The Galleys

Chapter 1 - Ink

The Galleys still smelled like a shop that had printed other people’s hunger. Miriam Cole gave the desk a name that was not the one on her hardcovers and watched it fail immediately.

“We know,” said the woman with the board. “You’re not a secret and you’re not a tour. Ellis has the room. He’s young. If you want a jaw from a poster I can give you Kovacs. If you want someone who will not perform your dust jacket, take Ellis.”

“Ellis,” Miriam said, because she had come to stop performing the dust jacket.

Jordan Ellis was in the hall in shop blacks and a spine that had decided not to apologize. Twenty-seven. Hands ink-stained from an actual day job at the shop downstairs. He looked at her the way a careful person looks at a live press.

“Cole,” he said. “Jordan. If my age is a problem you say it before we close a door. If my having read you is a problem, that’s already true and we should put it on the table.”

Miriam felt the old heat - being read - and the newer heat of being refused a pedestal.

“On the table,” she said. “Then we see if you can hold a woman who writes sentences about this and still needs her knees told what to do.”

Chapter 2 - Room

Room three had a bench, a hook, a chair, and the book. Paperback, cracked, sitting on the side table like a sin he had decided not to hide.

“I brought it so I wouldn’t pretend I hadn’t,” Jordan said. “I am not topping your character. I am not reciting your chapter six. Word is copy. You say it if I start directing a novel. I say it if you start taking notes on my mouth. Limits.”

She gave them. No marks a podium would have to explain next month. No audience. Impact, restraint, sex if they were still in the room. She had not done this in three years. Rust, not innocence.

Jordan nodded. He did not puff up to match her reputation.

“I want you kneeling because you asked for a first night, not because your blurbs like the shape,” he said. “Clothes off. Cushion. Look at me, not at the paperback. If the paperback is louder than I am, we pick it up and we leave.”

Miriam undressed with hands that remembered interviews. Kneeling cut the interviews off. Jordan stood close enough that she had to see the pulse in his throat.

“Still yes.”

“Still yes. Don’t flatter me with trembling unless it’s real.”

It was real. She hated that it was.

Chapter 3 - Rust

He cuffed her wrists in front, lined leather, and put her over the bench. His palm first: mapping, then striking, a rhythm that was workmanlike and then not. Miriam’s body remembered faster than her pride. When the strap came she made a sound she had given to a character in 2019 and never quite to a room.

“Color.”

“Green. Don’t you dare get careful because of the spine on that table.”

Jordan’s breath changed. “Then take what I give, not what she would have taken.”

He meant the woman in the book. Miriam almost argued and then did not, because the argument would have been copy.

Ten honest strokes. His fingers between her legs after, checking without turning it into a quiz. She was wet enough to be embarrassed, which was better than being quoted.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Yes. In me. You don’t have to earn a metaphor.”

Condom. He pushed in like a man who had been taught not to rush a press and then rushed anyway because she pushed back. Miriam came first, shaking, angry at the rust for giving way so fast. Jordan followed with a noise he bit off, forehead against her shoulder, twenty-seven and not a packet.

After, he unlocked her, water, a blanket that smelled like detergent not incense. The paperback sat there. Neither of them touched it.

Chapter 4 - Copy

In the aftercare chair Miriam’s hand went to her bag before her brain signed off on it. Notebook. Always the notebook. Jordan saw the reach.

“Copy,” he said.

She froze. The word sat between them like a closed press.

“I wasn’t going to write you,” she said, which was a lie in the process if not in the sentence.

“You were going to keep me from leaving your head in the only way you trust.” Jordan’s voice stayed level and young and unimpressed by fame. “That’s the vocation eating the scene. We stop. You can come back. You don’t get to file me while you’re still wet.”

Miriam laughed once, wrecked and caught. “That obvious.”

“To me. I read you. That’s the trap.” He handed her the notebook as if returning a weapon at the door. “Clothes. Tea downstairs if you want it. No second scene tonight.”

She dressed. At the door she said, “If I come back I leave that in the hotel safe.”

“If you come back,” Jordan said, “you leave it in the hotel safe and you let me be twenty-seven in a room. Not a device.”

Chapter 5 - Second

She came back four nights later with empty hands and a member guest sticker that felt like a demotion and a relief.

Jordan checked her palms as a joke that was not a joke. “Good.”

This time he had her kneel facing him while he sat, which made the inversion visible: she was older, known, on her knees; he was the one with the strap across his lap and a face that still looked like the shop.

“I want your mouth,” he said. “Then I want you on my lap. You don’t get to narrate. If a sentence arrives you let it pass.”

She took him in her mouth with the unhurried attention she brought to a difficult paragraph and then, for once, did not store the image. He stopped her before he finished, pulled her up, sheathed, and sat her on him. Miriam rode until he held her hips and took the pace. She came with her face in his neck. He came with his hand flat on her back, no quote.

After, on the floor, she said, “I can write about kneeling without putting your ink in it. I needed to prove that to myself more than to you.”

“Prove it by not doing it,” Jordan said. “I’m greedy. I want the nights, not the acknowledgments.”

Chapter 6 - Card

The desk gave her a member form. Jordan signed the sponsor line with a shop-hand scrawl.

“I’m not your research assistant,” he said in the hall. “I’m not your secret. If we keep a night, it’s on the board like anyone else’s. If your publicist calls the club I will be boring and unhelpful.”

Miriam tucked the form away.

“If I ever put a twenty-seven-year-old pressman in a book you can copy me in an email and I will cut him.” She paused. “I will also come on Thursdays if you still want a woman whose knees are rusted and whose sentences are not invited.”

Jordan almost smiled. “Thursdays. Room three. Bring nothing that binds.”

She walked down through the ink smell into a city that wanted her to be a quotation.

The Galleys kept printing other things.

She kept the card blank on the back, where a blurb would have gone.