“So what’d she say,” Phoebe said, feet tucked under her on the orange couch, guitar case for once staying home again.
“The real version.
Not the one you’re about to give me.”
“I don’t have a version.”
“You have a version.
You’ve got the face you get right before the version.” She studied him, patient, having already decided to wait him out.
“Go on.
Do the nice one first, get it out of your system, and then tell me the actual thing.”
He hadn’t meant to have a nice one ready, but there it was anyway, already assembled somewhere behind his teeth the second she asked: it went fine, she knows I’m seeing someone, that’s really most of it.
True, technically.
Also he could hear it even as it queued up the kind of true that left out every part that mattered.
“It went fine,” he said.
“She knows I’m seeing someone.”
“That’s the nice one.
I can tell it’s the nice one because your voice went flat, and your voice only goes flat when you’re being careful.” Phoebe pulled her knees in a little tighter, not accusing, just watching.
“You don’t have to protect me from your mother.
I’ve survived worse than a phone call I wasn’t even on.”
“I’m not protecting you from her.”
“Then who are you protecting.”
That landed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, and he sat with it a second before answering, because the honest answer wasn’t flattering to either one of them.
He wasn’t protecting Phoebe from Bitsy.
He was protecting the version of the last week where nobody’s mother had opinions about it yet the four hours of tea, the risotto, the walk home with a phone silenced on purpose protecting it from the cold the second his mother’s voice touched it, even secondhand, even through him.
“She called you an opportunist,” he said, plain.
“Before she knew your name.
She doesn’t know your name, actually I didn’t give it to her.
She assumed, because that’s what she does, and I let her assume wrong instead of correcting her, because correcting her meant handing her more to work with.” Read this novel at novelping . com for the best experience.
Phoebe didn’t flinch.
If anything her face did something quieter, more attentive, like she’d been waiting for exactly this and was relieved it had finally shown up instead of the nice version standing in for it.
“There it is,” she said.
“See?
That wasn’t so bad.
Slightly bad.
A four out of ten bad.
I’ve had worse from actual strangers on the subway.”
“I should’ve led with that instead of editing it into something smaller.”
“You should’ve, yeah.
But I get it.
You’re used to smoothing things for people.
That’s, like, seventy percent of your whole deal.” She reached over and took his hand, loosely, more a fact than a gesture.
“I don’t need smoothed.
I need the actual weather report, even when it’s bad.
Especially when it’s bad, honestly, the sunny reports are useless, everyone already knows when it’s sunny.”
“Noted.”
“You keep saying ‘noted’ like you’re going to actually do something about it.”
“I am going to actually do something about it.”
“We’ll see.” But she was smiling when she said it, small and satisfied, the small satisfied look of someone who’d gotten exactly the thing she came for and didn’t need to make a bigger production out of having gotten it.
She let go of his hand, reached for the coffee she’d stolen from him without asking twenty minutes ago, and drank it still made a face at how plain it was, same as always, and drank it anyway.
Across town, in a kitchen that had never once in its history smelled like anything other than clean, Bitsy Hannigan set the receiver back in its cradle and considered, for a moment, the particular texture of the word wonderful.
People used it carelessly.
Bitsy did not use words carelessly, and she did not appreciate hearing one used carelessly at her the softness of it, the way Michael had let it sit there unadorned, as if a single adjective settled anything at all.
Wonderful told her nothing.
She poured herself two fingers of something she wasn’t going to finish and stood by the window a moment, turning the shape of the problem the way she turned any problem patiently, without heat, the way one turned a stone to find the side that would split it.
A relationship with no name attached.
A woman with no last name, no family, no context, nothing to place her by which meant either Michael had genuinely nothing to hide, an unlikely proposition given how quickly he’d deflected, or he understood, on some level she found faintly insulting, that a name was ammunition and he wasn’t handing it over yet.
Clever of him.
Not clever enough.
She would find out who the girl was.
Not today today would look eager, and eager was a mistake she’d trained herself out of decades ago but soon, through the ordinary channels a woman in her position always had available to her, the ones that never announced themselves as channels at all.
A lunch here.
A casual question dropped into the right ear.
New York was a smaller place than people liked to pretend, especially the parts of it that mattered.
She took a sip of the drink she wasn’t going to finish, set it down, and permitted herself one small, private note of satisfaction not pleasure, exactly, nothing so undignified as pleasure.
Something closer to the quiet click of a lock finding its key.
Wonderful was not an answer.
It was, however, a very useful place to start.
hey quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
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P.S.
in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.