Ella Martinsen Gorham lives in Los Angeles, CA, where she is at work on a collection of stories and a novel. Her fiction has appeared in New England Review and ZYZZYVA, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2019
In the night hours a world of compatible people awaited. I met them on the MENSA platform and in reddit threads and gaming. We liked ancient myths and the origins of words, advances in gene-mapping and wind farms. Even when our opinions clashed, we managed to keep the tone civil. Our love of science held us together.
Fermín was a fellow citizen of that world. In the beginning I knew him by the handle Toroto75 and as a gaming avatar with shoulders built like meteors. I was content to leave things as they were, playing as allies, but he messaged me with persistence.
Do you like animals? he wrote.
The mandrill, with that showy popsicle snout, I replied.
The mandrill. But only for the nose.
The nose, yes.
I sat in the kitchenette of my apartment, at the window facing the courtyard. I could look from the monitors to the fountain paved in chipped tile to the hunchbacked sycamore tree. As the sky darkened the onscreen world became more brilliant and difficult to see past.
Fermín Garza Villegas, he wrote. I hadn’t asked for his real name, but once given it I found a research paper from a decade before on the fertility rates of fish exposed to plastics.
You’re a biologist? I wrote.
Yes, with a think tank.
A think tank was something tantalizing, a mystery. What happens at the think tank?
First, what is it you do?
I stalled. A few things.
He asked if we could meet face-to-face and I was curious enough to agree, breaking my own rules. In a keystroke Fermín popped in high definition: a face chafed by sun or wind with small eyes that roved, a slash of scar on the flare of the nose. He was older, well into his thirties or forties while I was twenty-seven. I preferred friends of different ages.
“Lexi314?” he said.
“It’s Caroline.”
“Caroline then.” He paused to reset expectations. I was not in a bikini of armor, but a serious-looking person. Plain-faced with flyaway hair the color of toast. In the school halls, boys of twelve and thirteen had punished me for my indifference to my looks, singing granny puss.
“Your job,” I said. “It’s unusual, isn’t it?”
He was with a group of people working to save animals at risk of extinction, most recently an amphibian. The ajolote could regrow its own limbs and organs.
“That can’t be true,” I said.
“Read about it.” He spelled axolotl, the English translation, and sipped from a can of Monster Energy drink. It was after midnight in Los Angeles, an even hazier hour in Mexico City. “And you?” he said.
“I’m designing a tool people can use on their phones to track their moods, change their habits.”
“Oh. Wellness.” He massaged his cheeks, as if the concept fatigued him.
“No. This is in the health tech space. My background is clinical psychology.”
“You must have a whole team there.” He squinted at me and my face flushed.
“Someday. It’s early stages.” I leaned in. “I’m calling it Exalt. Don’t tell any of the others.”
He nodded. Exalt.
I sensed we had the same thought: What a
fascinating couple of people we were. Serendipitous, meeting in a game.
. . .
My face burned as I imagined Fermín pecking around online for evidence of Exalt. There was none. Nothing formal yet, but the idea was real. I wanted to offer the first fully digital therapist. Exalt would ask users to choose from a spectrum of feelings: Numb. Elated. Furious. Neutral. Agitated. Morose. Follow-up questions would isolate the factors causing those feelings. People could set emotional goals and meet them with support from Exalt. A better life, and all that was required was tapping on buttons.
My old college roommate Drew said the idea was gold, and she was an engineer who knew people in venture capital. Over a period of years, I messaged Drew begging her to help me build Exalt. I needed someone to handle the technical end, to write code for a prototype. She was too busy, but she said she would introduce me to other developers. I only needed to finish drafting a proposal.
I pulled up my proposal notes as I sat in the dark: You feel morose. Okay. Let’s explore that. What time of day do you feel most morose? Outside, wind sifted through the branches of the sycamore. Sometime after last call the upstairs neighbors, a tall boy and his stubby counterpart, barreled into the courtyard. “Yo yo.” They fumbled up the stairs to their door. In tank tunics and pegged pants they were making inroads to a clubbing style, though they’d only recently arrived from the Midwestern plains.
We lived in the Little Armenia part of Hollywood, in a cherry-brown stucco named El Pacífico. My unit still had its original pale green bathtub. In one corner of the bedroom the wood floor was mealy, and the walls were latticed with hairline cracks from decades of tremors. I barely afforded to stay there with the money I made
tutoring students for college entrance exams.
