Page 14 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
None of it connects to anything I can act on. None of it is enough to say I know. I am a man who does not move on insufficient information, and what I have is not sufficient.
But I am also a man who has learned to trust the specific quality of a feeling that will not stay where he puts it, and this one has not stayed anywhere since Sunday night, and that, in my experience, means something.
I finish my drink.
6
ELENA
Mara is sittingcross-legged on the couch with a bowl of leftover pasta and the particular expression she gets when she has been patient long enough and has decided that patience is no longer serving either of us.
I know this expression. I have known it for four years. It means the conversation I have been successfully avoiding all week is about to happen, whether I am ready for it or not.
I put my bag down, take my shoes off, and go to the kitchen for a glass of water, and when I come back, she is still looking at me.
“Okay,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
She points her fork at me. “You said you were no longer a virgin, and then you left for work, and you have said approximately nothing about it since, and it has been five days, Elena.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’re always busy. Sit down.”
I sit down on the other end of the couch, pull my knees up, hold my water glass with both hands, and look at her. She looks back at me and waits, because Mara has always understood that the fastest way to get me to talk is to stop asking.
“It was good,” I say finally. “It was really good. And it meant something, at least to me, and I’m not going to do anything about that, so I’m just putting it away and moving on.”
She chews a bite of pasta. “Who is he?”
“No one you know.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Mara.”
She studies me for a long moment. “You’re not going to tell me.”
“No.”
“Is he married?”
“No.”
“Is he the reason you look like you haven’t slept properly in a week?”
I look at my water glass. “I’ve slept fine.”
She makes a sound that communicates, with impressive economy, exactly how much she believes that. She puts her bowl on the coffee table and pulls her knees up to mirror me and says, more quietly, “Did he treat you well?”
The question lands somewhere soft. I think about hands that slowed down without being asked to. Attention that did notwaver. The specific patience of a man who could have made that night about himself and chose not to.
“Yes,” I say. “He treated me well.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
