You have to give it to the Mongols. Fabulous at both invading China and takeout food. Kudos to them.
Shaw takes me to a place near work and her apartment where we pick up a steaming feast of noodles, vegetables, and meat. Later, we sit about in her living room surrounded by trapezoidal cardboard boxes and I get to demonstrate my inability to use chopsticks.
“So, how’d it go with Devon?” I say, giving up on the whole process, and just trying to spear a piece of pork.
“I hired her,” Shaw says through a mouthful of noodles.
Having just placed the piece of pork in my mouth, I then spray it halfway across the room.
“You what?” My incredulity is a zombie T-Rex smashing through the room.
“Would you be better off with a fork?” Shaw’s face is the picture of innocence.
“You did what to her?”
“Hiring someone is not a violent act, Arthur.”
“It is to bloody Clyde,” I say. And I believe I have a point.
Shaw puts down her chopsticks. “What should I have done, Arthur? Clyde had told her everything. Literally everything. In fact he briefed her so extensively I think I should have him date and break up with all new hires. Tabitha’s in the process of stepping up into more of a field agent role. We need a good researcher in the office, and I suddenly have one sitting in my lap.”
“She’s going to work for Tabitha?” My voice leaps up to an octave I didn’t know it could reach. “Her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend is going to be her boss?”
Shaw shakes her head. “She won’t report to Tabitha. I don’t think Tabitha’s entirely ready for that sort of responsibility.”
“Not exactly my point.” Jesus. Shaw is sensible and steady. How can she be letting this happen?
“Look, Arthur.” Shaw grimaces. “I didn’t recruit her. Clyde did. My hands were somewhat tied.”
“This is going to be a disaster,” I say. Which is maybe not diplomatic of me.
Shaw puts out her hands, calming rough waters. “We saved the world yesterday,” she says. She’s smiling. “How bad can we do at this?”
Considering the arse-whopping the Russian woman gave us, the depths are starting to seem deeper than I’d previously imagined.
But Shaw is leaning over the boxes of noodles to kiss me, and that exact point gets lost for a while.
Given the long girlfriend drought I suffered through prior to this relationship, I am intimately aware of that moment when there is nothing left on TV except infomercials and made-for-TV movies about hepatitis. The time when there is nothing left to do but hang around. It’s usually around two in the morning.
But having already crashed headlong through the sex-with-my-boss barrier and landed, tangled in the sheets, on the other side, there’s no bloody way I’m waiting around that long tonight.
I slip my hand off Shaw’s and onto the remote. The news credits roll out to Big Ben’s farewell bongs. I press a button on the remote, and the TV dies with a little electronic sigh.
I turn, look at her. She turns, looks at me. She has her hair down, has her legs tucked up under her. She has a spot of soy sauce on her chin that I think is cute enough to not tell her about.
I smile. And I know exactly what Kurt Russell would do.
Shaw reaches out a hand, touches my chest. I lean toward her. But there is no give in her arms.
As much fun as kissing is, I am abruptly aware of how stupid someone looks in the split second before it all happens, eyes half-closed, lips half-puckered.
I pull my face back into the semblance of a non-idiot. Shaw is smiling.
“I’m not stopping anything,” she tells me. “This isn’t me wishing you good night. Far from it. But…” She looks away for a moment. “I just want to make sure we both know what we’re doing here. I… I get that this could be weird. I’m the wrong side of forty. I’m divorced. I work a lot. I’m your boss.” She shrugs. “And the thing is, I’m not going to stop being any of those things.”
“I don’t mind those things,” I say. And it’s true.
“Except I think you might have minded a bit in the museum today. With the way I handled Kayla. And the Weekenders. Sometimes I’m going to make calls you disagree with. And I’m going to stand by those decisions despite you. And it won’t be personal, but I think sometimes it’ll feel that way.”
And that’s true too. But… “I’m willing to work with that,” I say.
Shaw smiles. “I am too. I just wanted to make sure… Relationships aren’t perfect. They’re messy. People aren’t perfect. I know I’m not. I’m messy. And I know you’re not, but that’s not me saying I want you to change. I don’t want you to stop being funny, or good-looking, or decent at a really fundamental level.”
“OK,” I say. I can feel her elbow weakening.
Shaw furrows her brow. “Will you say pretty much anything now if you think it’s going to get me into bed?”
“Not anything,” I say after a moment’s consideration. “But I should warn you that we’re pretty far from where I draw the line.”
She slaps at my shoulder. A playful rebuke. One that means her hand isn’t between us anymore. I close the distance.
She pulls me closer. She smells sweet and spicy, of far-flung lands, and horseback riders conquering the known world. Her hair falls forward onto my cheek. Her lips brush mine.
We manage to make it to our feet, she pulls me after her, through the unfamiliar apartment, down a corridor I should surely remember from this morning. Through a doorway. She pushes me onto a bed. Her bed.
The idea of sex, to me, is always a graceful, nebulous act. Limbs, and pleasure, and afterglow. The act itself always seems to involve more issues about getting my tie over my head, and trying to find the correct moment to take my socks off, and negotiating the mechanics of bra hooks. And then there’s the choreography of where to be when, and there is always more sweat than I remember, and I’m pretty sure it can’t be comfortable with my weight there, but I’m not sure how else to rest it.
But then, somewhere along the way, I finally lose myself. And there is just Shaw’s body, and mine, and the point where we meet, that tiny spot of pleasure that grows to eclipse the whole world.
And then, shuddering, and gasping, and grinning, it’s over. She kisses me. I kiss her. We lie next to each other, panting.
“I know,” I say, looking up at her ceiling, gripping her hand tight in mine, “that this won’t always be easy. But I believe some things are worth fighting for. The right things. The good things.” I turn, look at her. I want her to see that I am, for once, at least, sincere. No dissembling frivolity. No shield of humor. “I think you’re a good thing, Felicity.”
“You’ll fight for me?” Her finger plays across my chest, the corners of her lips curl.
“Well,” I say, “that is basically what you pay me to do.”