Reading her

Fiction, told by the man doing it. The whole of his attention is on information she does not know she is giving him, and none of the work is meant to be visible.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

She thinks I am somewhere.

That is the phrase she uses afterwards, when she is trying to describe how it was and has run out of ordinary words. You were really somewhere. And I nod, because the alternative is telling her the truth, which is that I was at a control panel with a clipboard.

Here is what is actually going on in me at the point she thinks I am furthest away.

I am counting. Not out loud, because she is not counting tonight. I am holding a number in my head and I have been holding it since we started, and I will not lose it, because losing it would mean guessing, and guessing is how people get hurt.

Alongside the number I am running a rough plan with three or four decision points in it. Where we are going. What comes out of the drawer next, if anything.

How long we have been at this, which I check against the clock on her side of the bed roughly every two minutes without moving my head. Whether the room is warm enough, which sounds like nothing and is not, because she goes cold fast and cold is the fastest way I know to end an evening badly.

And underneath all of that, taking up more room than the rest of it put together, I am watching her.

People assume the tell is the noise. It is not. The noise is the least reliable thing she produces, because some of it is real and some of it is her being who she thinks she should be, and after nine years I still cannot always sort one from the other.

Her feet are better. She is over the end of the bed with her feet on the floor, and when she is fine they are flat, weight through the whole foot, slightly apart. When she is working they come up: heels lifting, weight going forward onto the balls of her feet, toes gripping the carpet like somebody bracing on a boat. When they go up and stay up, she is spending more than she is taking in.

Her breathing is better still, and specifically the out-breath. Early on it is quick and shallow and it comes out through the nose. Later, when the thing I am aiming for has started to happen, it drops: longer, lower, through the mouth, and there is a fraction of a second at the bottom of it where nothing moves at all.

That gap is what I am waiting for the whole first half of an evening. When it arrives I know I can go somewhere I could not have gone ten minutes before.

Her hands I mostly leave alone. She has fists more or less throughout, which means nothing about her at all and took me a year to stop over-reading.

Tonight the gap arrived about eighteen minutes in.

Everything changed after that, and none of it changed for her, which is the point. I slowed the interval by a second or two.

I stopped talking, because once she has gone quiet in that particular way my voice pulls her back up and she has to do the descent again. I moved the target down slightly, because the place I had been working was starting to go hot in a way that would mark more than she wanted this week, and she goes swimming on Saturdays with a friend who notices things.

None of that was visible from where she was lying. I would be surprised if she could tell you within five minutes when it happened.

The thing nobody says about this end of it is that you are frightened almost the entire time.

Not dramatically. It is not fear the way it is fear on her side, where it is part of what she has come for. It is the low background fear of a man doing something with a real cost attached to getting it wrong: the sense, permanently present, that I am reading a person through a wall, and that the information is thin, and that she is in a state where she may not correct me.

That is the actual problem. Past a certain point she is not a reliable narrator of her own condition. She will say yes to almost anything.

She has told me, sitting up in daylight, that in that state she would agree to more or less whatever I proposed, and that she would mean it at the time, and that some of it she would regret on Tuesday. Which means the yes I get in the room is not evidence, and I am working from the feet and the breathing and nine years of knowing what she looks like.

I got it wrong once, four years ago. Not badly. I went about four past where I should have stopped, because I had a number in my head and I was serving the number instead of the woman, and she was quiet for the rest of the evening in a way I had not seen before and did not understand until the following day.

She has forgotten it. I have not, and I do not intend to.

We had agreed twenty tonight.

On the eighteenth stroke something moved in her shoulders. I cannot give you a better description than that, and I have tried. Not a flinch. A kind of settling upward, the shoulders coming forward and in by perhaps a centimetre, and the long low out-breath not arriving where it should have.

It might have meant nothing. It might have meant she was about to shift her weight.

I stopped.

I put the thing down on the chest of drawers where she could hear it go down, which is its own signal and means we are finished rather than pausing. Then my hand flat between her shoulder blades until her breathing came back up, then her dressing gown, then the light off and the small lamp on.

She said, some time later, with her face against my shoulder, "Was that twenty?"

And I said, "Near enough."

She will never hear about the eighteen. Not because it is a secret worth keeping, but because the whole architecture she gets to relax inside depends on it feeling inevitable, and there is nothing inevitable about a man making a judgement call about a centimetre of shoulder movement.

If she knew how much of it was judgement she would start helping. She would start managing me, the way she manages everybody else all day, and the one thing this is for is that for forty minutes a week she does not have to run anything.

So she gets the smooth version, and I keep the working.

My wife believes I am a natural at this. She has said so to at least one friend.

I am not a natural. I am a reasonably observant man who has been paying close attention to the same person for nine years and has made a study of her feet. I have read a great deal, most of it badly written. I have got it wrong and sat with the consequences. I check the room temperature.

None of that is what she wants to hear and none of it is what she needs, so it stays on my side of the wall. That is the job. Not the arm. Not the aim. Knowing where she is when she cannot tell you, and stopping two short when something says so, and never once mentioning that you did.