"Tell me where you want me."
He meant the bed. He meant the side of it. He was asking me to decide, the same way he'd asked me on the bank of the lake and in his grandmother's bedroom on the first night he'd ever slept beside someone.
I led him to my room.
I got in on the side away from the door.
That was the side I'd slept on at twenty-six because that was the side a woman slept on when her husband let himself in late, and she didn't want to be the first thing he found in the dark. I'd been sleeping on the side toward the door for a month. Tonight, I got in on the side away.
He got in on the side toward.
He didn't say anything about it.
I put my hand on his chest. He put his hand over mine.
I'd thought, getting into bed, that I would not be able to do this without breaking. The opposite was what happened. I lay on my side and held very still, and so did he, and we didn't say anything for a long count.
His hand on mine tightened a quarter of an inch. The same quarter inch his hand had tightened the first morning he slept beside me. He held the quarter inch on my hand and breathed against the top of my head, and I let myself be held by a man I'd told, six days ago, that I was not in a place to be held by.
I told myself this was for the best.
I told myself again.
The second time landed a little worse.
I didn't sleep. The window over the dresser went gray a long time before either of us moved. At some point, I felt his thumb start to move along the back of my hand, a small, slow circle through the rest of the gray and into the first of the light. He never said anything. I never said anything. The thumb was the entire conversation we had in bed all night.
He was up at six.
He showered. He came out in jeans and a fresh long-sleeve, and made the coffee at my counter the way he'd been making it for a month. He poured two mugs. He drank his standing.
"What time?"
"Truck's got to be on the road by eight."
"Okay."
He came around the counter. He put his hand on the side of my face and kissed the side of my head. He went.
I gave him a count of sixty at the kitchen clock. Then I put on my sneakers and crossed Maple in my sweater.
He was on his front porch with a box in his hands when I came up the walk. He saw me. He stopped on the top step and waited.
"Where's it going?"
"Bed of the truck. I got the heavy ones."
"I'll take this one."
He handed me the box.
We worked. The boxes that had been flat in his hallway for eighteen months were not flat anymore. I carried the recipe tin that his grandmother used for the Sunday pot roast. I carried a box of photos in old envelopes,Queenswritten across the top one in handwriting that was not his. I carried the guitar case he played on my couch the morning he told me he loved me back. He carried the heavy ones.
We didn't talk.
Twice our hands met at the same box.
Mrs. Halloran's curtain moved at the third trip across the porch. She didn't come out. I would be grateful for that version of her for the rest of my life.