“You can’t go on like this,” my mother often said. She meant that soon I would apply to graduate school and earn another degree. Tutoring seemed transitory, even to me.
“I have other things,” I said. “The business idea. Remember? Exalt.”
“You’re dreaming.” The skepticism hurt, but in the end she knew nothing of cutting-edge technology. She tried to stay relevant by wearing athletic tights in moisture-wicking fabrics, but her behind was flat as a fallen cake. I should have told her.
. . .
Most clients preferred to be tutored online, but Kam’s mother insisted that I come in person. He was prone to distraction. Three days a week I rode the bus across town, from Hollywood to Santa Monica.
One day, Kam greeted me at the door with a couple dead boutonnieres tucked into the bib of his overalls. Props, he said, from the shoot. I removed my shoes and followed him up the grand staircase with its polished balustrade. When we reached his room he fell on the bed. I caught a whiff of forgotten enchiladas. It was his body, his pubertal smell.
“Warning. I’m off today,” he said.
“You want to talk about it?”
“With you?”
“There were those cretins at school.”
“Shit’s over.” He raised a fist and exploded it. “Wait, I told you?”
“Good. Good, Kam. People can be cruel, but those people have deformed souls, right?” I sat in the chair always placed next to his desk for me, the seat bound in tapestry.
“Did you see this?” He passed me his phone then let his arm go slack. He’d filmed a zombie prom scene: a half-dozen kids in gray face makeup limped out of a school auditorium in bedraggled tuxedos and dresses. The prosthetic brains of some were exposed and picked over. The way he’d commandeered the setting for his movie was impressive but the story itself was pure theft of a host of others.
“Are these thrift store finds? The costumes?” I said.
“That’s going in the portfolio for schools.”
I nudged the papers on his desk. “I promised your mom we’d make progress on linear equations.”
He sat up, the boutonnieres spilling on the bed. “Is life over if I do bad on this test?”
“You want options.”
He pulled his hair in his fists. Very stagy. I could take his mother aside, tell her she was trying to force a square peg into a round hole. But then I’d be out of work, and Kam had two younger siblings who would need to be led through the same business.
“The good schools want to see that you can solve for x.”
“I don’t care about good schools.” He hung air quotes. “Are you thirsty, Caroline?” More air quotes, and I knew that thirsty meant horny. Horny, thirsty. Kam sensed I was neither of those. He had a way of poking at my interior life, but I always deflected.
We made ourselves Arnold Palmers and after, I persuaded Kam to sit at his desk. He just had to work at it, I said. Persistence. From the window I could see the bright plane of the ocean, he lived that close. A French country manor in Santa Monica, lots of stone and painted shutters. Smoke had coalesced over the sea from brush fires in the mountains skirting the basin.
“Did you always want to be a tutor?” he said during a break.
“That’s not appropriate, Kam. And I have other things.” My online clients weren’t so brazen.
Kam could say to his mother and father that I was the example of someone who had known all the answers on those exams. And what followed? A prestige school, and then? Kam didn’t realize that he would not be able to do whatever he wanted with his life. He wasn’t a visionary or even gifted, so the possibilities would narrow. Knowing that about Kam allowed me to feel some tenderness for him.
. . .
I walked to my bus stop along the Promenade, where retailers adjusted mannequins in athletic tights and a machine at a kiosk blew a continuous stream of bubbles. They would float over the ocean and fall in with the smoke.
I boarded the bus to Hollywood and settled, rearranging the full skirt of my dress. It was one of many I’d ordered from a catalog based in the Shetlands, seed buttons all the way to the ankles. This one was a paisley on saffron yellow.
In Bel Air the woman with a stain splashed over one eye, a birthmark, shuffled to the seat in front of me. I smiled at her and the bus jerked forward, jogging north and east, north and east. Flakes of ash from the fires had collected in the seams of the window. We watched a man urinate on the star-embedded sidewalk next to a tent.
“Make sure you do something for yourself tonight,” I said to the birthmarked woman as I made my way off the bus. Her mouth twisted with emotion. When would her life get better? Was she moving toward better?
. . .
The axolotl was a salamander with gills that emanated from its head like hairy antlers. A beguiling animal, its mouth turned up in a smile. Hello, you. I read everything I could find. The axolotl spent its entire life in the larval stage, a permanent adolescent. Accounts of the animals regenerating vital organs, lungs and spinal cords and ovaries, were astounding.
