Naked Girl needs to see what he’s talking about so she sits on my desk, on my desk, and leans in so she can get up close to my screen. She crosses one leg over the other and we’re so close that I’m staring at a mole on her thigh.
“You can take kids there,” she says confidently, while wrapping her ginger locks into a loose bun. From her recent body language I get the feeling Naked Girl and Ballsbridge are some sort of an item. “But be prepared to bring the nanny. It’s not a ‘kids club’ place, if you know what I mean.”
Marcus and I stare at her but she’s not done.
“I did receive the massage of my life on Necker. It was on a bed that floated in the water.” She sighs dreamily and pulls her hair down again, making Marcus agitated.
“Because you’ve actually been there?” he asks.
“It was a short trip but yeah, I’ve been,” she says, and rolls her eyes as if it bored her. “I was on a boat trip and we stopped there for two nights.”
I choose to ignore who the “we” was. “A boat like a cruise ship?” I ask while thinking no five-thousand-passenger anything is parking near those delicate reefs.
“A boat like a yacht,” she says. “And yeah, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.” She unwinds her legs and saunters away.
The short riffs from Henry have appeared sporadically: sometimes once per day, sometimes not for three days, launched like stealth missiles directly to their target in the middle of the night. I find myself waking from deep sleep, intuitively expecting their arrival, darting my eyes between my sleeping husband, if he has successfully made it to our bed, and my sleeping phone. One in the bed and one next to the bed and only one begs to be touched and lit up, and it isn’t Bruce.
When I open my mail, my pulse quickens. I’m a live, hovering heartbeat, a cocktail party paused, existing for a moment between feeling remembered and not. Each message delivers me into a fairy tale, away from my life of tired working person and exhausted mother. I return to being the person I was, not that many years ago.
I know I’m dabbling in a dangerous space, getting the high an addict craves. But the person I pretend Henry to be really doesn’t exist so I tell myself I’m still in safe territory. Reading one-way email is not exactly participating in something that feels close to being a cheater.
If Henry and I had stayed together, would I have left this job by now? Would I be drinking something chilled and frothy on an island and be burying our kids up to their necks in the sand?
I’m wasting time. The whole entanglement with Henry has led to a new habit, something entirely foreign to me. I daydream even now while my in-box pings. Message from Henry:
I just found a leg in the sand. It’s blue with a black boot. Plastic. I guess we’re not the first humans to visit here. The good news is I found the most perfect rock to give to you. The bad news is that I want to give it to you in person.
I remind myself that I have to end his little game, but his email has made me feel instantly better. I feel energized and girly. Am I so starved for attention that these emails make me some version of happy? Even Stone, who is now cutting his fingernails over his wastebasket, isn’t bothering me as much as he should. He began our partnership in an unusual way, acting uninterested in everything except the Metis memos. He bets other guys in the office on who the author is and once told me I speak the way Metis writes. The brat is trying to play with my head and I hate that I let him mentally clutter my brain.
Ping! It’s another Henry message. I don’t breathe as I open it. It reads:
I’ve been taking a look at swaps, longevity swaps. What can you tell me about those?
I crash back to earth. Longevity swaps? I know a lot about currency swaps and helped Tim do a few of those, but longevity swaps? I think they have something to do with betting on the length of someone’s life. How does a guy go from dreaming about me while on an island to figuring out how to profit from speculating on the human life span?
I’m about to call the swaps desk but glance again at Stone snapping his nail clipper. I feel massive irritation at his very existence. I call him even though he’s ten feet away and watch as he lets it ring five excruciating times. He has caller ID so he knows it’s me. He puts down the clippers when his pinky finger is perfect and answers.
“Hey, Stone,” I say. “Finished with the manicure?”
He says nothing so I continue, “What do you know about longevity swaps?”
Stone stands, uncurls his massive frame from his rolling chair, carefully places his clippers inside his drawer, and finally turns to face me. He’s about six foot two and keeps his tailored shirtsleeves pulled up to his highly developed biceps. Ruffling his unkempt hair is a favorite pastime of his. He seems aware of the fact that he’s good-looking.
“Ummm, nothing?”
“Right. Well, give me some good ideas on these things. I’m going home early today.”
“Okay, need any help writing memos?”