I got up and stood at the window for a while. The moon was lighting up the small clearing around my cabin. There was a version of tomorrow where I drove her down to the lodge and Jared gave me that grin and I came back up the mountain to my one mug and my one chair and my clean quiet perimeter, and everything went back to the way I’d built it.
There was another version. I made myself look at that one too, the way you check a wound you already know is bad. Her staying. Her chatter filling up rooms. Her learning where I kept things, which was the same as her learning me.
I’d known men who took a hit and kept walking, didn’t feel it till they sat down. I had the feeling I was one of them right now.
Third alarm.
This one I did slower. She’d earned a real sleep cycle if she could string one together. I crouched, said her name twice, and she came up out of it easier this time — faster to the surface, eyes clearer when they found me.
“Amy Marsh,” she said before I asked. “Cabin. Montana. Bigfoot residence. My headache is a one.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “How am I doing, doc?”
“Better.”
“Better,” she repeated, and smiled — sleepy, unguarded, aimed straight at me from a foot away, and I took it like a man takes a punch he watched coming. “Ask me the bonus questions.”
“There are no bonus questions.”
“Who’s the president? What year is it? How many fingers?” She held up three of her own, then frowned at them. “This is your part.”
I handed her another glass of water. “Drink.”
She drank. Handed the glass back but didn’t lie down.
That was the first sign she was healing. Getting better. Getting ready to leave. She stayed sitting up, the quilt around her shoulders like a cape, and looked out the window, and for a whole ten seconds she didn’t say anything at all. I’d known her for less than a day and already knew ten seconds of quiet meant something was coming.
“I keep waking up right before you get to me,” she said finally. “I feel the floor move. Big man, old boards.” She looked at me. Moonlight on one side of her face. The scrape on her cheekbone had gone dark. “And then I spend that second being glad it’s you.”
“Amy.”
“It’s the concussion talking,” she said and then frowned. “Except my head’s a one out of ten, so it’s mostly not.” She clenched the edge of the quilt around her hand, then smoothed it back out. This was the most coherent she’d been since the river, no slur in it, no fog — only her, awake in the middle of the night in my shirt, saying things straight. “The couch is fine. I want it noted the couch is fine. But every time I fall asleep, I’m back inthe water.” She let go of the quilt completely. “So. Can I sleep with you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re going to wake me up in two hours anyway. I’m proposing we cut out the commute.”
Every reason to say no lined up for inspection. And underneath the reasons was everything I’d spent the night not thinking about. Her in my bed. In my shirt. My sheets. If she’d asked for the bed and taken it alone, that would have been one thing. She was asking to sleep next to me — trusting me to lie down beside all that warm, soft, sleep-heavy woman and behave. I could behave. I’d have the worst night of my recent life doing it, but I could behave.
“You snore.” That was all I said. The only reason I could give her without revealing the other things. The real reasons why.
Her mouth fell open. “I do not.”
“Yes, you do. Like a small chainsaw hitting a knot.”
“That is slander, and I was concussed —”
She was still building her case when I stood up and pulled the quilt off her and got one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and picked her up, and the case collapsed mid-sentence into a small, startled sound and her arms went around my neck like they’d been doing it for years.
I carried her into the bedroom and put her down on the side of the bed nobody had ever slept on. She pulled back another thin quilt and burrowed beneath it as I stretched out on top of it beside her, boots off, watch set, staring at the ceiling.
She was a foot away and I felt her there like a campfire. My hands under my head to keep from reaching out for her. I gave myself the talk. She was hurt, she was a guest, and I was the man on watch. The talk mostly worked. My body registered a minority opinion and was overruled. Her breathing went long and slow inside of a minute, and I lay there, listening.
“Garrick?” Barely a word.
“Sleep, Amy.”
“I’m glad you pulled me out of the river, Bigfoot.”
I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.
