Page 42 of Omega’s Fold

There it is again, that flush. He’s going to stay. Or we are going to talk about it. At least, it is a possibility.

“Me too.”

I’m not sure I’m ready for the reality of it though. I’m still not one hundred percent sure he is going to stay. The heat was amazing, but it might have just been heat for him. But then he wouldn’t mention his mother or say it was going well if it wasn’t.

I’m overthinking again. I know it.

“You haven’t mentioned your family,” I say to make conversation. “Do you have any siblings?”

He laughs. “Just the one. A brother, Eli. He is a pain in the ass. But I love him.”

“And your work? I don’t really know anything about what you do. Donna said you’re an architect? What are you working on?” She had said something of the kind. I’d barely noticed, too busy trying not to make a fool of myself.

Julian pauses. “A waterfront scheme,” he says. “In the city. It’s boring. I don’t want to talk about work, if that’s okay.”

“Sure.”

He refills my glass. He asks me about the ranch, about the cattle, about what I did before I took it over, and I tell him, and the evening goes on.

We do the washing up together. He washes, I dry. He is not good at it. He leaves soap on things. I don’t tell him. He stands at my sink in a clean shirt with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and his forearms in the water and I watch him out of the corner of my eye and think, this is a thing I could get used to, and then I think, don’t.

We go upstairs together and sleep in my bed again. I wake early as I usually do.

Julian is asleep. He has rolled onto his stomach and his face is pushed into the pillow and one of his arms is under mine. I slide out carefully and I dress in the dark. I go down the stairs in my socks, the way I do when the boys are asleep.

The air smells the way it smells here in the morning, cold grass and dust and faint smoke from someone’s stove down valley. I walk through my morning chores, seeing to the cattle while my brain ticks over.

I don’t know what this means. Are we in a relationship now? I don’t think we are. We’re a prime match. That means we’re supposed to be, at least according to the government but I don’t see what business it is of theirs.

Donna will be here in a couple of hours, bringing the boys. They’ll notice that Julian is now sleeping in my bed and I might have to be ready for questions about that.

I walk back to the house around nine.

I can smell coffee. I could do with a mug. I wonder if this is what life is going to be like then. I go out early, do my chores and we start the morning together with coffee. He can work from here. He’s proved that. Maybe he will want to stay.

I push the kitchen door open.

He is standing at the stove with his back to the table. He is in the clean shirt from last night and the same trousers, barefoot, hair still wet from the shower. He has the milk jug in his hand and he is pouring into a mug.

“Morning,” he says, over his shoulder. Not turning. “Fancy a coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“Sit down. Two minutes.”

I don’t sit down.

The laptop is open on the table. He usually sits with his back to the wall, the laptop facing it. It isn’t now. The screen is facing me.

He must have put it down when he went for the kettle.

What is on the screen is a rendering.

I look at it for a second without taking it in. It’s a building. A big one. Glass down one side. Water in the foreground.

It looks gorgeous. Except for the logo. It’s a squared-off L inside a ring. I know that logo. I have seen it in color on the side of the pickup that came out here last spring with the survey crew. I have seen it at the top of far too many letters. I have seen it on the sign at the turnoff to the ridge road, the sign I drive past twice a week.

He turns.