"You make good coffee."
"I do."
"It's the only nice thing I've had in a long time."
He says it the way a person says a true thing they did not plan to say. Not a compliment about coffee. Something underneath it.
I do not respond.
I hold the cup with both hands and look at the counter because if I respond, I am going to say something true, something I did not plan to say. Something that starts withI knowand ends somewhere I am not ready to go.
He opens his eyes.
He is looking at me the way I have been looking at him when I thought he was not watching. The way that has nothing to do with threat assessment and everything to do with the particular problem of being in a small cabin with a specific person for half a day.
"You're going to be a problem."
"I already am one."
"I know. That's not what I meant."
I feel it before I can stop it.
The heat. Starting at my throat and moving up.
I am blushing.
I have not blushed in front of anyone since I was nineteen years old.
I pick up my coffee cup and drink from it, looking at the window. None of them works.
He sees it.
I know he sees it because he says nothing about it. A man who had not seen it would have kept talking. He goes quiet instead.
Madonna mia,my God.
I am going to mind.
We fight over coffee.
We do not call it a fight. We call it conversation. It is a fight.
He asks where I learned to suture. I say, Geneva. He asks who taught me. I say, a woman. He saysthat's not an answer.I sayit's the answer you're getting.He saysyou sound like my partner.
"I am not your partner."
"No. You're the woman holding my real name in her phone and pretending she isn't."
I freeze. Not visibly. I am too good at this for visibility. But internally, something shifts a quarter inch.
He has known I have his name for hours. He has been letting me think he did not know.
We are even.
"Sean."
He has been Liam Walsh since the warehouse. I have been letting him be Liam Walsh because it meant distance, and distance meant safety. I have just said his real name across a kitchen counter and done away with both.
