After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
Vera and Thomas, part two.
Vera Lindqvist had decided, firmly and on the record, that she would wait until Thursday. She was thirty-nine years old and a conservator of rare bindings, and her entire profession rested on the principle that nothing good is ever improved by hurrying. On Monday morning she climbed the four flights to her studio in an old Gowanus warehouse, put on her cotton gloves, and spent six hours coaxing a water-stained Victorian herbal back into one piece with wheat-starch paste and a patience that would have impressed a monk.
It was a little after five, washing her brushes at the big slop sink while the light over the canal went the color of weak tea, that she reached into her coat pocket for her keys and found only one gray kid glove. The left. She checked the other pocket, then the coat itself, then, with growing suspicion, her memory of the nightstand on Saturday morning, where a single glove had sat beside a note on a coffee receipt.
She took out her phone. “I believe,” she typed, “you are in possession of my other glove.” The reply came before she had dried her hands: “Guilty. Held as collateral. I’m under the Brooklyn Bridge until dark, if you’d like to negotiate.”
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