I stand up. I take my mug to the sink. I rinse it. I set it on the drainboard next to hers.
I walk past her to the hallway.
In the hallway, at the bedroom door, I stop and I turn back and I look at her in the kitchen. She is still leaning on the counter. She has not moved. She is watching me the way she was watching me in the chair yesterday morning, and her eyes on me do a thing to the skin of my back I have never felt a look do. I put my hand on the doorframe. I hold it there.
"Good night," I say.
"Good night."
I go into the bedroom and I close the door and I stand with my forehead against the wood, wondering what on earth I am doing.
I want her.
She might be keeping me as some kind of prisoner and she is lying to me. That is also true.
I get into her bed.
I close my eyes and think about her strong hands on my body and I hear a quiet moan slip from my own lips.
7
MAX
I'm awake at four.
The sofa is short for me the way it has been short for me for nine years. I sleep on my side with my knees forward and my head off the arm and my feet off the other arm, and my spine settles into a shape that is not a spine's shape and is not improved by the turn of a cushion. I have slept here three nights in a row now. I could sleep upstairs, except there is no upstairs. I could sleep in the bed, except she is in the bed. I could sleep on the floor, and I thought about it last night around one, and I didn't because the sound of me dragging a quilt onto boards at one in the morning in a four-room cabin would wake her, and she was asleep. She was asleep and I wanted her to stay asleep.
I sit up.
The stove is low. I feed it. I do it the way I did it yesterday, quiet, hand flat on the iron door so the latch doesn't click. I put the kettle on. I grind beans in a hand grinder because the electric grinder I bought in 2021 has a motor that sounds like a table saw and I don't want to hear it this morning and I don't want her to hear it.
I make coffee.
I drink the first cup standing at the counter, watching the window over the sink go from black to gray. The forest outside the window is not yet a forest. It is a darkness that will be a forest in twenty minutes. I can hear the creek off to the east, low, running well after the rain. A coyote, twice, east ridge. A branch in the wind.
I take the second cup and I walk to the bedroom door.
The door is open a hand's width. I left it like that last night when I came back from the kitchen at eleven to check on her. She was under the quilt then with one bare foot out along the edge. The foot was the only part of her I looked at. I looked at the foot because it was the thing that wasn't under the quilt, and I said to myself the foot was the thing, and I walked back out of the room.
I push the door open.
The bedroom is warm. The stove on the far side of the wall has been going all night and the wall is a warm wall. The window above the bed is gray now. The quilt is off her.
The quilt is off her because she pushed it off in the night. It is a heap at the foot of the bed. She is on her side facing the door. She is naked. She has taken everything off at some point in the night, and she is asleep in her own skin on my sheets, and the gray light from the window is on her the way light is on a thing that has been carved from marble.
I stop in the doorway. She is strikingly beautiful.
I stop in the doorway with my hand on the frame and my coffee in the other hand, and the part of me that has always known what to do in a room does not know what to do with this room.
I have never walked into a bedroom where a woman I barely know and am obsessed with was sleeping naked in my bed.
I do not leave.
I should leave. I know I should leave. I know it the way I know the four-minute mark on a two-story, the way I know howmany breaths are in a twenty-minute tank, the way I know the shape of Val's signature when she has been tired. I know that the right move from this doorway is to back out, pull the door to the same hand's width it was at, go back to my kitchen, make another cup of coffee, wait for her to wake up, not look at her like this.
I do not leave.
I know what it is. I am in a room with a person who did not invite me in, and I am here because the door was open and I wanted to be, and those two things are not the same as a reason.
