The Opposite of Drowning

by Erin McRae

  By arrangement, Harry, Jonathan, and Eliza met in the hotel lobby to go to the restaurant together. Jonathan was there already when Harry got downstairs, engrossed in his phone as he made sure nothing fell apart, and Eliza....

  Harry paused as he rounded the corner from the elevator bank to have another half a moment to observe her and get his bearings.

  She wasn’t doing anything in particular, just standing with an air of faint concentration as she observed the conversations and interactions around her. Her face, in profile against the bank of windows behind her, was absolutely lovely. She had changed from what she’d worn to the conference, and was a summer dawn in a salmon-colored sheath dress. The hair at the nape of her neck was slightly damp, and around her shoulders was a delicate silk scarf in a thousand shades of purple.

  Suddenly Eliza looked around sharply, as if someone had called her name though Harry hadn’t heard anything. Her gaze landed on him immediately. For a long moment they stared at each other.

  Harry cursed whatever twist of fate had brought Eliza on this trip with him and indeed had brought her into his life in the first place. Whatever they were together, or to each other, it seemed fruitless to keep denying or ignoring it. Not when he could attribute the ruins of one book and the beginnings of another to his reaction to her; not when Eliza’s engagement had, perhaps, fallen apart thanks to her reaction to him.

  The two of them were like gravity, pulling closer and closer together. Collision was inevitable. And, staring across the room into Eliza’s eyes, Harry knew they both knew it.

  He was so very, very fucked.

  OVER DINNER ALL HARRY had a mind for was to stare at Eliza across the table tucked against a window in the restaurant. Eliza, in the middle of her own conversation with Jonathan and Malik, caught Harry’s eye far too often. Each time their gazes met she gave him a smile, too soft to be a smirk and too aware to be gentle, from behind her wine glass.

  Halfway through the third course, Eliza slid her hand toward Harry’s on the table. For a wild moment Harry thought she was going to take it, and his heart nearly leapt out of his chest in response. But all she did was tap a finger on his cell phone, sitting face down on the table.

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. She looked insistently at his phone. So Harry picked it up and checked his notifications.

  There they go again, read a text from her, sent ten minutes prior with no further explanation. Harry raised his eyes from it to her. She nodded, with an air of amused insistence, at Jonathan and Malik.

  Harry tried to look at them without being obvious about it, but suspected any subtlety was unnecessary. The two young men were by now thoroughly engrossed with one another, leaning into each other’s space and paying absolutely no mind to himself or Eliza.

  Already an item, or about to be an item? Harry texted Eliza back. That Jonathan had been into Malik in Frankfurt – and that the attention was neither unwelcome nor unreciprocated – had been obvious. But he didn’t know what, if anything, had happened in the meantime.

  Your guess is as good as mine, Eliza replied. About all sorts of things.

  Jonathan’s intrigues aside, Harry suspected he had been caught.

  “DO YOU WANT ANOTHER?” Harry asked what seemed like hours later, when Eliza finished her coffee. Jonathan and Malik still weren’t paying them any mind, for which Harry was grateful. It felt indecent to have witnesses for what was happening with him and Eliza, even if they’d done nothing more than sit and talk.

  Eliza shook her head slowly. “No.”

  “I thought I might walk back to the hotel, get some air, see Paris with fewer tourists. Care to join?” Harry tried to keep his voice light, as though this were just one more companionable excursion between colleagues. He didn’t manage it. Eliza’s gaze on his was knowing and heavy.

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  Harry helped her on with her coat the way he had in her office so many weeks ago. He could feel the heat radiating off of her skin, at least before she shrugged on the heavy wool and buttoned it up over her scarf.

  The rain that had been pelting down since the day before had stopped sometime during dinner. The streets were damp and shone in the lamplight as they stepped from the restaurant into the sounds of a Paris evening.

  Eliza hesitated, looking around them. “Which way?”

