I went.
The bathroom was small and tidy, and it smelled like a man who used unscented soap.
I leaned both hands on the counter and got a look at myself in the mirror.
The hair towel was somewhere in his backyard. My hair was plastered in dark wet ropes across my shoulders. The towel around my body had a long, damp line across the front.
I was barefoot in a firefighter's bathroom holding a Hartsdale Fire T-shirt and a beige bralette.
"Okay," I said, to no one. "Okay."
Moose had followed me in. He was sitting on the bathmat with his tail thumping like he'd done something he was very proud of.
I crouched down and put a hand on either side of his face.
"You and I," I said, very quietly, "are going to have a long conversation about boundaries."
He licked my chin.
I straightened, put the bra on, and pulled the T-shirt over my head.
It fell almost to my knees.
It smelled like laundry soap, and underneath, the faintest trace of cedar and skin, the particular clean-warm smell of a man who'd come out of the shower an hour ago. The collar was loose around my neck. The sleeves came past my elbows.
I caught my reflection again.
A grown woman with wet hair, in a man's borrowed T-shirt, in a stranger's bathroom, after having been chased across two yards by her own dog with a bra in his teeth.
I closed my eyes.
Then I opened them again and admitted the second problem.
Because under the mortification, under the abject horror of how this morning had gone, there was the other thing. The thing I hadn't allowed myself to think about while he'd been standing in the doorway. The fact that the shoulders on him hadn't been the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old Easton Ford. The collarbones. The slight V of muscle at his hip, just above the elastic of the sweatpants. I had clocked all of it, quickly, professionally, with the part of my brain that had been a fifteen-year-old crouched on her parents' porch fourteen summers ago, and had apparently survived everything.
Excellent.
This was excellent.
I splashed water on my face.
I gathered my towel into a ball, gathered my dog by the collar, took one breath, and opened the bathroom door.
He was at the counter pouring coffee into a second mug.
He hadn't put a shirt on.
He looked up. Did the same fast, deliberate non-look down the length of me he'd done in the yard, and then he focused very firmly on the coffee pot.
The smell of the coffee hit me before anything else did. Strong. Cheap, in the way Hartsdale was cheap—gas-station beans run through a drip machine somebody had owned for fifteen years.
"Thank you," I said. "For the shirt."
"Don't mention it."
He set the pot back on the burner. The click of the glass against metal was the only sound in the kitchen for a beat.
"I'll wash it and bring it back. End of the week."
