His finger goes still against my skin.
And then, from the hallway behind us, a door bangs and he steps back.
I let my shirt fall.
We do not look at each other.
“I’ll get my bag,” I say, to the bookshelf.
“Yeah,” he says, to somewhere else.
I pick up my bag. I make sure my phone is in my pocket, that I’ve got my keys. I am, by every visible measure, a woman gathering her belongings to walk twelve feet across a hall.
But my hand keeps drifting back to my side.
Not on purpose. I’ll be doing something else — settling the strap on my shoulder, checking I’ve got everything — and the heel of my hand finds the spot through my shirt, the stretch of ribs where the ink is, where his finger was, and presses, light, like it’s checking something’s still there.
I catch it the third time and make myself stop.
It’s just warm there. That’s all. Skin holds warmth, that’s a known property of skin. It doesn’t mean anything that my hand keeps going back to check.
The little dragon sits on the shelf with its head turned, listening, like it has been this whole time.
“Ready?” Erik says from the door, his bag over his shoulder, his face put back together into something easy and ordinary, like the last few minutes happened to two other people.
“Ready,” I say.
My hand is on my side again. I take it off.
I follow him out, across the hall, into the apartment that’s mine, and the whole way over there is a small warm place on my ribs insisting, quietly and against all evidence, that something happened that I’m going to need to deal with later.
Chapter 13
Elara
The fitted sheet goes on first because that’s apparently how these beds work. I learned this from my mother, over the phone, the first time Ashley stayed over, standing in the dark holding a corner of elastic like it had personally wronged me. The fitted sheet is the foundational document. Everything else is built on the fitted sheet.
Erik is in the bathroom. I have, I estimate, four minutes. Maybe five if he’s the kind of man who looks at his own face for a while, which I doubt, because men like that don’t, they just walk out already certain.
Four minutes. That’s plenty. I’m just making up the pull-out. It’s a small job. A normal, small, hosting job that any normal host does for any normal guest, and I am going to do it calmly and proportionally and then go to sleep in my own bed like a person.
The blue blanket.
Obviously the blue one.
It’s the softest thing I own, it’s the one I’d want, so it’s the one he should — actually. No. Wait.
It’s thin.
The blue one is the softest but it’s also the thinnest. Summer-weight, barely there, and if he gets cold in the night he’s not going to come knock on my door and ask for another one. Men don’t do that kind of thing. He’ll just lie there freezing and polite about it until morning, and I can’t have that, that’s a failure of the whole operation.
Hosting.
This is hosting.
I throw the blue one on anyway, because soft matters, and reach for the gray.
The gray one is the warm one. Heavier, thicker, the one you actually want when you get cold. But it’sonlywarm — what if Erik runs hot. Some people run hot. Some people are furnaces, they kick everything off in the night, they sleep on top of the covers like a starfish radiating heat into the void. I have never once thought about Erik’s personal temperature and I am absolutely not thinking about it now. Not about what he’d be like to sleep next to, or whether you’d wake up warm…
