Twelve Minutes, Blazer Still On

The second hand passes twelve and she starts counting.

Eleven minutes, fifty-nine seconds. She knows the number because she counted the walk from the conference room — forty-one steps, one elevator bank, one locked door — and she knows the number because she is the kind of woman who does not leave variables unaccounted for. The rabbit sits in her blazer pocket, which is why she wore this blazer, which is why she has been wearing this blazer every third Thursday for four months.

The fluorescent light above the sink is the specific white of fluorescent light in winter, flat and total, the kind that shows everything. She does not look away from it. She looks at her reflection instead — blazer buttoned, hair still in its arrangement from 8 a.m., the face she had at the negotiating table twelve minutes ago still completely present. She is still that person. She will be that person again in eleven minutes. The distance between these two facts is what she is here to use.

She sets the rabbit on the counter. She checks the watch. Ten minutes, forty seconds.

The skirt requires both hands, which she already knew. She reaches behind herself for the hem — the wool is dense and warm and does not want to move, and the resistance of it is its own information, a small deliberate friction — and draws it up slowly, watching her reflection do the same thing she is doing, watching the hem rise above her knee, above the cold air of the room, the fluorescent light making no concessions. The lining peels away from the backs of her thighs as she lifts. There is a brief moment of cold. Then her own warmth, already there, already waiting for her to acknowledge it.

She had not expected to be this ready.

The thought arrives without sentiment, filed and noted. She picks up the rabbit with her right hand. Her left hand holds the skirt at her hip, fingers pressing the wool flat against her waist so it stays. She checks the watch without moving her wrist. Nine minutes, fifty-one seconds.

The hum begins before she places it — the lowest setting, barely audible over the ventilation system, a sound that would disappear under the sound of the meeting. She holds it for a moment. She is aware of the distance between her hand and the place it is going. She is aware, in the particular way she is aware of everything, that once she closes that distance the nine minutes will start to cost something.

She exhales. The sound comes out shorter than she had planned — cut off somewhere behind her sternum, unannounced — and the woman in the mirror does not look different yet, but her knees have parted, slightly, the space between them an open question she has not yet answered.

The second hand moves. She watches it.