My knees went.
He caught me under the arms before I was the rest of the way down.
"Hey. I got you," he said, his voice softer now.
He got me back upright, then he got me down again, slower, the way you get a person down who can't get herself there. We ended up on the floor of my front hall with my back against one side of the doorframe and his against the other, my legs across his lap. The front door was still open. The cold from the November porch was coming in around us. He pulled me closer against his coat. Smoke and him underneath the smoke.
I put my face against the front of his coat.
I didn't cry. I just put my face against the coat while he kept one hand on the back of my neck and one at the small of my back. Moose came down the hall, lay down across both of us, set his chin on Easton's thigh, and his tail across my knee.
After a while, Easton reached up and shut the front door.
"Don't get up yet," he said. "I got us."
He pulled the deadbolt across without looking at it.
I lifted my face off his coat.
"The sauce."
"What sauce?"
"On the stove. It'll burn."
He let a breath out against the top of my head that was almost a laugh.
"I'll get it."
"In a minute."
"In a minute."
He kissed me on the top of the head.
"You're alright. You're alright."
He said it twice on purpose.
"I'm alright."
He got up carefully, sliding out from under Moose and from under me with the patience of a man who had moved a sleeping old dog more than once. He set me back against the doorframe with the hall rug pulled across my lap. He stood up.
"Three minutes."
He went down the hall to the kitchen. I heard him turn the burner off. I heard him move the pot, rinse the wooden spoon, stir the sauce twice with a clean one, and put a lid on it. I sat in the hall with my back against the doorframe and listened to a man in my kitchen take over a pot of my mother's tomato sauce on a Saturday evening in November, and I let myself listen.
He came back with a glass of water and a kitchen towel.
"Drink."
"I'm okay."
"I know you're okay. Drink."
I drank.
He handed me the towel for my face. He held out a hand and pulled me up. He walked me to the living room, sat me on the couch, pulled the blanket over my lap, and finished dinner. The sauce. The water for the pasta. Setting the table. FeedingMoose. He rinsed off in the shower and moved through rooms that weren't his with the forward motion of a man who'd decided they were going to be alright tonight, whether the woman on the couch was up to making them alright or not.