  Harry shrugged, not particularly caring. “I don’t have a preference. What do you want to see?”

  “No. I mean, I’m turned around, and I don’t know where the hotel is.”

  “Oh. This way.” Harry nodded his head in the proper direction and tried not to be surprised. To him, Eliza had a sense of direction about everything – her life, the publishing industry, how to tackle Philippe. It was strange to him that the streets of Paris might somehow be what foiled her.

  They walked slowly, enjoying the luxury of not having to rush or even talk. Harry was grateful for the silence. Except for dinner, he’d been switching back and forth between English and French since they’d landed, and his mind was as exhausted as his body. He suspected that Eliza, having done much the same, felt similarly.

  Paris wasn’t the European city Harry most disliked, but it was the one he found the most overrated. But after eleven on a weekday night, most of the tourists had gone to bed, and anyone out after dark was going about the business of their ordinary lives. Harry watched as Eliza looked up at their surroundings, her eyes taking in the beaux-arts buildings reflecting the ambient light of the city. Perhaps his problem with Paris was simply that he’d never had the right company for it.

  Next to him, Eliza drew in a soft breath. Harry turned to look at her. Her attention, however, was riveted by the view, her eyes bright and her lips parted softly as she took it in. He knew it wasn’t her first time here, but that didn’t seem to lessen her wonder.

  “Short way or the long way?” Harry asked as they reached a branch in the road.

  Eliza didn’t answer, at least not in words. She slipped her arm through Harry’s. When he turned his head to look at her, part in surprise and part in fearful, wonderful disbelief, she looked back at him steadily.

  “Long way, then,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Long way,” she confirmed.

  WHEN THEY FINALLY CAME within view of the hotel, Harry felt his steps slow. He had early meetings, but he didn’t want this evening to end. With Eliza, time didn’t seem to matter.

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as they walked and found she was looking at him, too. Time slowed further.

  What to do next? was the only question left. The answer seemed obvious: Invite Eliza to his room and continue the conversation they always seemed to be having, in every possible way. While Eliza was looking at him like that – her features soft, her eyes shining – Harry could hardly remember why he’d ever decided that taking her to bed, not to mention pursuing a relationship with her, was a bad idea.

  But he had come to that conclusion and with good reason. He couldn’t decide to ignore it because he wanted Eliza, acutely and intensely, in every way possible.

  Eliza met his eyes again as the elevator ascended. This decision wasn’t his to make alone. Perhaps she would say something. They’d been dancing around this thing together for months, and tonight especially – but she made no further move. If anything, she seemed to be reminding herself of her own resolutions to avoid whatever this was between them. She broke eye contact and pulled out her phone. Probably to scroll through the messages she’d received while they’d been out.

  Wiser than I am, Harry thought, with disappointment.

  As the elevator doors opened Eliza reached out, and for a wild moment he thought she was going to invite him to go with her after all. But all she did was touch his hand before she vanished down the hall toward her own room.

  At least, Harry thought, as he watched her go, we still have a few days left.

  Eliza

  THE NEXT MORNING, AS Eliza got ready for the day, her thoughts kept dri
fting back to Harry and the evening they’d spent together.

  They’d spent a lot of evenings together over the last five months, but none like last night. And now, more than ever, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She obsessed over the pleasant languor of dinner, the frisson between them as they’d walked the streets of Paris. And while last night hadn’t been a date – certainly not with Jonathan and Malik there at the restaurant – she’d never felt so distracted by any evening she’d ever spent with Cody. Up to and including the night he’d proposed. She never should have said yes to him.

  But Cody was no longer her problem and, just as importantly, not in Paris. Harry was a whole new world of challenge.

  Her phone chirped with a meeting reminder, and she had to shove thoughts of Harry aside as well as she could to deal with the more prosaic aspects of her life. Namely, her job. And Philippe.

