Chapter 24: Etched

Three months later the first pane of Davenport Crown came up the harbor road on a flatbed truck, wrapped in blue plastic.

It was a test pane, ten feet by six, and it was the first piece of my tower I could touch.

Dot stood on the truck bed in her orange cap, directing the crane.

Emmett stood below with a clipboard and a face of deep suffering, because he had been told to hold the other end of a rope.

"Left," Dot shouted. "Your other left."

The pane swung into the cradle, and the plastic came off.

The afternoon sun went through the glass and laid a pale rectangle across the dirt.

I had a diamond-tipped scribe in my pocket.

I knelt at the lower corner and etched M.E. into the glass, the way I had on the sixtieth floor, with a date under it.

Then I held the tool out to Leighton.

"Your turn."

"I can't draw."

"You don't have to draw. You have to write two letters."

He took the scribe.

He crouched at the glass beside me and put his other hand flat on the pane to feel where the corner was.

Then he cut an R and a C.

They came out a little crooked.

I looked at them with my whole chest.

"Perfect," I said.

"It's a disaster."

"It's yours."

He leaned over and kissed me, in front of a crane operator, a foreman and Emmett, who looked at the sky.

That night I ran a bath in the stone tub in the old guest suite.

It had been my room for about nine days and was now where I kept my books.

The water came up hot and deep and white with steam.

Leighton stood in the doorway in his shirt.

"Say something," he said.

"Get in."

He undressed slowly, with his eyes on me, and stepped into the tub behind me.

The water closed around his hips.

I leaned back against his chest between his thighs, with my head on his shoulder and my knees drawn up.

He wrapped both arms around me.

For a long time we only sat there.

His hands moved over my belly under the water, around my ribs, and up to my breasts.