The Gentlemen's Hour

165

They lie in bed at his place that night.

After a little while she asks, “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Really? Because you seem sad.”

He thinks about it. “Yeah, kind of, I am.”

“Your friends?”

“That’s part of it,” he says. “But only part. It’s the whole thing, you know? It’s made me question . . . who I am. I never saw the ugliness until it was too late, until it killed someone like Kelly. Maybe I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to see it. I only wanted to see . . . paradise.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“No, I’m not,” Boone says. “If you don’t see something, you don’t have to do anything about it. And I didn’t do a damn thing.”

“You’re not responsible for the whole world.”

“Just my piece of it.”

Petra kisses his neck, then his shoulder and his chest, and slides down his body gently, because he’s bruised and sore and aching, but she does soft, loving things until he cries out. Much later, her head in the crook of his neck, she asks, “Have you had a chance to think about Alan’s offer?”

Boone smiles. “He told you about that?”

“Yes.”

“Before or after he made it?”

“Before,” she says. “Does that matter?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Ah. I see. I didn’t ask him, Boone. It was his idea.”

“But he ran it by you first.”

“I’m sure just to see if I’d be comfortable with the idea of you being around the office,” she says.

“Are you?” Boone asks. “ ‘Comfortable’?”

She rolls over and puts her head on his chest. “Much, much more than comfortable. I’m ecstatic.”

He holds her tight. “Why don’t you stay here until you’re ready to move back in to your place?”

“Yes?” she asks. “Yes, thank you, I’d love that, but it wasn’t an answer.”

“Yeah, Pete,” he says, “I think I’ll do it, the law school thing.”

She smiles and settles closer into him. A few minutes later Boone feels her breathing deepen and he looks down to see that she’s fallen asleep. He loves the smell of her, the feel of her, her hair splayed against his chest.

He doesn’t sleep.

Lies there and thinks.