After-Hours Appraisal

The clock on the wall above the front desk said 9:04 when I turned the deadbolt on the front door of Laurent & Sons. Locking up is my least favorite part of the job, mostly because it means the day is officially over and the next stop is my apartment, which has been officially empty for a year now. I'd been cataloging the Hollis estate lot all week and I still had half a crate of silver to photograph, so I'd stayed late again. That part was fine. It was the going home part I dreaded.

I was halfway through my coat when I noticed the light under the basement door. That stopped me. The building is an old Victorian townhouse that creaks like a ship at night, and after hours it's supposed to be dead quiet except for the furnace. A light meant a person, and a person meant either a burglar with terrible instincts or Tom.

It was Tom. I could hear him before I saw him, actually, because he was muttering to a server the way some people mutter to a car that won't start. The server room is at the bottom of a narrow stairwell, all cable racks and humming black boxes and one sad desk chair. Tom was sitting in the chair with his sleeves rolled up, glasses pushed up into his hair, a man who had been down there for hours and was fine with that.

He looked up and did a double take when he saw me.

"Gayle? It's nine."

"I know. I just locked the front door. Why are you still here?"

"The Aldrich migration is tomorrow and server three is being difficult." He gestured at the rack like it was a misbehaving child. "What about you?"

"Hollis estate. Silver. I lost track of time." I stood at the bottom of the stairs holding my coat, and I don't know why I said the next part, except that it was true. "Honestly I don't mind losing track of time. It's better than sitting in my apartment watching the walls."

He didn't laugh or make it awkward, which is Tom's whole talent. He just nodded and said he got that, and that his apartment had walls too, and before I quite knew how it happened we were upstairs in the break room splitting the dregs of the vending machine coffee, which tastes like burnt cardboard and costs a dollar seventy-five and is somehow still better than nothing.

We've done this before, sort of. Six months ago my friend Maria dragged me to a divorce support group at the community center because she was tired of me moping on her couch. Tom was already there. He'd joined after his girlfriend of four years left him at twenty-nine, and he sat in the circle with his hands folded like a kid in church, and when it was my turn to talk he actually listened instead of doing the polite nod thing. We've been coffee friends since then, nothing more. He's thirty-one, quiet, works IT here two floors below my auction podium, and until tonight I would have sworn I knew exactly what our friendship was.

But it was nine at night and the building was empty and I was tired in that bone-tired way where your mouth stops filtering.

"So my ex used to say I had no instincts," I told him, stirring coffee I wasn't going to drink. "Which is funny, because I can walk into a room full of strangers and price a mahogany secretary to the dollar. I can read a bidder's twitch from thirty feet. But I married a guy at twenty-four who turned out to have forty thousand dollars of gambling debt I didn't know about, so apparently I can read anything except people I'm sleeping with."

"That's not about instincts," Tom said. "That's about him being good at hiding it. There's a difference."

"Sure feels the same from here."

He wrapped both hands around his paper cup and was quiet for a second, and then he said something that surprised me, and I mean genuinely surprised me, because Tom is the most careful man I have ever met. He said lately he'd been dealing with the same restless feeling in a different way, and that the way he dealt with it was a toy.

I must have made a face because he held up a hand.

"Not like that. Well. Like that, but not the way you're thinking." He took a breath. "I've got a prostate massager. Vibrating. I use it when I can't sleep. It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud in a break room."

I laughed. I couldn't help it, and he took it well, and I told him it didn't sound ridiculous, it sounded like the most organized stress relief I'd ever heard of. But underneath the laughing my brain had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere I hadn't let it go in a long time, because the truth is I hadn't been touched by anybody since my divorce, not a hug I didn't initiate myself, and I'd been telling myself that was fine, that I was fine, that hands are enough.

Hands are not enough. That is the whole honest truth of it.

* * *

He didn't ask me anything. That's important, I think, looking back. He just said the toy was in his desk down the hall if I ever wanted to see what a good one looks like, because the market is flooded with junk, and I said fine, show me, and we took our coffee down the hall to his office like it was the most normal thing in the world. Maybe it was. Maybe showing a friend a gadget is a normal thing and I was the one making it weird in my own head.

His office is small and neat, one plant, three monitors, a photo of his sister's dog. He opened the second drawer down and took out a black case, the kind of case you'd keep expensive pens in, and inside was a sleek curved thing in matte silicone, about the size of my thumb and a half, with a flat base and a button.

"That's rechargeable," he said, turning it so I could see. "Holds a charge for two hours. Body-safe silicone, none of that porous junk. My urologist actually mentioned the category first, would you believe that. I did three weeks of research before I bought one, because I research everything."