"You didn't call," she said.
I'd been in a meeting with the insurance reps who underwrote Perihelion's employee coverage. I'd been told to expect a two-hour session but it turned out to be a twenty-minute update on billing policy, and when it finished I thought it would be quicker to just drive on home, maybe even beat Molly to the door if she'd stopped to pick up wine. Such was the effect of Molly's long level gaze that I felt obliged to explain all this before I asked her what she was doing in my files.
She laughed as I came across the room, one of those embarrassed, apologetic laughs: Look at the funny thing you caught me doing. Her right hand hovered over the touchpad of the PC. She turned back to the monitor. On screen, the cursor dived for the shut-down icon.
"Wait," I said.
"What, you want on here?"
The cursor homed in on its target. I put my hand over Molly's hand. "Actually, I'd like to know what you were doing."
She was tense. A vein throbbed in the pinkness just forward of her ear. "Making myself at home. Um, a little too much at home? I didn't think you'd mind."
"Mind what, Moll?"
"Mind me using your terminal."
"Using it for what?"
"Really nothing. Just checking it out."
But it couldn't be the machine Moll was curious about. It was five years old, nearly an antique. She used more sophisticated gear at work. And I had recognized the program she'd been in such a hurry to close when I came through the door. It was my household tracker, the program I used to pay bills and balance my checkbook and Rolodex my contacts.
"Kind of looked like a spreadsheet," I said.
"I wandered in there. Your desktop confused me. You know. People organize things different ways. I'm sorry, Tyler. I guess I was being presumptuous." She jerked her hand out from under mine and clicked the shut-down tag. The desktop shrank and I heard the processor's fan noise whine down to silence. Molly stood up, straightening her blouse. Molly always gave herself a crisp little tuck when she stood up. Putting things in order. "How about I start dinner." She turned her back on me and walked toward the kitchen.
I watched her disappear through the swinging doors. After a ten count I followed her in.
She was pulling pans off the wall rack. She glanced at me and looked away.
"Molly," I said. "If there's anything you want to know, all you have to do is ask."
"Oh. Is that all I have to do? Okay."
"Molly—"
She put a pan on the burner of the stove with exaggerated care, as if it were fragile. "Do you need me to apologize again? Okay, Tyler. I'm sorry I played with your terminal without your permission."
"I'm not accusing you of anything, Moll."
"Then why are we talking about it? I mean, why does it look like we're going to spend the entire rest of the evening talking about it?" Her eyes grew moist. Her tinted lenses turned a deeper shade of emerald. "So I was a little curious about you."
"Curious about what, my utility bills?"
"About you." She dragged a chair away from the kitchen table. The chair leg caught against the leg of the table and Molly yanked it free. She sat down and crossed her arms. "Yes, maybe even the trivial stuff. Maybe especially the trivial stuff." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I say this and it sounds like I'm some kind of stalker. But yes, your utility bills, your brand of toothpaste, your shoe size, yes. Yes, I want to feel like I'm something more than your weekend fuck. I confess."
"You don't have to go into my files for that."
"Maybe I wouldn't have, if—"
"If?"
She shook her head. "I don't want to argue."
"Sometimes it's better to finish what you start."
"Well, like that, for instance. Anytime you feel threatened, you do your detached thing. Get all cool and reserved and analytical, like I'm some nature documentary you're watching on TV. The glass screen comes down. But the glass screen's always there, isn't it? The whole world's on the other side of it. That's why you don't talk about yourself. That's why I spent a year waiting for you to notice I was more than a piece of office furniture. That big dumb endless cool stare, watching life like it's the evening news, like it's some sorry war on the other side of the planet where all the people have unpronounceable names."
"Molly—"
"I mean I'm aware that we're all fucked up, Tyler, every one of us born into the Spin. Pretraumatic stress disorder, or what was it you called us? A generation of grotesques. That's why we're all divorced or promiscuous or hyperreligious or depressed or manic or dispassionate. We all have a really good excuse for our bad behavior, including me, and if being this big pillar of carefully premeditated helpfulness is what gets you through the night, okay, I get it. But it's also okay for me to want more than that. It's okay, in fact, it's perfectly human, for me to want to touch you. Not just fuck you. Touch you."
She said all this and then, realizing she was done, unfolded her arms and waited for me to react.
I thought about making a speech back at her. I was passionate about her, I would say. It might not have been obvious, but I'd been aware of her ever since I came to work at Perihelion. Aware of the lines and dynamics of her body, how she stood or walked or stretched or yawned; aware of her pastel wardrobe and the costume-jewelry butterfly she wore on a skinny silver chain; aware of her moods and impulses and the catalog of her smiles and frowns and gestures. When I closed my eyes I saw her face and when I went to sleep that was what I looked at. I loved her surface and her substance: the salt taste of her throat and the cadence of her voice, the arch of her fingers and the words they wrote on my body.
I thought about all that but couldn't bring myself to say it to her.
It wasn't a lie exactly. But it wasn't exactly the truth.
In the end we made up with vaguer pleasantries and brief tears and conciliatory hugs, let the issue drop, and I played sous-chef while she composed a really very good pasta sauce, and the tension began to lift, and by midnight we had cuddled an hour in front of the news (unemployment up, an election debate, some sorry war on the other side of the planet) and we were ready for bed. Molly turned out the light before we made love, and the bedroom was dark and the window was open and the sky was blank and empty. She arched her back when she came and when she sighed her breath was sweet and milky. Parted but still touching, hand to thigh, we spoke in unfinished sentences. I said, "You know, passion" and she said, "In the bedroom, God, yes."
She fell asleep fast. I was still awake an hour later.
I climbed out of bed gently, registering no change in the pulse of her breathing. I slipped into a pair of jeans and left the bedroom. Sleepless nights like this, a little Drambuie usually helped shut down the nagging interior monologue, the petitions presented by doubt to the weary forebrain. But before I went into the kitchen I sat down at the terminal and called up my household tracker.
There was no telling what Moll had been looking at. But nothing had changed, as far as I could tell. All the names and numbers seemed intact. Maybe she had found something here that made her feel closer to me. If that was really what she wanted.
Or maybe it had been a futile search. Maybe she hadn't found anything at all.
* * * * *
In the weeks leading up to the November election I saw more of Jason. His disease was becoming more active despite the escalating medication, possibly due to the stress caused by the ongoing conflict with his father. (E.D. had announced his intention to "take back" Perihelion from what he considered a cabal of upstart bureaucrats and scientists aligned with Wun Ngo Wen—an empty threat, in Jason's opinion, but potentially disruptive and embarrassing.)
Jase kept me close in case it was necessary to dose him with antispasmodics at some critical moment, which I was willing to do, within the limits of the law and professional ethics. Keeping Jase functional in the short term was the most that medical science could do for him, and staying functional long enough to outmaneuver E. D. Lawton was, for the moment, all that mattered to Jase.