Her Devotion

I stayed late on a Thursday, which I did more often than I admitted to anyone. The training office I used at Prestige Financial Services was small and the wall I shared with Jerome's cubicle was thin, and some nights that thin wall felt like company. Jerome Lynch is our office manager, thirty-eight years old, and he has been there longer than me. I'm Luce Martino, I'm forty-two, and I came to the city two years ago after my divorce stuff finally wrapped up.

So that night the janitors had already come and gone. The floor was dark except for the little lamp over my desk and the blue glow from the server room down the hall. I was packing up my bag when I heard his chair roll back. Then the elevator dinged, someone got on, and the ding faded and I realized I was alone with him. Just us, on the fifth floor, at nine at night.

I stepped out of my office and there he was, standing by my door with his jacket over one arm.

"I heard you tonight," he said.

My stomach did a slow drop. "Heard me?"

"Through the wall. You were on the phone with your sister. You laughed three times and each time I stopped working." He shifted his jacket from one arm to the other. "That's probably strange to say out loud."

"It's strange," I said, and then, because it was true, "but I'm glad you said it."

We stood there in the dim light like two people who had been circling something for months and had finally run out of hallway. Because the thing was, I had been circling. For weeks I'd been slipping little folded notes under the gap in my baseboard, the one where the wall met the floor in my office. There's a gap there, a real one, and paper will fit through it into his cubicle. I don't know why I picked that method instead of just talking to him. I guess talking felt too risky and notes felt like a game I could quit.

"I should tell you something," I said. "Those notes."

His eyebrows went up. "You wrote those?"

"Every one of them. I've been leaving them under the wall for about a month." I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them because I looked defensive. "I know it's a weird way to flirt with a coworker."

Jerome reached into his jacket's inner pocket and pulled out a rubber-banded stack of paper. My notes, all six of them, folded the way I'd folded them, the rubber band keeping them square.

"I kept every one," he said. "I read them more than once. The one about the coffee machine, the one where you said my laugh was the second best sound on this floor." He tapped the stack against his palm. "What was the first best sound, by the way?"

"Your laugh was the first. I was being shy in that note."

He laughed right then, low, and I thought, yep, still the best sound on the floor.

"I've been trying to figure out how to answer them for weeks," he said. "Then tonight I heard you laugh through the wall and thought, well, this is the last Thursday I'm going to stand in this office and not say something."

"So you said something."

"So I said something."

The server hum carried down the hall. I could feel my own pulse in my throat. Jerome set his jacket on the back of my visitor chair and looked at me in that careful way of his.

"Can I touch your hands?" he asked. "Just your hands. To start."

I blinked. "My hands?"

"If that's okay. I've watched those hands tap a keyboard for two years and I've had thoughts about them I'm not proud of." He held his own hands loose at his sides, waiting. "But nothing happens unless you say yes."

"Yes," I said. It came out fast. "Yes, you can."

He took my right hand first, and instead of shaking it or holding it like a dance partner, he turned it over so my palm faced the ceiling. Then he bent his head and kissed the center of my palm. Not a peck. A real kiss, warm and slow, his lips resting there like the palm was something worth resting on.

"Oh," I said. Just that. It was all I had.

He moved to my fingers next, kissing each fingertip one at a time, and I could feel him smiling against them. "You have long fingers," he murmured. "Elegant. The kind piano teachers tell a kid they wasted." He kissed the knuckle of my index finger. "I used to watch you gesture during training sessions and lose entire sentences of whatever the meeting was about."

"I do gesture a lot."

"You do. It's one of my favorite things about this floor."

He switched to my left hand and gave it the same treatment, and by then my knees had formed opinions I hadn't consulted. He worked up from my palm to my wrist and pressed his lips to the inside of it, right over the pulse point, and held there long enough that I knew he could feel my heartbeat speed up under his mouth.

"There it is," he said softly. "There's the fast one."

"You're doing that on purpose."

"Everything I'm doing is on purpose, Luce."

I want to stop here and say something about Jerome, because nothing in my life before this would have predicted him. Two years of casual dating in this city and I'd had a lot of men who moved fast and called it passion. Jerome moved slow and called it nothing at all, he just moved slow. He kissed the thin skin of my inner wrist like he was sealing an envelope.

Then he slid my blouse sleeve up, careful, asking with his eyes before his mouth went lower, and I nodded. He pressed his lips to the inside of my elbow, that soft creased part nobody had ever kissed in my life, and my breath caught hard enough that I actually heard it catch.

"There it is again," he said against my skin. "That little catch. I want to hear it a hundred more times."

"Jerome." His name came out rougher than I meant it to. "Nobody has ever..."

"I know." He straightened up but didn't let go of my hands. "That's the entire idea. Nobody has ever, so tonight somebody finally does."

The elevator dinged down the hall and we both froze, then heard it pass, somebody on another floor. He grinned at me in the blue light.

"We should probably move somewhere less public," he said. "Or at least behind a door."

"My office," I heard myself say. "There's a lock."

"Show me the way."

* * *

I locked the door behind us and turned on just the small desk lamp. The training office looked different with a man in it. Jerome took off his glasses and set them on my shelf, which somehow felt more intimate than anything else he'd done, and then he came back to me and picked up my hands again like he'd never put them down.

"How far do you want to go tonight?" he asked. "Straight answer. I'll be happy with any version."

"I want to go all the way," I said. "I've wanted to since the note about the coffee machine."

"The coffee machine note. Wow, that's months of wanting."

"Years, probably. The notes just made it official."

"Then we go slow, and we go all the way." He stepped in close and kissed my mouth for the first time, soft, both of his hands cradling my jaw, and I made a small noise into it that I'll admit to because it's the truth. His mouth tasted like the mint tea he drinks all afternoon. He kissed me like the hand kisses, patient, like there was no clock anywhere in the building.

When we came up for air he kept his forehead against mine.

"I want to worship you tonight," he said. "That's the honest version. Every inch, with my hands and my mouth, in whatever order feels right. Not to get anywhere fast. Just to do it."

"That's..." I laughed a little, shaky. "That's the most romantic thing anyone has said to me in this decade."

"It's not romantic, it's practical. I've had two years to build a list."

"You have a list?"