Free The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams Page A

box from his hand and replaced it with my fingers. “Lie down again, will you? You’re making me anxious.”
    He laughed at that and settled back against the cushion, a tiny fraction closer to me. I felt his hair against mine, his mouth disturbing the air as he spoke. “You’ve never been anxious in your life, Vivian.”
    â€œOh, haven’t I? I’m anxious now.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t be.”
    I let that sit for a moment in perfect tranquility, because I liked the way it sounded.
You shouldn’t be.
Shouldn’t be anxious, Vivian, because I am the real deal, I am your Doctor Paul, and we two have an understanding, now, don’t we.
    â€œYes,” I whispered.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œYes, we have an understanding, don’t we?”
    He squeezed my hand against the bare parquet floor of his sterile white apartment. “We do.”
    Doctor Paul evidently had a clock somewhere, buried in his boxes or else on an unseen shelf, because I could hear it ticking methodically as we lay there in perpendicular quietude, absorbing the force of our understanding. If I could see that clock, I guessed it would read somewhere between seven and eight o’clock in the evening, which meant that I had now known him for just over seven hours.
    I traveled through them all again: the post office, my apartment, the walk to the library, the library itself, the coffee shop. Wandering up the dull weekend stretch of Madison Avenue, bending our way to the park, not caring where we went as long as we remained linked by this pulsing thread, this shimmering ribbon of you-and-me. How we talked. Not of ourselves, of course. We stuck to the things that mattered: books read, places traveled, friends met, ideas discarded. An hour had passed in a minute, and another hour in a few electric seconds, until we’d looked up to a lowering sky in blind amazement. “Where are we?” Doctor Paul asked.
    â€œI think that’s the Guggenheim, through the trees over there. The museum.”
    â€œI know the Guggenheim. My apartment’s only a few blocks away.”
    â€œImagine that,” I said.
    â€œImagine that. Are you hungry?”
    â€œEnough to eat you alive.”
    â€œWill Chinese do?”
    We ordered takeout from a tiny storefront on Eighty-ninth Street— THE PEKING DELIGHT , promised the sign above the window, in bright gold letters on a lucky red background—and Doctor Paul led me to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, on the third floor of an anodyne white-brick apartment block, the primary virtue of which was its close proximity to the express subway stop on Eighty-sixth Street. “It’s only fair,” he told me, “since I handed you such a gilded opportunity to have your psychopathic way with me this morning.”
    He had opened a bottle of cheap red wine, not a good match for the Chinese, but we drank it anyway in paper Dixie cups, ounce by tannic ounce.
    I listened to the clock, the irreplaceable tick of seconds and minutes.
    â€œI should head home,” I said. “You need a few hours of sleep before you go back to the hospital.”
    â€œI suppose I do.”
    Neither of us moved.
    â€œI don’t like it,” he said. “It’s dark out, and that neighborhood of yours—”
    I laughed. “Oh, nuts. It’s the city that never sleeps, remember? I’ll be just fine. Anyway, my parents live around here. I could always sleep there.”
    â€œYou could sleep here.”
    Our hands were still entangled, his right and my left, clinging on for dear life. Not a muscle twitched in either.
    Doctor Paul cleared his throat. “For the record, I meant
sleep
sleep. Real sleep. I’ll take the sofa.”
    â€œYou have a sofa?”
    â€œSomewhere underneath all these boxes.”
    â€œThese boxes you won’t unpack.”
    â€œI will now.” Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to thebone. I