Between Floors

Liv

Dana Pike crosses the studio with two mugs of coffee and puts one down beside Liv’s keyboard. Liv suspects at once that her Monday is about to get worse. The founder of Pike Larrabee Architects brings people coffee when she has news that will ruin their week.

“Good morning, Liv. How was your weekend?”

“Good morning. Too short.” Liv wraps both hands around the mug. “Thank you for the coffee. What happened?”

The top floor of the old warehouse is one long room under timber beams, and this early in the morning the low sun slants in off Portland Harbor through the tall windows and lies in bright stripes across the desks. Down on the wharf the gulls scream over the scraps behind the fish market. The heating was turned on over the weekend for the first cold week of the year, and now the radiators along the brick wall knock and smell of scorched dust. Dana pushes her reading glasses up into her gray hair. “Mark Ellis called me at home last night. He wants the roof terrace back.”

Mark Ellis is the developer of the building on Washington Avenue, forty apartments over a row of shops, and it has been Liv’s project from the first sketch. She has checked every stair and every door in it, and the permit drawings are almost ready for the city.

“We took the roof terrace out in August to save money. He agreed to it in writing.”

“His wife saw one in Boston. She runs the company with him and handles the leasing, and she says it’s worth fifty dollars a month on every apartment.”

Liv pulls the top-floor plan onto her left screen and tilts it so Dana can see. “Then the stair and the elevator have to go up through the roof, and the roof structure has to be redesigned to carry people. The condensers up there have to move inside, so every unit on the top floor loses a closet. And the stair tower puts us over the height limit, which means the planning board, which means the drawings don’t go to the city a week from Friday. They go in January.”

Dana studies the plan with her lips pressed together.

“Will you tell him that?”

“I’ll tell him exactly that. And if he still wants the terrace in January, he can have it in January, as an additional service.”

“He listens to you.” Dana laughs. “He argues with me.”

“He argues with me too. He just loses faster.”

Dana picks up her own mug and taps it once against the edge of Liv’s desk on her way back to her office, which from Dana counts as a medal. Liv watches her go and lets her shoulders drop. Her legs still feel the morning’s run along the Eastern Promenade, the first one in daylight in weeks, because the clocks went back yesterday. The run had cleared her head, but not for long.

At the far end of the long desk, in the seat nearest the restroom door, the new architect is drawing by hand.

His name is Alex Keane, and he has been at the firm for three weeks. He has the worst seat in the studio, the one every new person gets, with the restroom door in front of him and the draft from the stairwell at his back. It doesn’t seem to bother him. Yellow tracing paper lies unrolled over his keyboard, and his sleeves are pushed up to the elbows. His dark hair is a bit too long and keeps falling into his eyes. He shoves it back with his wrist, because his fingers are gray with graphite. Priya, the designer next to him, leans over with a joke Liv can’t hear, and he laughs. It is an easy laugh, and two people at the next desk look up and smile without knowing the joke.

His pencil sweeps across the paper in long, quick strokes. Liv catches herself watching his hand and looks back at her screen. She has a permit set to finish and a developer to talk out of a roof terrace. She has no business looking at the new guy’s hands.

By late morning she has a headache behind her eyes, and the stair on her screen has stopped making sense to her, although she drew it herself.

On days like this she has her own way of clearing her head. In the morning it is the run. In the middle of a workday it is her own hand, and the only place for it is the old restroom at the far end of the studio. The restrooms by the kitchen have stalls with gaps around the doors and somebody at the sinks half the morning. The old one is a single room with a thick door and a radiator that knocks loud enough to cover a sigh. She does it when nothing else helps, more often in some weeks than in others.

The lock on that door is older than anyone in the firm, and the little window above the handle shows green half the time when it should show red. So nobody at Pike Larrabee walks in without knocking, and everybody waits for an answer.

Liv pushes back her chair, picks up her phone out of habit and crosses the studio. At the end of the long desk Alex is bent over his tracing paper, the pencil moving. He doesn’t look up when she passes.

The restroom is narrow and clean, white-painted brick with a frosted window at the top, and it smells of eucalyptus soap. The bottle on the sink is hers, brought from home. Somebody has propped the window open an inch, and the air coming through it is cold and salty from the harbor.

Liv pushes the door shut with her shoulder, lifts it by the handle so the bolt will meet the hole in the frame, and starts to turn the bolt. Her phone buzzes in her other hand. She glances at the screen. Mark Ellis has written, “Dana says you have thoughts. Call me before lunch?”

She types back with her thumb, “At eleven thirty,” and sends it. Her hand lets go of the bolt before it reaches the end of its turn.

She puts the phone face down on the edge of the sink and leans her forehead against the cold brick. She unbuttons her trousers, pushes them down with her underwear to her knees and sits on the toilet seat. The plastic is cold against the backs of her thighs.

At first she thinks of nothing at all, which is what the restroom is for. She breathes in the eucalyptus and the salt and listens to the radiator. She lets her knees fall apart as far as the trousers allow, touches her sex lightly with the pads of two fingers and waits for her body to remember what to do. Slowly the warmth gathers low in her belly, and she grows wet under her fingers. She draws the wetness up to her clit and starts to circle.

The stiffness in her neck lets go first. She leans her shoulders back against the cold tank and closes her eyes. Ellis goes, and the terrace goes, and the stair. There is only the slow circle under her fingers and the heat spreading out from her clit into her thighs.

Without meaning to, she pictures a hand sweeping a pencil across yellow paper, and a wrist shoving dark hair back from a face.

Liv opens her eyes and stares at the white brick. Not him. Not the new guy at the end of the long desk, who has said maybe twenty words to her, most of them about the plotter. She closes her eyes again and thinks firmly of nothing.

But her fingers have not slowed down, and she is much wetter than she was a minute ago. She is breathing through her mouth. The radiator has gone quiet, so she bites her lip to keep any sound in. She slides two fingers inside herself and rubs her clit with her thumb. Her thighs tremble. The trousers cut into her knees as she tries to open them wider. She is close, she is so close, her heels pushing into the tiles and her free hand gripping the edge of the seat.

The handle goes down.

The door swings open, and Alex Keane stands in the doorway.