Chapter 4
Chapter 4: His Hotel
The Broadview was an eleven-minute walk. They took it.
Jamie had offered the Uber with such genuine ease that Nisha had almost taken him up on it, but October was crisp and clear for the first time all week, the clouds that had pressed down on the city for four days finally dissolved, and the street had the particular quality of late Thursday night in a neighbourhood she knew well — quiet without being empty, the buildings gold-lit, the night doing what Toronto nights did in autumn when they remembered to try.
She walked with her hands in her jacket pockets and thought about the eleven minutes and about what was on the other side of them, and felt — which surprised her, slightly — entirely calm.
This was not, she thought, the situation for calm. The situation was: a stranger. A wrong table. A dinner that had lasted three hours without either of them noticing. A bar. A hotel two blocks away. She was a practical person, and practical people assessed the components of a situation and named what they were. This was an unexpected evening with a man she'd met four hours ago whose game she'd played at PAX East and whose hand had been close to hers on the bar in a way she'd been aware of for fifteen minutes before she said anything about it.
Calm was not the expected outcome.
But here it was.
"You're quiet," Jamie said.
"I'm always quiet."
"That's not been my experience of the last four hours."
"I was busy arguing with you for most of the last four hours."
"Also not my experience." He glanced at her sideways. They were close enough that she could feel the warmth of his arm without it touching hers. "We agreed about almost everything."
"We agreed about Undertow's second act."
"You haven't played it."
"Based on the demo and your account of it. I'm conditionally agreeing."
"Conditional agreement," he said. "Very you." But he said it with the tone that meant he found it specifically appealing, and she let herself register that.
The Broadview appeared at the end of the street — the renovated hotel in the old building, the corner lit up with the particular warmth of a place that understood it was a landmark. Jamie held the door and she walked through into the lobby.
The elevator was old and slow and she stood beside him watching the numbers change and thought: here is a moment. She was good at noticing moments — the hinge points in a thing, where it could go one way or another. Games were built out of them. So was everything else.
The number clicked to four. The doors opened.
She followed him down the corridor to the room at the end, and stood beside him while he found his keycard with the slightly unnecessary thoroughness of someone whose hands know what to do and whose head is occupied elsewhere.
The door opened.
The room was a standard conference hotel room made slightly less standard by the fact that the window faced the bridge, and the bridge faced the city, and the city — tonight, with the clouds finally gone — was lit against a sky that had remembered it was October and turned the particular dark blue of a clear autumn midnight. A desk with an open laptop. A jacket over a chair. A Field Notes notebook on the nightstand.
Nisha looked at the window.
"Good view," she said.
"The bridge," he said. "I kept looking at it. The whole conference."
She turned to look at him. He was closer than she'd registered, which meant she'd been registering where he was. He looked back at her with the same direct quality he'd had all evening — the full attention, the warmth with the specific weight in it, the patience of someone who was very aware of what was happening and was not going to rush it.
She reached up and touched his jaw. Just that, first. The slight roughness of a day's growth, the specific warmth of a person who had been outside in October. She felt him go very still.
"Hi," she said quietly.
"Hi," he said.
She kissed him.
He kissed her back with the unhurried attention he'd been paying all evening — slow and deliberate and thorough, the kind of kiss that said this is what I wanted, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere. His hands found her face, tilting her slightly toward him, and she felt the evening's momentum arrive all at once in the specific, clean simplicity of this: him, her, the room, the bridge lit up through the window.
She pulled back just enough to look at him.
"You were very patient," she said.
"I had good company. It was easy to be patient." His thumbs brushed her jaw. "Are you—"
"Yes," she said. "I've been yes for about an hour. Possibly longer."
"I didn't want to assume."
"I know. That's—" She kissed him again, briefly. "That's one of the things, for the record."
"One of the things," he said.
"The list is longer than one. Don't let it go to your head."
He laughed against her mouth — warm, genuine — and she felt her hands move to his shirt, the buttons, with the specific clarity of a decision that had already been made.
He was careful with her in the way that wasn't caution — not hesitation, not wariness. The specific, deliberate quality of someone paying attention. He touched her like each thing was worth his full concentration, which she felt with an intensity that was almost inconvenient, because she was trying to be a practical person about this and he kept making it difficult.
She pulled his shirt from his shoulders and looked at him in the low light from the bridge — the breadth of him, the dark eyes watching her — and thought: there it is, that's the trouble, and kissed him again before the thought could go anywhere.
He unzipped her dress with the same unhurried attention he'd given everything else. His mouth found her shoulder, her neck, the curve of her jaw, and she let her head fall back and stopped thinking about the trouble.
"Nisha," he said, against her skin.
"Still yes," she said.
