Page 53 of The Drifter

"That was my work."

"You going in?"

"No."

He didn't say anything to that. But his arm came across and gathered me back into him, all of me. He pulled me in against the long, warm wall of him, and I went. I went easy. That was the frightening part, how easy I went.

We lay there a while in the gray light.

"You're supposed to argue with me," I said.

"About what?"

"About taking another day. Everybody argues with me. Otis argues with me. My aunt argues with me. I argue with me."

"I'm the last man on earth going to tell you not to take a day." His hand moved slow up and down my spine. "I've taken years of them in a row."

I laughed into his chest.

And then, because the morning was soft and he was warm and the phone was in a drawer, I did a thing I do not do. I stayed. I lay there in a bed with a man and a whole free day in front of me and I didn’t get up to be useful to anybody. I let the light come up. I listened to his heart do its slow, absurd, unbothered thing under my ear.

Then, he got up to make coffee. I reached for the sheet. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me.

"Sasha."

"I know," I said. "I know."

I let the sheet go.

I got up out of that bed in the gray morning light with nothing on and I walked out into my own kitchen naked. It was easier than yesterday. Not easy. Easier. My hands still went looking for something to hold and still came up empty and still had to learn, over and over, to just hang there at my sides and be hands. But it was easier, and that told me something, which was that a person can get used to being seen the way a person gets used to anything. Fast. Faster than you'd think. And then, they need it.

He made coffee wrong.

"That’s not how you make coffee."

"It's coffee."

"You put the water in like you're mad at it." I came around him and took the pot out of his hand, naked. He let me, and stood back against the counter with his arms crossed and watched me fix his mess with an expression that was doing its best not to be a smile. "There's a way. My grandmother had a way. You don't just—Clint, are you laughing at me?"

"No, ma'am."

"You're laughing at me."

"I'm watching a beautiful, naked woman get het up about a coffee pot," he said.

I threw a dish towel at him. He caught it without looking.

That was the thing I kept running into, all that gray-gold morning. The ease. I have been comfortable with people my whole life—I am professionally comfortable with people, I put strangers at ease for a living. But comfortable and at ease are two different things. I had been in the first one so long, I'd forgotten the second one existed.

I stood in my kitchen, naked, and made coffee and got teased and teased back. There was no counter between me and anybody, and nothing in my hands, and I was fine. I was better than fine.

That should have been the warning. It wasn't a warning. It was just the morning. It was good. I let it be good.

We took the coffee out onto the balcony. He put a towel down on one of the chairs first, for me, without a word about it. I understood that this was the concession—that a man who wanted me bare in every room was also a man who had noticed the metal chair would be cold, and had done something about it before I had to ask. I sat on the towel. He sat in the other chair with his coffee, not caring, a big, naked man on a balcony over the harbor in the morning like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The city was waking up down there. A jogger on the point. A shrimp boat coming in. The water doing its coin-toss thing with the early light.

"Tell me about the room," he said.