"That's a lie."
"Yes."
"Why are you lying?”
"Because the thing I want to say isn't the thing you want to hear at six in the morning on your third day in a stranger's bed."
She holds the look. She does not smile. She does not frown. She looks at me with the steady look of a woman who has been composed her whole life and is, for the first time in my presence, not quite fully composed, and is letting the not-quite show on purpose. She moves slightly and her other breast is exposed and I know she knows it and she doesn’t move to cover them.
"Maybe I want to hear it?” she says.
I sit in the chair.
I sit in the chair because if I get out of the chair we are going to be on each other. I know it the way I know the four-minute mark. I know the shape of what happens if I cross the room in the next ten seconds. I know she is not going to stop me. I am going to have her hand in my hand and her face against my throat and her mouth under mine before either of us can get any of these thoughts out of whatever part of our heads our thoughts are still in.
I do not get out of the chair.
"Not today," I say.
"Not today."
"No."
"Why?”
"Because you buried a husband this week."
"I didn't love him."
"I know."
"So."
"So you get a few days to be in a bed alone without somebody in it with you. That's the version where I come out of this a person I can look at in a mirror."
She closes her eyes.
She closes them slow. Not out of shame. Out of the same want I have in me. I watch her close them and I watch her open them again, and when she opens them she has not pulled the sheet up and she has not moved her hand.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
My phone rings on the side table.
I feel it in the wood under my hand before I hear it. I have had it on silent. The vibration is a drill and a drill only. I do not take calls on vibration from anyone but Val and Dani. I look at the screen without picking it up and it is Val.
The want stays. I push it under the call.
"I have to take this."
"Okay."
I stand up. I pick up the phone. I walk out of the bedroom, pulling the door to the same hand's width I found it at, and I cross the living room and I step out onto the porch and I shut the front door behind me, and only then do I answer.
"Chief."
"Hale. There's a fire in the industrial strip on Fourth. It's going to be ours at oh-nine-hundred. I want you on it by eight."
