle it the same way we've handled the last 48 hours together without performing for anyone. She was quiet again. Then you're remarkably calm about things that would make most people spiral. Four years of single fatherhood, he said, you stop spiraling about things you can't control.
There's not enough time. She made a sound that was almost a laugh. I need to learn that. You will, he said. You've got a good teacher.
Are you volunteering? I'm considering it. This time the sound was definitely a laugh brief real the unguarded kind. And lying in the dark on his side of the enormous bed with the pillow barrier between them, Malcolm felt something loosen in his chest that had been held tight since Friday morning when he'd walked into a stairwell to call his mother and said the two words that had started all of this. The right words, it turned out, even if it had taken the entire weekend to confirm it.
By 8:30, they were dressed and ready, bags packed, and by the door, the room returned to its impersonal resort order. Standing in it before they left, Malcolm looked at the bed, the pillow barrier still in place, undisturbed for the second morning in a row, perfectly symmetrical, and thought about the particular absurdity and dignity of two people keeping their word to each other, even when circumstances made it unnecessary. The pillows held up, he said. Vanessa looked at them. Something moved through her expression.