“I’ll find the moment. This week. I just need time to find it right.”
“Your time’s running out.” No heat — which landed harder than heat. “Find it.”
The line went dead before I could say I knew.
I stood in the dark with the phone in my hand and my shirt cold against my back, wrung out like a twelve-hour build. Nothing was fixed — a man with a truck and a grudge out past the cul-de-sac, a woman across the road who didn’t know to lock her windows, a conversation I was no nearer to opening.
I dragged both hands down over my face. There were two of us now — me and her own brother, a county apart in two dark kitchens, deciding between us what she got to know about her own life. Both of us sure it was for her own good.
She’d told me once, in the flat voice she kept for the true things, how much she’d hated being handled — a whole family deciding things over her head her whole life, keeping the sharp edges off her like she was something that might break, when all she wanted was to be told the truth and trusted to stand up under it.
And tonight I’d gone into her phone with the code she trusted me with, called her brother behind her back, and settled with him what she was allowed to know — me, the man who was supposed to be the one place she didn’t have to earn. Now I was just another set of hands deciding her life over her head.
“Fuck.” My hand came down flat on the counter, hard enough to sting.
25
Sophia
The dress had been in the back of my wardrobe for three years. Simple, white, nothing to it — the kind that does its work by getting out of its own way. The good brown boots, soft and broken-in, because it was just the bar in town, the Silver Spur, and not a gala. A swipe of gloss and nothing else; my face has never once taken instruction from a cosmetic and I’d stopped asking it to years ago.
I left my hair down. That was the new thing. Six years I’d put it up off my neck the second I crossed a threshold, and somewhere in the last month I’d stopped, all because of the man I could hear fiddling in my kitchen.
I caught my own eye in the glass and felt the color come up the side of my throat at nothing, at no one, at an empty bathroom — because the morning was still in my body and had been all day.
I’d come off four nights at seven, dead on my feet and lit up at the same time, too far past tired to sleep. Then I’d come through my own door to the smell of coffee already made and the sight of him at my counter in nothing but sweatpants, and the only frequency I had left rerouted itself entirely.
He’d looked at me once — that operator’s once-over he doesn’t bother hiding anymore, the one that starts at my face and takes a slow inventory south — and put his coffee down. “You’re wired,” he’d said. Not a question. The man reads a body like a chart.
“I’m fine. I’ll just—” I’d lifted the wave-off,don’t go to any trouble, and didn’t reach the end of it, because he’d crossed the kitchen and kissed the rest of it clean out of my mouth.
He’d walked me backward into the bathroom, peeling the scrubs off me between the door and the tile, the water already running. He put me against the wet wall and went down onto his knees on the hard floor, setting his mouth on me with the focus he gives a weld — like there was nothing in the building he’d rather do — and I came apart in about ninety seconds, embarrassingly, one hand flat on the cold tile and the other fisted in his wet hair, his name the only word I had left, while he held me through the shake of it and told me low against my hip exactly what watching me did to him.
By the time he’d dried me off I was gone — bone-tired all at once, the wired thing finally cut, my whole body cashing the check it had been writing all night. He’d put me into my own bed and drawn the quilt up over my shoulder and bent and kissed me slow, the kind of kiss that tastes like a promise and is in no rush to collect.
“Sleep, darlin’,” he’d said against my mouth. “We’ve got a date with your family tonight.”
I was under before he reached the door.
That was the part I kept not believing. Not the heat — I could believe the heat. The rest of it: that I’d handed myself over, wrung out and useless and asleep before he’d left the room, and the whole skin of me had stayed quiet. The watchfulness I’d carried since I was twelve, set down somewhere I couldn’t evenfind to pick it back up, because some animal floor of me had decided this one was safe and closed the file.
I had watched rooms for eighteen years. I had stopped watching him.
I told the woman in the mirror she was, on the available evidence, in love. The woman in the mirror did not deny it.
“You’re going to be late deciding whether you’re late.”
I turned. He was in the bathroom doorway, all six-four of him in it, dark shirt with the sleeves shoved up his forearms, freshly shaved and looking faintly put-upon about having done it.
“I was conducting a survey,” I said.
“Yeah? Results in?”
“The dress wins. It’s been a landslide.”
His mouth went up at one side. Then his eyes went down the white dress and the bare legs and the brown boots and the hair I’d left loose for him, slow and unhurried, and whatever he’d come to say got mislaid somewhere around my collarbone. He pushed off the frame, crossed the small room, and stood in behind me so we were both in the mirror, one hand flat on my hip.
“Ready, beautiful?”