I watched videos of the team breeding them in captivity. Fermín could have been among them, though I found no proof one way or the other. I saw nothing about a think tank.
“Will you show me the think tank?” I said to him a short time after we met. We had moved on from the gaming realm and watched together a Monty Python film.
“For security reasons, I cannot. No cameras.” He laughed at the film, pushing air out of his nose.
“Paint a picture for me. How many things are being studied there? Anyone working on desalinating the oceans?”
He paused the movie so we could look at each other. “It’s not a laboratory. I’m sure you know there are many types of think tanks. Depends on the funding.”
“Of course.” I should have known more.
“We teach the public about what harms the earth, what can be done to stop it.” Then he said something about a ban on plastics.
“Are plastics killing the axolotl?”
“Everything is.” I could tell there were things being left out. He carried me to the kitchen and propped me on the counter while he rinsed dishes. “And the wellness for the masses?” he said over the clatter.
“I have a few interested parties. Well, that’s putting it lightly. It’s going to shift the paradigm.”
“You better hurry, before there are ten
thousand others doing the same thing.”
“You think it’s important work, don’t you?”
“I think you have compassion. That is what drives you.” No one had ever said it to me before. I was driven by compassion. When he saw me that way, it was easy to want more of him.
. . .
A building a few steps from my bus stop in Santa Monica was said to be a think tank. Poised on the cusp of the sea, the building’s curved walls were clad in something recycled. It looked like a spaceship or a giant bivalve. I had seen its green growing roof in satellite images.
After meeting Fermín, I was intrigued enough to watch people pass through its heavy doors. A pair of women wore culottes and the shoes with insoles made from memory foam. It might have been a day when the think tank offered complimentary stretching.
I strode over to the women, who wore ID badges on lanyards around their necks. “Can you tell me what you do in there?”
“Why?” one of the women said.
“Layperson’s curiosity.”
They blinked at me.
“We manipulate data,” the other said.
“Of course. But to what end? What’s the agenda?” I tried not to sound impatient.
“Rude,” the first said. They broke away.
“Anyone studying animals?” I called after them. Perhaps I would see them again, at the local farmer’s market down the road. They probably shopped there. Leafy greens, unbleached canvas bags. I would try them again.
. . .
We revealed our lives to each other in fragments, our belongings and habits coming to light. As I showed Fermín around with the camera on my phone, he pointed out products that were harmful, either toxic or full of plastic bits. “You put that down a drain?” I threw them in the trash, feeling both shame and regret. I showed him photos of myself as a girl, at the mouth of the Grand Canyon and among the Redwoods that dwarfed all other life.
“Did you ever visit another country?” he said.
“No. Well, my father’s work was so demanding that we never took long trips.”
“Ah. The transplant surgeon.”
“Exactly.” My face felt hot. My father was a surgeon, yes, but memories of living with him were scarce. He left when I was four.
Where Fermín lived, paper journals folded open were strewn across tables. I watched him put in eye drops, for his allergies he said. He sat in a deep chair that looked expensive, coral red fabric timeworn to a sheen. He said that the chair was Russian, that his forebears had been diplomats. He had spent much of his childhood abroad.
Being with Fermín left little time for the rest of my online community. I only skimmed the topics trending among them. A 3-D printer could replicate human cartilage. A rogue planet was wandering out in space, and people debated whether it could support life. I was letting go of my place in the discourse. Fermín’s opinion was the only one I’d come to care about.
. . .
“My mom says you’re a good influence,” Kam said. We’d been working steadily at the desk for twenty minutes. He arched his back and tapped his head with a pencil.
“She would think that,” I said, elbowing him.
“Do you have kids?”
“Me? I’m twenty-seven.” I pulled a thread from the sleeve of my dress and let it drift toward the floor. “Anyway I don’t think I ever will, out of principle.” I acted out of principle, not whims or impulses, I said. It was why his mother trusted me.
Kam nodded. He hadn’t shaved his whiskers in a week. He said he was trying to look older, he’d met a young woman already in college and she wanted him less fresh-faced.
“Where did you meet this person?” I said.
“Sam? Party.”
“Do you know what she’s studying?”
“Theater.”
I smiled. “Kam and Sam. Well, don’t let her use you.”
He exhaled deeply and stared at the ceiling. “Women are a lot of work.” But his expression was serene. If I could map all the feelings flooding his brain.
“Relating is a lot of work,” I said. “Relating to people, and all of their needs.”
