Chapter 2: The Conservatory Seduction
The conservatory scene was giving her trouble.
It wasn’t the passion. That, she could do in her sleep. It was the setting. The damn plants. She’d never been good with greenery. Nana stared at the sentence on her screen: The scent of night-blooming jasmine wrapped around them like a promise. It was garbage. It was wallpaper-paste prose.
The deadline was a live wire in her brain, sparking against her temples. Marion’s voice echoed: product belongs to us.
Fine. Product.
With a grimace that felt more like baring teeth, she shoved the laptop aside. It nudged a precarious tower of notebooks, and they avalanched across the desk, a flutter of yellowed paper and frantic marginalia. She didn’t bother to pick them up.
She reached for the brass vibrator, its metal cool under her fingers. Tonight, it didn’t feel like a key. It felt like a lever. A means to an end. She plugged it in, the cord slithering through a constellation of old coffee rings. The initial hum was the same, but it felt different inside her. Less like inspiration, more like a mechanical jump-start.
She hit record on the voice-to-text app, adjusted her headset, and began, her voice flat.
“The conservatory was a cathedral of glass and want. Condensation—" She stopped. Too clinical. She closed her eyes, trying to find the thread. The vibrator’s pulse was a sterile thrum. She pushed harder, searching for the spark. “He backed her against a workbench, clay pots shuddering. His hands were gritty with soil. He told her she was the only rare thing he hadn’t managed to kill.”
Better. There was a rawness there. She let the sensation build, chasing the feeling into the words. Her breathing shallowed.
“She kissed him with the desperation of a woman drowning in open air. It was messy. Teeth and tongue and the taste of earth. He hauled her up onto the bench, the terracotta cold through her thin skirt, and she—oh—”
A real gasp tore from her, unbidden. The mechanical thrum finally synced with something real, a live nerve she’d been stomping on. The flat professionalism shattered. Her diction melted.
“He didn’t ask. He just… looked. And she opened for him. Like a… god, like a flower turning to the last sun of the year. It was so quiet. Just the drip of water from the leaves. And the sound of… of his breath. And hers. And…”
Nana’s free hand gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white. The words became staccato, half-formed. The narrative disintegrated into pure sensory feedback. She was barely dictating anymore; she was reporting from a collapsing front. “It’s too much. It’s—the light is green. Everything is green and breaking. Please.”
Her back arched, a silent cry shaping her mouth. The world dissolved into a white-noise roar of release, the vibrator’s buzz the only anchor. For a few seconds, there was nothing. Just the hum and the rain and the hollow, blissful static in her head.
Then, through the headphones, crystal clear in the post-climax silence, a voice. Soft, ragged, unmistakable.
“Nana.”
It wasn’t in the recording. It was live. On the line.
Her eyes snapped open. The flushed, dazed warmth in her veins froze solid. She fumbled, her hand hitting the spacebar, stopping the recording. The silence that followed was absolute and screaming.
She yanked the headset off as if it had burned her. Stared at it. The call was still connected. He was there. He had been there the whole time. Not just editing a recording. Listening. Live.
Her voice, when she found it, was a dry crackle. “Leo?”
A beat of dead air. Then a horrified, choked sound. “I’m here. I’m so—the software. It has a live-monitor function for clarity. I always have it on. To catch mumbles. I didn’t think—you usually just send the files. I didn’t mean to…” His explanation died in a heap.
She could see him. In that beige apartment. His cowlick, his kind, overwhelmed face now etched with pure panic. He’d heard it all. The fake prose about the conservatory, and the very real, very unstaged symphony that had followed.
A hot wave of violation washed over her, then immediately crashed against the sheer, absurd reality of it. This was her process. She owned it. She was never ashamed of the machinery. But the audience… the audience had always been theoretical. A future editor sifting through cold audio files. Not a man. Not Leo. Not hearing her whisper please into the void.
“You heard,” she said, not a question.
“I… yes.”
“The whole thing.”
“Yes.”
Another silence. This one was different. Heavier. The professional veil wasn’t just torn; it had been incinerated. She felt exposed, but beneath the exposure, a spark of something else. A dangerous curiosity.
“Why did you say my name?” she asked, her tone impossibly calm.
A long pause. She could hear him breathing. “I don’t know,” he whispered, and it sounded like the truest thing he’d ever said. “It just… came out.”
She looked around her chaotic office, the scene of the crime. The stained typewriter leered at her. The vibrator, still buzzing faintly on the desk, suddenly looked absurd. Vulgar. She reached over and switched it off. The sudden quiet was a physical thing.
“Okay,” she said finally, blowing out a breath that ruffled the pages near her face.
“Okay?” he echoed, disbelief warring with hope.
“Yeah. Well. That happened.” She managed a weak laugh. It sounded strange to her own ears. “Look, Leo. I dictate sex for a living. You transcribe it. We both know the score. That was just… a particularly vivid session with a technical difficulty.”
She was giving him an out. A professional life-raft. She could practically hear him clinging to it.
“Right. A technical difficulty. The monitor function. I should have—”
“Forget it.” She cut him off, softer this time. “But since you’re already on the line and your ears are now permanently scarred, you might as well give me your notes. The conservatory bit. Before the… technical difficulty. Was it working?”
The sheer, brazen normality of the question seemed to reset the universe. He let out a shaky breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was closer to the Leo she knew—the careful, literary Leo. “The soil on his hands. That was good. Visceral. The ‘rare thing he hadn’t managed to kill’… that’s a killer line. But the night-blooming jasmine…”
“Was wallpaper paste.”
“Exactly.”
A genuine smile touched her lips. “Noted. No jasmine. Just dirt and desperation.”
“Just dirt and desperation,” he agreed, and there was a smile in his voice too, fragile but there.
The moment stretched, comfortable now in its new, awkward shape. The boundary hadn’t just been crossed; it had been redrawn in permanent marker. They both stood on the other side of it.
“I should let you go,” he said, but he didn’t sound in a hurry.
“Yeah. And I should probably write something that isn’t just heavy breathing and horticulture.” She paused. “Leo?”
“Yes?”
“Next time, mute your mic.”
A short, startled laugh burst from him. “Yes, boss.”
The call ended. Nana sat in the quiet gloom, the only light from the flickering desk lamp. She looked at the silent brass tool, then at the half-finished sentence on her screen. The humiliation was receding, replaced by a strange, electric clarity. He’d heard her. Really heard her. And he was still there. He’d even given a decent note.
She deleted the line about the jasmine. Her fingers hovered over the keys. Then she started typing, not dictating, the old-fashioned way, the keys clacking softly in the rain-filled room.
He called her name, and it wasn't in the story. It was a sound from the real, dark world, and when she heard it, she knew the conservatory had just become real, too.