The Boss's Last Question

Mara had a system for avoiding sex, and she was almost proud of how good she'd gotten at it. A headache that came on conveniently around ten at night. Falling asleep on the couch during a movie and mumbling something about being too comfortable to move. Offering to do the dishes with a seriousness that made it sound like surgery.

She was thirty-five years old, and she'd spent the last six months treating her own boyfriend like he was a vending machine she was afraid to touch.

It wasn't him. God, it was never him. Sebastian was the kind of man who remembered that she hated cilantro and that her left shoulder clicked after long drives. He was steady and warm and funny in a dry way that snuck up on her hours later while she was teaching a yoga class and suddenly laughing into her own water bottle. They'd met at a climbing gym three years ago, when she was thirty-two and he'd fallen off a route that was way below his level because he was busy watching her chalk up.

But lately she'd caught herself turning away from mirrors. She'd noticed the softness at her waist that hadn't been there at thirty, the way her thighs touched now no matter how she stood. Small things. Stupid things, probably. But they'd stacked up in her head like unread emails, and every time Sebastian reached for her she heard some anxious little voice saying he'll figure it out, he'll see it, and then what.

So she'd built the system. And the system worked great, if you didn't count the part where she felt lonelier in a one-bedroom apartment than she ever had living alone.

Their place in the Hawthorne district was small enough that she could hear the neighbor's TV through the wall and the food carts hissing on the street below. On Friday evening she was sitting cross-legged on the couch with a bowl of leftover curry, wearing the oldest sweatpants she owned, when Sebastian came out of the bedroom with a folder.

An actual folder. Paper. He was holding it like a clipboard.

"Oh no," she said. "What is that."

"This," he said, sitting down across from her in the desk chair, which he had dragged in from the corner for effect, "is the final stage of your interview process."

"My what."

"Your interview. For the position. Of my girlfriend." He crossed his legs and smoothed an invisible tie. "You've been in the role for three years now, on a trial basis, and HR has flagged some concerns."

"HR flagged concerns." Mara set the curry down. "We don't have an HR."

"We do now. I'm also HR. It's a small company." He was thirty-seven, and he could still make his face go completely neutral when he wanted to, which was deeply unfair. "There's just one final interview question remaining before your permanent placement is confirmed."

"You are such a weirdo." She was smiling, though, and she hated how easy it was. "What's the question?"

"Can't tell you yet. Interview protocol." He stood, tucking the folder under his arm. "The question has to be asked in the interview room."

"We live in four hundred square feet, Sebastian. Every room is the interview room."

"Not this one." He nodded toward the bedroom door, which was shut, which was unusual, because Sebastian never shut doors. He said closed doors made the apartment feel like a shoebox. "I prepared it specially. Took me forty minutes. You have no idea the logistics involved in our bedroom."

She looked at him for a moment. Underneath the clipboard act his eyes were doing something quieter, something careful, and she felt that little anxious voice stir and then, weirdly, settle. He wasn't laughing at her. He never laughed at her. He was doing the thing he did when he'd thought about something for days and finally found a way to say it sideways.

"Seb," she said slowly. "What did you do in there?"

"You'll see. Come on." He held out his hand. "The candidate will please follow the interviewer."

"Is this a sex thing? Because I have curry breath and I'm wearing sweatpants with a hole in them."

"You look incredible. The hole is very professional. Come on."

She took his hand and let him pull her up off the couch. Her heart was doing something she didn't want to name, that mix of dread and hope she'd been carrying around for months. Six months of excuses. Six months of him never once making her feel bad about it, just waiting, patient in a way that made her feel worse somehow, like she was wasting something.

He opened the bedroom door and steered her in with a hand between her shoulder blades.

He'd moved the small wooden chair from the kitchen corner to the middle of the room, set in front of the dresser like it was a desk. The folder lay on the dresser top, squared up neatly. On the far corner sat a single glass of water, positioned exactly the way a bottle of water sits on a table at a job interview.

The bedside lamp was the only light on, warm and low. It made the whole setup look almost serious, if you ignored that the "desk" had a bottle of lotion sitting next to the folder.

"Sebastian," she said, turning around. "There is a chair in the middle of our bedroom."

"That's the interview room." He came around her and took his place behind the dresser, flipping open the folder with great ceremony. Inside, she could see, there was just a single sheet of paper with what looked like one line written on it. "Please, have a seat. We have a lot to get through."

She didn't sit. She stood there with her arms crossed, looking at him over the little desk, and he looked back at her with that calm, steady face, and for a second neither of them said anything.

"Three years," she finally said. "Three years and you're giving me a performance review."

"I'm giving you a final interview. Very different. Reviews are for people who already have the job." He tapped the paper. "You're still technically a candidate. Better benefits if you pass."

"What's on the paper?"

"The final question."

"Can I see it?"

"No. Interview protocol!"

"You made that up."

"I did make that up," he agreed. "Sit down, Mara."

There was something in how he said her name. Not boss-voice at all anymore, just him, just quiet, and she felt her chest go tight in that specific way she got in yoga when a hip opener hit something that wasn't really muscle. She pulled the chair out and sat, and the chair was low, and suddenly he was looking down at her, which almost never happened because he was only an inch taller.