“Only porn is easy.” He looked at me directly and mouthed the word porn before returning to his problem set. At that moment my mother sent me one of her text missives: You’re so stuck Caroline. Uncontrolled neurosis on all fronts. I wasn’t rattled by it, only worried that as I sat in the tapestried chair I was losing ground on my true work, my golden idea. Exalt might one day expose me as a genius.
Kam went downstairs for a break and I dared to wander to his parents’ room, with its antique-mirrored chest of drawers and the pastoral oil hanging over the bed. In the bathroom drawer: a hairpiece curled like a sleeping ferret. Was she bald, Kam’s mother? In another drawer: a tub of antacids and soaps in green plastic boxes stamped Hermès. I took the lid off one and sniffed. Heady oranges and sugar. I slipped the bar into the pocket of my dress, where it burned for the rest of the session.
. . .
My eyes were drawn to a painting behind Fermín’s favorite chair, a portrait of a woman with the same jowls as his. The style was crude, paint applied in thick dabs. “My sister,” he said.
“She was an artist?”
“You want to know the truth? That is the work of my ex.”
“Ex-wife?”
“Lover.”
“Oh.” An ache radiated outward from my heart. But who was I, to be hurt that he’d had a lover? We had known each other no more than a few weeks. “So, your ex painted your sister. Or painted you as a woman.”
“Sit still.” He captured my face in a screen shot.
“You haven’t asked me to take off my clothes,” I said.
“No.”
“Why? Where am I with you?”
“There are lots of places to peek, if I want. It’s not respectful.”
“How did you get that scar?” I said, touching my nose.
“Fight. Knife fight.”
“Jesus.” I pressed my fingers against the image of his face and the membrane of my monitor gave ever so slightly.
. . .
My hips pressed against the sides of the bathtub, it was so narrow. I ran my hands, rich in Hermès lather, over the slopes of my breasts and the pelvic plateau. I thought of Fermín’s devotion to the most vulnerable animals, his depth of character. I’d had only a few of those spasms ending in a rush of warmth at the center of my body. The conditions had to be just so.
I cajoled and teased, but Fermín slipped away and I imagined myself walking the corridors of a think tank, manipulating data in an office with ocean views and temperature control. The water cooled and my hand cramped. The spasms eluded me again.
. . .
As if to taunt me, the taller boy from upstairs made a scene in the courtyard with a woman in short shorts. She had startling bronzed legs. He maneuvered her into the shadows and they gnashed and hissed. I wanted to look away but I saw hands groping buttocks, and it was both riveting and unseemly. He knew I sat working a few feet away.
. . .
On the bus I pointed my phone camera out the window to show Fermín the murmuration of birds over the rooftops at Hollywood and Wilcox. They rose and then dipped in a pixelated cloud. “Must be starlings,” I said. “Right?”
“No. Simple pigeons.” The birthmarked woman turned in her seat at the sound of his voice then looked out the window again. I was certain the birds were starlings, but Fermín had told me that my need to be right was insufferable.
I brought him to the bluffs in Santa Monica, a windless day and the sea below us slick as syrup. The smoke from the fires had long cleared. To the south the Ferris wheel spun on the Pier.
He said the beaches there were more beautiful.
“Bring me to the axolotl,” I said.
He resisted, but I pressed him for days until he indulged me. From a canoe, he panned across Xochimilco, a system of canals between gardens overrun with vegetation. Serrated trees lined the banks of waterways, the sky bright and milky.
“Imagine,” Fermín said. “They built rafts on water to grow food.” He yelled over the noise of barges chugging in the distance, music blaring from them.
“Can we see the nests?” I said.
He gave directions in Spanish to the man steering the canoe. Then, when they’d paddled to a less crowded spot, he pointed his camera at the shore. The area was protected and we could go no closer, he said. “They are about gone. It is rare to find just one in the wild.” I sensed he was falling into one of his morose spells. “Everyone says, yes, they need protection. But how much? I think, the most possible. Then they call me an extremist.” He moved the camera, the picture blurring, the pluck of the oar in the water. Then we lost our connection.
Later that day he sent me photographs of a tree along the Xochimilco canals strung with doll parts, molded heads with black gashes for eyes. It was demented, something Kam would steal for one of his movies.
Don Julian Santana Barrera lived here, with nobody else, for many years. No electricity. No gas, he wrote.
Why the dolls?
No one wants to be alone like that.
I called him right away. “I want to visit,” I said, surprising myself. He needed something beyond all the attention from a distance. He needed to be held.
