But here, held against this man on this deck with the water filling the quiet and his mouth still pressed against my hair, the anger has a place to rest, not a place to disappear but a place to set down long enough to pick back up in the morning.
And somewhere on the other side of the gate, someone with a key to my storage room is counting the days until I stop looking.
7
BOONE
The kitchen smells like real food.
Not the protein bar and bourbon situation that Ireland has been narrating as a personal failing since she opened the pantry two days ago, but actual groceries. Eggs, butter, bread that didn't come from a care package.
A carton of orange juice on the counter next to the coffeepot, which now holds dark roast beans she brought from her townhome in a bag with a handwritten label from some Annapolis roaster that probably costs more per pound than my bourbon.
She went shopping. She didn't ask. She assessed the situation, determined that a man cannot survive on twenty grams of expired protein and whiskey, and took corrective action.
Ireland stands at my stove scrambling eggs with the efficiency of someone who has opinions about how eggs should be cooked and no interest in hearing alternatives. Her hair is damp from the shower, pulled over one shoulder. She's in the oversized UVA swim team hoodie she lives in when the morning is cool enough to justify it.
The hoodie falls to mid-thigh. Her legs are bare underneath it, toned and tan from years of competitive swimming, and the view from the doorway of this woman barefoot in my kitchen, moving through my space like she's owned it longer than I have, does things to the base of my spine that have no business happening before coffee.
"You own three plates," she says without turning around.
"I eat off one."
"You eat off one. You own three. The math on that is genuinely troubling."
"The other two are for company."
"Boone, the other two were in the cabinet still wrapped in the paper they came in. You have never had company that required a plate."
She's not wrong. The plates were part of the base housing essentials, and the paper has been on them since I moved in.
I could argue the point, but the argument would require admitting that I've lived in this house for years and never unwrapped two plates, and the look she would give me is not worth the semantic victory.
"I'm having company now," I say.
The smile she gives me over her shoulder is quick and bright. Her freckles are dark against her skin in the kitchen light, scattered across her nose and cheekbones in a pattern I've been memorizing since the first morning I saw her in the rehab center hallway and had to remind myself that staring at a colleague's face is not a professional activity.
"Company implies a temporary arrangement." She slides eggs onto a plate, one of the newly unwrapped ones, and sets it on the counter. "I've purchased groceries, replaced your towel situation, and reorganized your spice rack. This is an occupation."
"I had a spice rack?"
"You had salt and a jar of something that might have been paprika in a previous decade. The jar has been disposed of. You're welcome."
I cross the kitchen and take the plate from the counter, but my free hand finds her hip on the way past, settles there, thumb pressing the crease above her hip bone.
She leans into the contact without breaking her rhythm at the stove, and the easy way her body answers mine, automatic and unhesitating, sends a pulse of heat through my gut that I file alongside every other piece of evidence that this woman has undone eighteen years of practiced discipline in a matter of days.
"Towel count?" I ask, my mouth close to her ear.
"Eight. Two bath towels and two hand towels in the bathroom, the same in the linen closet, and wash rags, because you were apparently unaware that wash rags exist. In addition, the linen closet contained a single fitted sheet for a twin bed and a grungy pillowcase that didn't match anything in the house."
"The pillowcase works fine."
"The pillowcase is beige. Your sheets are grey. The visual dissonance is an act of domestic violence."
"You're grading my housekeeping."
"Upgrading, Boone. I tossed the fitted sheet and pillowcase and replaced them and the dingy gray sheets with two new sets to go with the new orthopedic pillows. The old pillow looked like it might have become some kind of science equipment so it got the boot too."
