Twenty Minutes, Level Three

Twenty minutes. She knows this because she checked her phone before she climbed into the backseat, and she is still checking it in her head — the countdown running somewhere behind everything else, a second track beneath the hum of the parking structure's ventilation, the fluorescent wash coming through the window in stripes across her lap.

She did not plan this.

That is the thing she keeps returning to, even now, even with the cotton voile of the sundress pooled at the tops of her thighs and her right hand resting there — resting, she tells herself, just resting — the fabric thin enough that her own warmth comes back through it before she has moved at all. She had parked on Level 3 because Level 3 was where she always parked. She had sat in the backseat because her blazer was on the hook above the rear door and she needed to check the collar. That was the sequence. That was all it was.

Her left hand is pressed flat against the seat beside her hip. She is aware of the vinyl, slightly cool through the back of her thigh where the dress has ridden up and left nothing between her skin and the upholstery. The contrast is specific — cool seat, warm fabric, warmer still beneath it — and she does not let herself think about that contrast for more than a second before she is thinking about nothing else.

Somewhere below her, a car engine turns over and idles out. The ventilation hum absorbs it.

She has a presentation. She has a slide about Q3 projections that she built until eleven last night and she knows it perfectly and none of that is what is happening in her body right now. What is happening in her body right now started in the elevator from the parking structure to the lobby when she pressed the button and felt the lift and thought — she doesn't know what she thought. Something that wasn't a thought. Something the elevator did to her that she is still carrying.

She exhales through her nose. The sound is longer than she intended, and quieter, and something in her chest releases that she hadn't known she was holding.

Her right hand shifts. Not much. The dress moves with it, voile whispering against voile, hem grazing the inside of her knee and then not grazing it.

Furious at herself, she thinks.

And then the fabric is warm under her palm, and her knees are no longer quite together, and the gap between them is a question she has not yet answered, and the meeting is in nineteen minutes, and she is — she is not furious at all.