Callie blew out a sigh. “Um, well, Saturday.” She let go of him and stepped past him into the doorway where she could watch both him and the outer office. “Last I remember is driving your car back to my apartment — you got short legs, by the way.” She glanced into the outer office and lowered her voice. “Then I remember dragging your sorry ass up the stairs to bed.”
“Was I there when you woke up?”
“No. You wasn. .” She winced. “You weren’t. But then I didn’t wake up till noon. I figured you went to meet Olivia at work.”
Paul sighed and turned away, pacing a nervous little circle in the inner office. “Olivia’s gone,” he said.
Callie looked puzzled. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”
Paul’s mouth was very dry. With Callie looking at him so intently, it was hard to think straight. He heard a voice that sounded just like his in his head, saying, don’t tell her anything, just take her by the hand and lead her out into the parking lot, and get in her pickup truck and drive away and don’t look back.
Don’t be stupid, he heard another voice say, sounding much like the first one, you can’t run forever. You lost your career and your wife and everything you ever worked for. You have to hit bottom sometime. Colonel’s right, the voice went on, you’ve got it good, finally, after much too long. You’ve got a permanent job, a sweet deal, a safe harbor. Okay, so it’s not exactly what you planned on, not tenure at a research university — no book-lined office overlooking the leafy quad, no slim, influential volumes from major university presses, no fetching graduate students hanging on your every word. It’s just a job in state government, life in a cube, but it’s also a steady income and benefits and job security like nobody else has except maybe the pope and federal judges.
“Olivia quit,” Paul heard himself say.
“Quit?” Callie looked even more puzzled. “How come?”
He couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. The voices in his head were still contending with each other. Think what you’re doing, said the first voice, while the second one said, for chrissakes, what you’re being offered here is better than tenure. Yes, Colonel’s magnum opus is probably unreadable, but at least he’s writing a book. Think what you could do with access to a computer and all that time in a cube with nothing else to do. .
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “She just did.”
“When?” Callie put her hand to her throat. “We just saw her on Friday night.”
“She came in on Saturday morning and left a letter for Rick.” Paul drew a breath and continued. “Then she left her badge at the security desk and took off.”
“Did you see her?” Callie glanced once more towards the hallway, then stepped towards Paul. “I mean, was she here when you got here?”
Tell her what happened! said the first voice. This girl’s the best thing you’ve got going right now. Be a man for once in your life and tell her the truth!
Don’t be an idiot, said the second voice, you saw nothing on Saturday, you heard nothing. Olivia’s gone, and everybody’s better off. Hell, maybe even Olivia is better off wherever she is. Callie doesn’t need to know.
Callie’s the one untainted thing in your life! said the first voice.
Why not keep it that way? said the second. What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.
“I don’t remember what happened.” Paul’s throat clenched, and he could barely get the words out. “I don’t remember anything until I woke up this morning.”
Callie peered at him. “Really?”
He looked away from her. “Really,” he said hoarsely. The voices in his head had gone silent.
“Jesus,” breathed Callie, and she brushed his shoulder with her fingertips. “Aw, honey, you really can’t hold your liquor, can you?”
Paul was on the verge of tears, and he didn’t know why. “That’s not all.” He drew a deep breath. “They’re giving me her job.”
Callie’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Really,” she said.
“Yes.” Paul met her eye as best he could. “Probably. Rick’s looking into it.”
“That’s quick,” she said. “I mean, her chair’s still warm, id-nit?” A slow smile spread across Callie’s face.
“What?” he said. He felt his face get hot.
“You’re gonna be a lifer,” she said, with an ironic twist to her lips. “A TexDog.”
Paul laughed bitterly and said, “Fuck you.”
She let her hand trail off his shoulder. “Pretty soon,” she said, “you’re gonna be too good for the mail girl.”
What happened next astonished them both. He seized her tightly around the waist and kissed her hard. She put her palms against his shoulders, but she didn’t push him away, and after a moment, she folded her arms around him and pressed herself as tightly against him as he was pressing himself against her. He could feel her heart pounding, could feel the blood rushing through her arms, could feel the warm slide of muscles in her back. The heat rising off them was more than the sum of their two bodies, and Paul, his eyes squeezed shut, thought he might happily die in this hot darkness, that he might spin away with her into the void and never come back.
They parted, gasping for breath, both of them wide-eyed and flushed.
“Callie,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.
She put her fingers to his lips. “You’re having a good day,” she said. “Don’t push your luck.”
“Callie,” he insisted, trying to pull her close again.
“Shh.” She cupped his face in her palms and wiped his tears with her thumbs. “You got the job. Olivia’s gone.” She smiled. “That means you win, right?”
“Right.” Paul sniffled. “I win.”
THIRTY-SIX
LATE FRIDAY NIGHT, Callie roused Paul from a doze as they lay postcoitally entangled by the flickering light of the TV.
“So what’s eatin’ you?” she said. Paul blinked up at the TV light on the ceiling and stirred, Callie’s arm across his chest, her warm thigh across his lap.
“What makes you think anything’s eating me?” He massaged the sleep from his eyes with the heels of hands.
“Something is,” Callie said. “I can feel it.”
“Nothing,” insisted Paul.
“Bullshit,” Callie said, and under the sheet she twisted a handful of love handle.
“Ow!” cried Paul.
“I ain’t fixin’ to play this game with you every goddamn night.” She vigorously propped herself on an elbow, making the mattress bounce. “I asked you a question, mister.”
Paul sighed. It was true, he had passed the last four days numbly. He felt as if he had retreated to the center of his own head: He could see out of his eyes, he could hear through his ears, but he reached and touched and moved things just with the tips of his fingers. Smells seemed to come to him distantly; food had no taste. When he got up from his desk and walked the aisles of TxDoGS, or down the hall and out the lobby and across the parking lot to his car, he felt like he was in one of the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds, as if he was some sort of slithery, boneless, alien polyp sitting in the control room of a giant machine, working the blinking controls with big, spatular flippers as the machine strode, whirring and clanking, across a miniature landscape. When he turned his head, he seemed to be looking down on the world from a height, dispassionately scanning the villages and roadways below for a house or a hay wagon or a frantic, antlike refugee he could fry with his heat ray.
“I’m waitin’,” said Callie, who got folksier as she got more demanding. She rapped his sternum with her forefinger.