Ten Years to Win Her, Two Weeks to Leave Her novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Green Thermos
On the roof during the Perseids Lydia climbs up beside him and puts her hand on his wrist, but still cannot say the words; her father's assistant calls them both in for six a.m.
At eleven that night Nolan went up to the roof with a box of his things still sitting in the trunk of his car.
The Perseids had started.
A meteor crossed the dark over the parking structure and burned out behind the mountains.
The green thermos was on the ledge, in the same spot, beside the same vent.
It was nearly the same thermos every year, dented on one side and scrubbed clean.
He stood and looked at it.
Then he unscrewed the lid and poured some cocoa into it.
It was hot.
That meant someone had climbed the stairs within the last twenty minutes, and the roof was empty.
"You're still drinking it," Lydia said.
She had come up the stairwell without a sound.
She wore a gray cardigan over her work clothes, and her hair had come out of its pins.
"I never found out who leaves it," Nolan said.
"The night janitor, I'd guess."
"For ten years."
"He's a patient man."
She came and leaned on the ledge, an arm's length away.
Another meteor went over, slower and brighter than the first.
Neither of them said anything.
"I filed the transfer at ten past twelve," she said. "Personnel's assistant cried a little. My father lands from Boston at five."
"He'll refuse it."
"Probably."
"Then why file it?"
"Because I said I would."
He turned the cup in his hand.
"I'm not doing this to punish you, Lydia."
"I know."
"You always say you know."
She was quiet.
The wind moved across the roof, warm and dry, and carried the smell of creosote up from the desert.
"Say one thing," Nolan said. "One true thing about us. Not something smooth."
She looked at him.
She opened her mouth and closed it.
In ten years he had watched her give a lecture to four hundred people without a note, and he had watched her face her father across a boardroom table, and he had never seen her look like this.
"I'm bad at it," she said at last. "I don't know how to say it in rooms."
"It's a roof."
"I know it's a roof."
"Then say it."
"I want you to be standing here next year," she said, very low. "And the year after that."
It was not what he had asked for.
It was true, though, and he could hear that it was true.
It still wasn't what he had waited ten years to hear.
"That's something you'd say to a colleague," he said.
Her mouth tightened.
He picked up the cup and drank.
The cocoa was too sweet, the way it always was.
Lydia held up her left hand.
The silver band he had given back that morning hung from a thin chain around her wrist, and she turned it so it caught the light from the stairwell door.
"I'm keeping this until you tell me you don't want it," she said.
"I told you this morning."
"You told me with your hands full of coffee and a roomful of people watching. Tell me again up here."
He didn't answer.
A meteor went over, and then another right behind it, and the roof was suddenly full of falling light.
Her hand came across the ledge and settled on his wrist.
It was only her fingers, resting on the inside of his wrist, over the pulse.
He knew that she could feel it.
It was going hard, and it had no business going hard.
It was the stairs, he told himself.
She did not move her hand, and he did not move his.
"Forty years from now," she said, "somebody will ask what the best night of the year was, and I'm going to say this one."
"I filed a transfer today."
"Yes."
"I'm still leaving."
"Yes," Lydia said. "I'm coming too."
Her thumb moved once across his skin.
His phone buzzed against the ledge.
So did hers.
They both looked down.
It was a text from the director's assistant, sent to the two of them at once.
Dr. Wexford lands at five and wants you both in his office at six.
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