  Her main meeting of the day was with a French digital branding company she was trying to partner with for Philippe’s books and sauces. Five minutes in, Eliza knew the discussion would go nowhere, and she was sure everyone else in the room knew it too. But still they had to suffer through hours of polite – and sometimes less than polite – wrangling over a nonexistent deal that was never going to happen.

  This was all, she reminded herself multiple times, Harry’s fault.

  Still, when she finally arrived back at the hotel, she couldn’t help but keep an eye out for him as she crossed the lobby. She didn’t know his schedule for the day and had no real reason to expect him to be there – but he was. Tucked into a corner seat, almost out of view behind the bar, he had his laptop on his knees and three paper cups on his armrest.

  “Aren’t you rather overdoing it on the caffeine?” Eliza asked, pointing to the cups as she sat down in the armchair across from him.

  Harry glanced up at her. “If I’m going to be in Paris on this horrendous schedule, I’m going to drink all the precisely rendered coffee I can.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “How was your meeting?” Harry asked.

  Eliza considered giving him an answer involving details, and even words, but instead she covered her face with her hands and groaned.

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. I’d rather drive a food truck for Philippe than sit through another meeting like that.”

  “Bad indeed.” Harry looked like he was on the verge of laughing at her.

  Eliza couldn’t even be mad at him; the meeting had gone so poorly there was little left she could do but find the whole thing funny.

  “For someone who works in publishing,” Harry said, closing his laptop and setting it aside, “you’re never working on books. Have you noticed that?

  Eliza had to restrain the instinct, honed by so many years with Cody, of instantly defending her career choices. But Harry wasn’t taking a dig at her; he was asking if she was happy.

  “I do strategy,” she replied carefully. “And, for a long time, that strategy has involved keeping my career options flexible.”

  They’d talked about that months ago, at that dreadful work cocktail party. But they hadn’t talked about the real reasons behind her choices.

  But apparently that time was done now, because the next thing Harry said was, “Because you had to. Because of Cody and the commitments you made to his career.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And now you don’t have to worry about that any more. So what do you think is going to be next for you?”

  He was looking at her so intently. What answer he might be hoping to find, she had no idea.

  “I think I’m going to explore my options,” she said. She desperately hoped Harry was one of them.

  Harry

  AFTER HARRY AND ELIZA discussed her disastrous meeting, spent the rest of the day on the exhibition floor, and ate sarrasin crepes filled with ham and egg and gruyere while walking, they finally made it back to the hotel. As the evening wore on, Harry felt something between them shift.

  No, that wasn’t right. What was between them wasn’t changing. What was changing – in sidelong glances, pauses that lasted too long, the brush of fingertips against a sleeve – was that they were acknowledging what had been between them so long. Without hesitation, without doubt, and without shame.

  In the elevator Eliza made no move to hit the button for her floor.

  “Are you sure?” Harry asked, hand hovering over the button for his own floor.

  “Harry,” Eliza said, exasperated.

  “I just wanted to be sure.” Eliza had spent so much of her life struggling with other people’s unspoken expectations of her. Harry was determined not to add any of his own.

  “I am,” she said firmly.

  As they walked down the hallway toward Harry’s room, he took the liberty of putting his arm around her waist. He’d thought about this – and tried not to think about this – for so long that the warmth of her by his side shouldn’t have lived up to his guilty fantasies. And perhaps, in some way, it didn’t. For nothing about this felt illicit; it just felt obvious. And right. And easy.

  It felt even better when Eliza leaned into him as he fumbled one-handed for his room key. With a soft laugh, she took it from him and slipped it into the door lock before he could drop it.

  “Thank you,” he said when she handed it back with a raised eyebrow.

  Inside, the door closed between them and the brightness of the hallway. The room was dark, and the drapes were pushed back to show the sparkle of Paris at night.

  He and Eliza regarded each other solemnly. Then Eliza stepped deliberately out of her heels. He looked down as she curled her stockinged feet in the plush of the carpet, then up when he felt her stare. Although she was tall, without her shoes her eye line was finally, slightly below his. She tipped her chin up to meet his gaze.