"Good." He pulled her toward the bed with a warm certainty that made her laugh — not nervousness, just the ease of it, the specific pleasure of being with someone whose warmth was constitutive, not performed. "I like your list," he said. "The one with more than one thing."
"Don't fish."
"I'm just noting that it exists."
"Jamie."
"Yes?"
"Stop talking," she said, and pulled him down to her.
He stopped talking.
The room filled with the sounds of the two of them and the low distant noise of the bridge, and she stopped being practical about it, and she stopped noticing the moments, and she was simply in one — the long sustained one of a person who had arrived somewhere without expecting to and discovered it was exactly right.
He knew what he was doing. More than that: he was present, which was not the same thing. There was a quality to it — to the way he moved, the way he looked at her, the way he said her name once in the middle of it, low and certain, as if checking that she was still there, still this, still everything he'd been hoping all evening — that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with attention. He was paying attention. Fully, specifically, to her.
She pressed her face against his shoulder and thought, very briefly: this is a problem.
And then she stopped thinking that too.
Afterward, they lay in the dark with the bridge light coming in through the curtains she hadn't thought to close, painting blue lines across the ceiling. She was on her side facing the window. He was on his back, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him but not quite touching.
"Okay," he said.
"Yes," she agreed.
A pause. The bridge lights moved slightly — a truck crossing, the shadows shifting.
"I'm going to ask something," he said, "and I want you to know it's not—" He stopped. "It's not the polite version. It's the real one."
"Ask it."
He turned his head to look at her. "What are you thinking."
She looked at the ceiling. She thought about what she was thinking, which was not one thing but several things arranged in a configuration she couldn't fully name yet.
"I'm thinking," she said, "that this was not what I was expecting tonight."
"No."
"I'm thinking that it's very late and you have an extremely early flight and I'm not—" She paused. "I'm a practical person."
"You've said that."
"It bears repeating in this context."
He was quiet for a moment. She could feel him looking at her in the way he'd been looking at her all evening, and she looked at the ceiling instead of back at him.
"Nisha," he said.
"Still here."
"I would like to tell you something."
"You can."
"I've been to Toronto twice before," he said, "for other conferences. And I'm a person who talks to people — it's not difficult for me — and I have never had a night that felt like this one."
She was quiet.
"I'm not saying that to—" He stopped. Tried again. "I'm not asking you to do anything about it. I'm just telling you. Because it's true and I'd rather you know it than not."
Nisha thought about this for a long moment. The bridge lights shifted again. Somewhere far below, a car moved along the street, its headlights crossing the ceiling in a slow arc.
She turned onto her back. She was close enough to him now that her shoulder pressed against his arm, and she felt him still — the same stillness as when she'd touched his jaw, the waiting quality, the patience.
"Dinner was three hours," she said. "The bar was another hour."
"Roughly."
"That's four hours." She looked at the ceiling. "I've known people for years who never—" She stopped. "I don't do this. For context. This isn't— I'm not a person who goes home with someone from a wrong table at a restaurant."
"I know," he said quietly. "I could tell."
"Then you understand that when I say this was not what I was expecting tonight, I mean — I wasn't expecting it to be anything. And it was—" She felt the word coming and let it: "Something."
He turned his head to look at her. She felt it, even though she was still looking at the ceiling.
"Yes," he said. "It was."
She finally looked back at him. In the bridge light he looked exactly himself — the warmth, the attention, the open quality of a person who didn't need to perform anything because he'd already decided what he thought and was simply in it.
She had, she thought, very little to say in response to a face like that.
She turned back to the ceiling.
"Your flight is at six forty-five," she said.
"I know."
"You should sleep."
He was quiet. Then: "I know that too."
Neither of them moved.
"Tell me something about Watershed," he said, after a while. "Something I won't see until the end."
"I don't give spoilers."
"I won't remember. I'm half asleep."
She almost smiled. "The last image. The woman in the water at dawn, the town coming up through the surface. It's her mother's town. She went back to the place her mother came from, before all of it, and she stands in it and the water is up to her knees and the light comes up and she just — stays. She doesn't leave."
"Why doesn't she leave?"
"Because she's done enough of that," Nisha said. "She's been running the whole game. Reconstructing, documenting, cataloguing. And at the end she stops. She's in the place. She lets it be the place."
"That's the ending?"
"That's the ending."
He was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to finish it," he said. "When I get back."
"Good," she said.
He turned onto his side, toward her. Not touching, still — just oriented.
"Go to sleep," she said.
"Working on it," he said.
And she listened to his breathing slow while the bridge light drew its lines across the ceiling, and she thought about the woman in the water standing still, and thought — with the particular thought of someone who was trying not to feel a thing and was feeling it anyway — that four hours was not actually that short a time.