He studied her for a moment like he was actually reading notes, though the folder was closed now and she knew the page was blank except for one line.

"Before the question," he said, "I have something to say that is not to be recorded."

"There's no record. It's a made-up interview."

"Off the record anyway." He set the folder down. "You've been dodging me for months. And I'm not mad about it. I need you to hear that first. I'm not mad, and I'm not hurt, and I'm not going anywhere. But I've been watching you look at yourself like you're auditioning to be your own worst enemy, and it's been driving me crazy, because the woman I see is not the woman you keep describing when you think I'm not listening."

Mara opened her mouth and nothing came out.

"I hear you," he said simply. "The walls are thin, but you're thinner. I hear you in the bathroom mirror. So I built this stupid interview, because I figured you'd never let me just say it, but you might let me ask you one question. If it comes with a chair and a folder and HR."

She laughed, and it came out watery, which annoyed her. "You're insane."

"Probably." He picked the folder back up and opened it, and looked down at the single line he'd written, though she was pretty sure he didn't need to read it. "Okay. One final interview question, and then your placement is decided. Ready?"

"I don't know," she said honestly. Her hands were in her lap, and her heart was loud, and the lamp made everything in the room gold. "Ask it anyway."

He looked up from the paper at her, and his voice went soft.

"What do you think I see, when I look at you?"

The room was quiet except for the food carts starting up their evening noise on the street below.

Mara sat with the question like it had weight. Outside, a bicycle bell rang somewhere, and through the wall the neighbor's TV murmured its laugh track at nothing.

"I don't know," she said finally. "You see me?"

"That's not an answer, Mara."

"You see... I don't know, the whole thing. The package."

He waited. That was the worst part about him, the waiting. He could out-wait anybody. She looked at the lamp, at the folder, anywhere but his face.

"I don't know what you want me to say," she said.

"Okay, let me make it easier. Body part by body part. What do you think I like about your shoulders?"

"My shoulders?" She laughed, short and flat. "Nothing. My left one clicks like a glow stick after every long drive. It's grotesque."

"Next. Your waist."

Mara looked down at her lap. "I know what you're doing."

"I know you know what I'm doing. Your waist."

"You see the softness," she said, quieter. "The stuff that wasn't there at thirty. I feel you put your hands there and I think, he's noticing it's different now. That's what I think."

He nodded slowly, like she'd given a real answer on a real test. "Your thighs."

"Sebastian."

"Your thighs."

"They touch," she said. "All the time. No matter how I stand. When I teach, I see every other instructor in the building and theirs don't, and mine do, and I think that's the first thing anyone sees when I walk into a studio. So I assume that's the first thing you see too."

"What about your mouth?"

"My mouth is fine," she said, thrown. "I mean. It's a mouth."

"You use it to say things like 'it's a mouth.'" He set the folder down flat. "Last one. Your chest."

Mara pressed her lips together. Six months of avoiding this exact conversation, of fake headaches at ten o'clock, of volunteering for the dishes like the dishes were a life raft. She had a whole system, and here he was dismantling it with one line on a piece of paper.

"That's the part I've been hiding," she said. "So that's the part I like least. It's changed. You know it's changed. I assume you've noticed, and I assume every time you look you're comparing it to how it used to be."

He was quiet a moment. Below the window the food carts hissed at each other, somebody laughing near the curry cart they both liked.

"Okay," he said. "Thank you for your answers. Now I have to give mine, and I have to give it properly. This is a demonstration question."

"A what?"

"Stand up."

"Sebastian."

"Stand up, Mara. You're not in trouble. Nothing bad is going to happen. I just need both hands free."

She stood, because there was nothing else to do with him in this mood. He came around the little desk, and stopped in front of her, close enough that she could feel the warmth off him.

"Here's what I actually see," he said. "I see the shoulders of a woman who can demo crow pose at thirty-five without falling on her face, which I cannot do, and the click in the left one is from the road trip to Bend, which was the best weekend of my life, so that shoulder is my favorite road trip in the world."

"That's not..."

"I'm not finished. I see a waist that gets softer every year and every year I put my hands there on purpose, because it's the spot where you're most you. I never once put my hands there by accident. Your thighs touching means when you sit on the couch with me there's more of you pressed against me, and I have never, not one time, wished for less of you against me. And your chest." He paused. "Your chest is different than it was at thirty, yes. It's also the chest I looked at when I decided I was going to fall in love with you, and it has only ever gotten better at being that chest."

"You can't just say things like that."

"I can. I rehearsed them. Forty minutes of setup, ten minutes of rehearsal." He stepped back a half step. "But words are cheap, so. Demonstration."

And then he started undressing.

He took his time about it, no show, just a man pulling his shirt off over his head and folding it over the dresser like he was setting up for bed. His chest, flat and scarred under the nipples in the way she knew better than her own hands, the top surgery scars thin and silver now after all these years. She had touched them a thousand times. She was staring anyway.

"Sebastian, what are you doing?"

"Demonstrating," he said, and his jeans went the same way, folded, deliberate, until he stood there in his boxers in the gold lamplight, thirty-seven years old and completely