CHAPTER 13 #4
He picks me up off the edge of the tub. He steps into the water with me.
He sits down with me in his lap. The water comes up to my collarbones and his sternum.
The heat is just on the edge of too hot.
He arranges me — he turns me to face away from him; he settles me between his thighs with my back against his chest. He wraps an arm around my ribs.
He cups water with his other hand and pours it down my chestnut hair.
He washes my hair.
He does it the way he did the buttons of his own shirt — slowly, the small economy of motion of a man who was taught once how to do small things, who has not forgotten.
He pours water in handfuls. He works a small palmful of something — the shampoo, also on the marble shelf — through the length, the lengths of it red-gold in the bath light. He rinses. He does it again.
His thumb finds the place at the base of my skull where my mother used to press to make me sit still for the comb. He presses there for one beat. He does not know my mother did that. The press is a coincidence of where a man's thumb goes. The coincidence is its own kindness.
I let him.
I let him in the way I have not let any man do anything for me since March of 2021.
I lean my head back against his collarbone.
He kisses the side of my neck once — not the carotid, not the vein, just the muscle behind the ear — and goes back to the water at my temples.
He rinses the last of the suds. He cups water and rinses my eyes the way he would rinse the eyes of a child.
"Stay," he says.
He gets out of the tub. He comes back in twenty seconds with a Turkish-cotton bath sheet warmed from the heated rail.
He helps me out. He wraps me. He dries me, slowly, the cotton at my shoulders and my hipbones and my thighs and the backs of my knees.
He does not put a robe on himself. He carries me back through the velvet-lined door into the bedroom.
The chaise where I have slept the last five nights is empty.
He lays me on the white linens at the center of the four-poster.
He folds the ivory wool blanket up over my legs and to my hips.
He gets in beside me. He pulls me against him.
I put my face on his sternum. He puts his right hand at the small of my back.
The fire has dropped to embers; the cedar in the air is the last clean breath of it.
He does not say I love you. He has not said it yet. He will, on a different night I am not yet ready for. Tonight he says only my surname, once, into the top of my hair.
"Quinn."
"Vance."
He sleeps.
I do not, for a while. I lie with my cheek on the warm-marble of his sternum and I listen to the building.
The penthouse hums the small hum I have learned in nine nights.
Somewhere, deep through the steel and the studs and the insulation, the great-room hearth has its low gas note.
The four-poster's iron posts are cold. I think of them without thinking of them — the way a body in the dark catalogs a room without the mind being involved.
The post nearest the fireplace, the northeast corner of the bed, has taken on a little of the wood-fire's heat.
The other three are the cold of a winter four-poster.
One of the four — the post at the southwest corner, nearest the window, nearest the wall through which the harbor wind carves its way into the building — is colder than the other three.
I do not catalog the difference yet. I just know it as the body knows a room.
I sleep.
I wake at 04:00.
I wake because I have rolled in my sleep and my left ankle is touching the southwest post and the iron of it is several degrees colder than my skin and the differential has lifted me out of the last layer of dream.
I open my eyes. The room is dark. The fire is out; the embers are the only red.
The blackout shades are still up. The city below is the dark map of late-Monday lit windows.
His sternum is under my cheek. His right hand is at the small of my back where he put it.
He is asleep. The pale gray pupils are shut behind the dark lashes.
The two silver streaks at the temple are silver in the dim.
He is breathing — slow, even, the breathing of something that has rested. He has not moved in four hours.
I lie still and I look at him.
I am the woman who chose the body of a man tonight for the first time since my mother died. I have not let myself think this until now. I think it now. I do not let it scare me. I do not let it not scare me. I let it be what it is. He is a man — and not just a man — and I have chosen him. Vance.
I said it at the top of the second orgasm because the surname was the verdict of the choice. The first name is a different verdict. I am not ready to say it. I do not have to be ready tonight.
I close my eyes.
At 04:51 the blackout shades descend.
I hear them — the same low mechanical hum I heard from across the hall on my first morning in this building, the moving shadow on the ceiling, the dawn-cold radiating through the wall as the shades reach the sill — and I let them descend without opening my eyes.
The dark of the room becomes the dark inside the dark.
The fire is out and the city is gone and the four-poster's iron is the cold of the harbor through the wall.
I sleep through it this time.
His hand is at the small of my back.
I sleep.