  “You should kiss me now,” she said. It was almost a dare, as if she didn’t think he had the nerve to follow through.

  Harry couldn’t blame her. He’d been so cautious of her youth and her circumstances and her utter competence. But now that they were here, it would have been awfully unfair to make her do all the work.

  He raised his hand to cup her cheek. Her skin was warm, flushed maybe, and smooth, youth unavoidable. When she gave him that faint half-smile he had become so impossibly fond of, he ran his thumb gently along her lower lip. His own breath caught in his throat as her lips parted slightly.

  Harry dipped his head and pressed his mouth to hers.

  It didn’t feel like a first kiss. Which was absurd, because Harry had spent nearly half a year knowing Eliza without touching her. But as he slid his hand from her jaw into her hair, his thumb pressed heavily just behind her ear with all the certainty of instinct and familiarity combined. Like every other time he was sure he had known her forever, he was also sure he knew everywhere she liked to be touched.

  The moment felt drawn out, dangerous, the kiss gentle but shot through with tension. Eliza smelled like roses and amber, a heavier, sweeter scent than the perfume she’d worn in Frankfurt, and not something she ever wore at the office. Harry’s five o’clock shadow scraped against her skin and she gasped, the sound half caught in her throat.

  Harry struggled to keep his touches gentle. He had never wanted anyone the way he wanted Eliza, and now that he had her, warm and willing and responsive in his arms, his desire almost frightened him. But then Eliza sighed into Harry’s mouth and wrapped her arms around his neck and fear, along with any reason to keep this slow or controlled, vanished.

  Harry shifted his weight and shoved her against the wall by the door for a deep, searching kiss. When he felt her smile against his mouth, any cogent thoughts fled. There was only Eliza, the warmth of her, the eagerness with which she wrapped a leg around Harry’s own and tried to pull him closer, even though they were already as close as two people could be.

  Well. Not entirely. Not yet.

  Harry undid the fastenings of Eliza’s coat and pushed it off her shoulders. The logical thing, th
e romantic thing to do at this point, would have been to lead Eliza to bed, undress her slowly, and show her with his hands and his mouth and his body everything he felt for her.

  But Harry was done waiting. He was clumsy and frantic as he tried to unfasten her blouse, the grey silk skin-warm. As he pushed the fabric from her shoulders, there was ripping sound as a button tore free and fell to the floor. But then there was nothing between Eliza’s skin and his hands...and a string of lace, from which dangled an antique-looking key.

  He put his fingertips on the bit of metal. It was warm from the heat of Eliza’s body.

  “What’s this?” he asked. For a thrilled, horrified moment he remembered what he’d written about Eliza, and Ys, in the book he hadn’t been supposed to write in Vienna. About the key that opened the gate to the city and let the waters flood in.

  Eliza blinked at him, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed. She took his fingers and made him let go of the strange necklace. “A key.”

  Harry knew there was a story there – beyond the myth of Ys – but if Eliza didn’t want to volunteer it, he was not going to press. He slid his hands under her skirt, shoving the fabric up. His hands encountered the soft scratch of lace, satin, and, when he slid his hands further down Eliza’s legs, silk.

  “Of course you wear stockings,” Harry mumbled against her skin as he worked a finger under one of her garter straps.

  “Of course,” she agreed, as if she weren’t as much of a panting mess as him. “Do you like them?”

  “Yes,” he said as he thumbed ineffectually at the catch. He cursed.

  “Too challenging?” she asked.

  “Not really.” Harry gave up on trying to divest her of any more clothing and spun Eliza around to face the wall instead. He pressed against her, before pulling back only enough to push her skirt out of the way and over her hips. He yanked her panties down roughly to where the garters trapped them. Still, it was far enough, and she certainly understood what he was about, tilting the perfect rosy cream of her ass up against him.