“The real Caroline?” he said. “Here?”
“Forget it. I could never afford it.”
A few days later he contacted me with a
proposal. “I want to come to Los Angeles.” He said he had reason, a conference on water pollutants. I clapped like an idiot but my insides began to churn with unease.
. . .
It was awful to think that Fermín might see for himself all that I hadn’t accomplished. I focused on the Exalt proposal, with a fever dream that I could finish it before he set foot in Los Angeles. I could even line up meetings with developers.
Do you remember the last time you felt joy? Are you ready to discover what gives you joy in your life today? Let’s explore some factors:
Conversation
Work
Food
Sleep
Music
Romance
Sex
Drew was the last person for whom I’d felt a longing. We had a night in my loft in the dorms, some deep conversation followed by touching that was awkward and yet charged with feeling. We traced each other’s hair and kissed, but it was the conversation that mattered. Machines will be superior to us one day, she’d said. It’s inevitable. I’d disagreed: Not if we design them only to serve us. Her thoughts had such intricacy. Her body, its shape and age and gender, were not significant.
. . .
I could not dissuade Fermín from coming to Los Angeles. “Are you a mass murderer? A dirt eater?” He dismissed my concerns. So, we were going to go through with something.
I met someone, I messaged my mother.
Where?
A biologist.
She dialed me right away, the quack ringtone, but I didn’t pick up.
“I met someone,” I said to Kam. That afternoon we’d agreed to work in a restaurant instead of his house so he couldn’t fall onto his bed. With its starched white tablecloths, the dining room was formal for a boy of sixteen in bear paw slippers. “I know we need to work but I thought I would share. I mean, you told me about Sam.”
“I don’t believe you.” He smiled and pressed his thumbnails against the seam of a roll, breaking it open. He had a round bruise on his neck, I noticed. And those whiskers, that wispy mustache.
“It’s long-distance,” I said.
“A computer boo.”
“As you say. It works well. And we admire each other.”
“He lives in Bangkok, though. Bet. Bet he does.” He spread on the roll a paste of olives and peppers.
“Mexico.” I felt prickles all over my skin. Talking about it made it so true. “He wants to meet in person. I can’t and I thought you would help me come up with an excuse.”
“Nope. This is the best news ever.”
We shared a tuna tartare and I groaned with pleasure at its taste, audibly groaned.
Kam gave me a sidelong look. “Unleash the beast, Caroline.” He tore a sheet of paper from his notebook. “I know. Watch some porn. It’ll loosen you up.” He started to write down some titles.
“Stop. That won’t help.” I wiped my hands on my napkin and laid one on the table. “Here.” I wiggled my fingers. He looked dubious but rested his inkstained hand on mine. “It all feels normal, doesn’t it?” I was practically whispering.
He dropped our linked hands and swung them between us. “Yeah, you’re aight.” He smirked, brought my hand to his mouth, and exhaled heavily so I could feel his moist breath.
. . .
I was nearly finished with the Exalt proposal when I found a product in the app store called AllSwell that seemed disturbingly similar. I downloaded AllSwell and scrolled through the features: the mood-tracking tool, the goal-setting tool. A wave of sour sickness broke over me and I curled myself on the bed.
I wondered about Drew. She could have taken my idea for her own gain, knowing it was gold. She could have become more avaricious. I messaged her: Too late for Exalt? Have you seen AllSwell?
Monstrous disappointment, with all the
millions of its itchy legs on my skin. Something I’d done as a child to soothe myself was to suck on a strand of hair, gilding it with enough saliva that it became hard as a quill. My father left us, my mother and me, for a more relaxed woman. They would go on to have two sons, my half-brothers. The boys ran free in the park with no worry for things that could snag their bare feet.
My mother marooned herself on me. She played a game, speaking into my ear while I pretended to sleep. She recited nothing holy or illicit, but words she believed would make me smarter. Isotope. Same number of protons, different number of neutrons. The game was pointless, because I wanted success as much as she wanted it for me.
I moped in bed under spiders, traced a fissure in the wall. I had been too passive with Exalt. I had to keep moving forward with Fermín, or another chance might slip away. Intimacy. A chance to be intimate with myself, as much as him. I had something to discover.
. . .
The elliptical walls of the think tank were rough in texture, even pulpy. Suggesting paper, suggesting erudition. I ran my hands along them as I circled the building, hoping to see in. Of course the windows were not two-way glass. I could only see my own reflection, my dress a flag trailing off in the breeze.
