"Was a thing."
"It was."
I picked at the tie of the robe at my waist. I made myself look at him. "Astrid and Easton. They're going to be in our lives. For a long time. For years."
"I know."
"We see each other at things. Birthdays. The baby, when they have one. Christmas at the bungalow."
"I know, Callahan."
"This can't be a thing."
He looked at me for a beat. His elbows were on his knees. The sheet was at his waist. The morning light was gray on his face, and I made myself not catalog any further than that.
"Okay," he said.
His jaw shifted. A small thing—the muscle at the hinge, a contraction that lasted half a second and was gone. If I hadn't spent six years reading the bodies of women in labor, I would have missed it. But I had, and I didn't, and the half-second told me that okay was not the word his body wanted to say.
"Okay?" I said.
"Okay. It's not a thing. Last night was last night."
I waited for him to push back. I'd built the speech in the bathroom for the version of him who pushed back. I had a paragraph ready about how this wasn't personal, how I likedhim, how we had cleared something out of our systems, and we could be friendly the next time we saw each other at a barbecue. I had the whole thing loaded.
He didn't push back.
He saidokayand held my look, and I felt something in my chest do the small, disappointed thing it had no right to do.
"Good," I said.
"Yeah."
I nodded. He nodded. We sat there at six in the morning on the edge of the bed and on the headboard with three feet of mattress between us, and we made a clean adult pact about a thing two reasonable people had done after running out of fuel for the fight they'd been having.
"I should go," he said.
"Yeah."
He got up. He found his pants on the floor and pulled them on with his back to me, which I appreciated more than I was going to think about. His shirt was over the chair where he'd dropped it last night. He picked it up. He looked at me before he put it on. His mouth went up at one corner.
"Eyes up here, Callahan."
"Don't flatter yourself."
He buttoned the shirt from the bottom up, unhurried, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the robe with my arms crossed, watching him not look at me, which was looking too, just slower.
"Sock under the chair," I said.
"How do you know?"
"Because I saw your foot trying to find it from across the room last night, and I find it riveting that you didn't notice you'd lost it."
He laughed, low, surprised, the same laugh he'd done against my mouth four hours ago, and bent down to fish it out fromunder the chair. He sat on the chair to pull it on. He found the other one at the foot of the bed.
When he straightened up, he looked at me, and I looked at him, and the look lasted a beat longer than it should have. Neither of us took it anywhere.
"Will you walk me out?" he said.
