9. Blythe #2
“She went on break. Come on, I’m trapped in here.”
The curtain rustled. Reid’s voice came from right outside. “I don’t think I should-”
“Reid. Please. My arms are starting to cramp.”
The curtain opened.
He stepped inside, and suddenly the fitting room was very small. He filled it completely, shoulders blocking the mirror, head nearly brushing the ceiling. His face was already flushed, and he was looking at a point somewhere above my head.
“Where’s the zipper?”
“Side.” I lifted my arm. “It’s stuck about halfway.”
His hands were warm on my ribs. I felt him find the zipper, felt him work at it carefully, his fingers brushing against my skin through the gap in the fabric.
Up close he smelled like cedar and clean laundry and warm skin.
His collar was open at the throat, and I stood there with my arm raised, staring at the line of his neck, the pulse ticking under his jaw, the tendons shifting in his forearm as he worked.
I pressed my thighs together. The man was trying to free me from a dress and my body had decided it was foreplay.
Traitor.
“It’s really caught,” he said.
“I know.”
“I might have to-”
“Just do it.”
He pulled. The zipper didn’t budge. He pulled again, harder, and I heard fabric tear.
“Shit.” His hands went still. “I’m sorry. I think I-”
“It’s fine. Just-”
He pulled one more time, and the dress came apart in his hands.
The fabric split from hip to armpit, and suddenly I was standing there in my bra and underwear, the ruined dress pooling around my feet. Reid’s hands were frozen on my waist, his eyes wide, his face so red it looked painful.
“Sorry.” His voice was strangled. “Sorry. Sorry.”
He squeezed his eyes shut.
I should have told him it was fine. Should have grabbed something to cover myself, should have laughed it off, should have made some joke about his strength.
I turned around instead.
Don’t ask me why. Some instinct. Some need to see if he’d look.
I stood there with my back to the mirror, facing him, in nothing but my underwear.
His eyes were still closed. His hands had fallen to his sides. But he wasn’t backing up. The fitting room was tiny and he could have stepped out, could have given me space, could have done any of the appropriate things a man in his position should do.
He didn’t move.
“Reid.”
“I’m not looking.”
“I know.”
“I should go.”
“You should.”
Neither of us moved.
The fitting room had gone very small. I could feel the heat coming off his skin. My heart was pounding. His chest was rising and falling too fast.
We were a breath away from each other.
I watched his jaw work. Watched his hands clench at his sides. Watched him fight with himself, some internal battle I couldn’t see.
His eyes opened.
They were dark and heated, fixed on my face with an intensity that made my breath catch.
“Blythe,” he said, and his voice came out low and thick.
A woman’s voice came through the curtain: “I heard some commotion. Everything okay in there?”
We jumped apart. Reid’s shoulder hit the mirror. I grabbed a shirt off the bench and held it against my chest. My face was burning. His was worse.
“Everything is fine,” Reid said.
His voice had gone rough and low, nothing like the awkward man who’d stammered about tide tables to Sandrine Chadwick.
“Everything is fine.”
We paid for a small mountain of clothes neither of us looked at.
He carried the bags. I walked to the car on unsteady legs, pulse still going, my brand-new underwear in a state I had no intention of examining too closely, and spent the drive home furious at my own body.
Telling myself it was adrenaline. Grief. Proximity. Anything but what it was.
His knuckles were white on the wheel the entire twenty minutes. Neither of us said a word.
By the time we got home, Bayes had decided the silence was unacceptable.
He met us at the door with his leash in his mouth, a lie, he’d been walked, and herded us both toward the kitchen with the bossy efficiency of a dog who has raised one emotionally constipated human already and is not above raising a second.
Reid cooked with his back to me, because that was the only way he could cook and talk at the same time, and I sat at the island and told him which committee members hated which, and somewhere in there the fitting room stopped ringing between us and the evening turned into something almost easy.
We ate at the island. Bayes conducted his nightly referendum on the separate-wings policy by lying across both our feet at once, voting, as ever, against.
After dinner Reid took the dishes and I wandered into the library, because I’d finished my book the night before and there was an entire wall of them and the ladder was right there. The famous ladder. The one he’d apologized for twice on the worst night of my life.
The brass rail was smooth under my hand. I climbed three rungs, then four, hunting a green spine on the fifth shelf, and the ladder glided half a foot along its rail with my weight on it and my stomach dropped.
I didn’t fall. But I grabbed the shelf, and a hand closed around the ladder’s side rail at the same instant, and Reid was there, soundless and enormous, a dish towel still over his shoulder, steadying it with one hand like the whole thing weighed nothing.
“It slides,” he said. “I should have - there’s a trick to it. I’m sorry about the ladder.”
“You keep apologizing for this ladder.”
“It keeps ambushing you.”
I came down slowly. His hand moved from the rail to my waist, to steady me, that was all, three rungs from the floor didn’t require steadying, and then I was on the ground and my back was against the shelves and neither of his hands had gone anywhere.
The library was very quiet. He smelled like dish soap and cedar. I could feel each of his fingers through my shirt, and his eyes had gone dark, and his throat moved when he swallowed, and I thought, with total clarity: this is a terrible idea and I am about to have it anyway.
Bayes barked once from the kitchen, imperious, betrayed by an empty food bowl.
Reid’s hands dropped. He stepped back and cleared his throat and said, “He’s - I should-” and pointed at the kitchen with the dish towel, and fled.
I stood against the shelves for a while, holding a green book I had no memory of choosing.
***
We watched a film that night, on opposite ends of the couch, with a dog between us like a border checkpoint.
It was a bad film. Neither of us watched it.
And when I went up to my wing, my separate, sensible, contractual wing, I lay awake for a long time listening to the house settle, thinking about a hand on a ladder rail.
Separate wings. Right.