Did the employees sit at desks, or on mats? What did they hope to accomplish? Did they have to prove that they were gifted? I had been thinking, more and more, that I belonged in there.
It was late afternoon, the ocean a silver dollar and the sky satin blue. From the think tank I walked to the aquarium under the Pier, where I saw a pair of orange fish mating. It was by accident, as I thought I might find axolotl there, but only these fish flaying each other with their tubey noses. They made their bodies parallel, one atop the other, and touched. Then one darted away and circled back. They repeated this dance, looping and touching and looping and touching. In a few lashes of their fins the contact ended.
. . .
In a bar on Vermont I nursed an old fashioned to quell the storm in my gut. My heart loped in my chest as Fermín walked in carrying a duffel bag. There he stood, in all three dimensions, wearing a linen shirt that had creased badly in travel.
Caroline, he said with affection. He slid into the seat across from me and clasped my hands. His were baby-soft. I brought them to my nose and smelled. “Peanut butter?” I said. “You look so different.”
“Not you. Exactly the same.”
“Really?” He was slighter than expected, or I was larger. I pulled my hands away and sat on them. Something I’d done to prepare was to buy a female condom, a slick nitrile tunnel called the FC2. It was in a box in the bathroom drawer.
He ordered a pint of what was on tap and knocked his glass against mine.
“The water conference,” I said.
“Yes.” He looked down. “Well I feel terrible for this. There is no conference.”
I suspected he’d made up the water conference, but I had decided not to get mired in sorting the facts from the fantasies. I’d been tracking my feelings on AllSwell, and trying not to sabotage our chances.
“I thought it was better to have two reasons to come,” he said.
“But there’s only one.”
He drummed his fingers on the table. “I had these miles, and they were going to waste. Let’s not feel too much pressure.” He emptied his glass, a drawn-out series of gulps. I was not a wellness mogul. I might tell him, but later.
“Did you know the apes have a midlife crisis?” he said.
“Strange,” I said. “But they’re so much like us.”
“All animals are more alike than different. So much the same.”
“Some are exceptional though. The axolotl.”
He waved me off.
“I looked for them at the aquarium. I think I’m in love.”
He placed one hand on his forehead and looked down. “We better worry about every animal. Every insect, every fungus. Okay?” He excused himself to use the restroom. I wondered if I had turned him off entirely. But when Fermín returned to the table he was buoyant. “I traveled here to have a good time with you. Today, and maybe tomorrow. Let’s not talk about work.”
. . .
“This is it,” I said. “El Pacífico. Miles from the actual shoreline.” Lavender dusk filtered through the boughs of the sycamore in the courtyard. He paused to admire it, dipped his fingertips in the fountain. The wind had picked up again, dry air that made my hair stand on end.
He followed me inside and ran his hand along the back of the sofa. “You’ve seen it all before,” I said. I busied myself in the kitchenette, cradling a butternut squash. I’d planned on roasting it but suddenly it looked obscene, flesh-colored and lumpy. The apartment was sweltering. “Can you crank that window open?”
“Sit.” He patted the sofa next to him and I hesitated, swallowing a few times to wet my throat. When I joined him he pressed his nose into my neck. “You smell nice.” It was the soap of millionaires.
“Can we take a picture?” I held my phone out and he stared into the camera with a frank expression. Later I would send the photo to my mother. The biologist.
He pressed his fingers into my thigh. I had worn one of my favorites from the Shetlands, a celery green with white polka dots. “I wanted to ask you. Are you orthodox?” he said.
“In what sense?”
“A very religious woman?”
“No, the opposite of that. You know.”
“These.” He pinched my dress and shook out the skirt.
“I like the look. You can’t trace it to any trend.”
He pursed his lips and frowned.
“Are you disappointed?” I said.
“I like to think of you as a very religious woman. I don’t know why. It’s silly.”
“Then do.” People’s secret desires were silly. I was relieved that he said it.
He took my hand and placed it on the damp chest hair under his shirt. Strange, to touch him where his heart thumped under my hand. I willed myself to keep it there.
“Tell me about the think tank,” I said.
“That’s not exactly—”
I put my fingers to his lips. “Tell me.”
He thought for a moment. “When nobody else wants to fight, we fight.”
“Yes,” I said. “You do such good.”
“We are making a difference, making people more aware of their impact.”
I held fast to his words, believing they could do the work alone. The words would pull me through.
