Page 95 of Wreckage and Rain

She turns and unlocks the door. I follow her in and she doesn't look back. The door clicks shut. I'm in her apartment. I'm in her space that she's been living in without me. I have a half-second to register it. Her laptop is closed on the kitchen table. A coffee cup beside it. Sticky notes scattered around. A vase with sunflowers on the counter. My sunflowers. She put them in water. My breath hitches. I stand in the entryway with my hands in my pockets and I take in her life and I try to keep breathing. She sets the canvas bag on the table. She turns and looks at me.

"Why are you still by the door?"

"I'm trying not to scare you."

"You're not going to scare me, Colt."

"I'm scaring me."

She walks across the room to me. She stops a foot away. She's small. I'd forgotten how small. The stage and the lights and thequeen who walked across the floor had made me think she'd grown two inches. She hasn't grown two inches. She's grown bigger inside a body that's exactly the same. She reaches up and places her hand on the side of my neck. The exact place I've been imagining for weeks. Her thumb at my jaw.

"Breathe."

I breathe.

"Again."

I do.

"Look at me."

I look at her.

"I'm here. You're here. We're doing this. Are you with me?"

"I'm here. I'm with you. I'm scared I'm going to break something."

"You can't break me by touching me, Colt. You broke me by everything else. You won't break me with this."

I bend down and put my face in her neck and I don't move for I don't know how long. She holds the back of my head. Her hand at the base of my skull. Her other arm around my shoulders. She's small and she's holding me up and she did this once before, when she was twenty and I lost the first deal I ever lost and I came home and put my head in her lap on the couch and didn't speak for an hour.

She didn't speak for an hour then. She isn't speaking now.

I'm crying. I don't know when it started. I'm crying and I'm holding her against me and she's letting me and she isn't flinching and she isn't pulling away and she's doing what she did at twenty which is hold the parts of me I can't hold myself.

After a long time I lift my head.

I'm wet-faced. I don't wipe it. She takes my face in both of her hands.

"I'm not sure of anything yet, Colt. I let you in the door. That's the only sure thing I've got tonight."

"That's enough."

"It isn't. But it's what there is."

She steps back. Her hands come off me and the cold comes in where they were. She looks at me for a long time, the queen from the stage and the girl from the diner in the same face, and whatever she's deciding she takes her time deciding it.

"You can stay," she says. "The couch is right there."

"Summer."

"Don't. Don't make it more than it is." A breath. "Here's what you're not getting tonight. You're not getting me. I let you cry on me. That is not the same as letting you back in, and I need to set that boundary before you lie down under my roof and start writing yourself a better story than the one you're in."

"I know the difference."

"Do you?"

"You held me up. You didn't give me anything back. I'm not going to mistake one for the other."