Chapter Eighteen – Rhett118
Chapter Eighteen – Rhett
The fire had gone to its working embers by the time the dishes were cleared, and the house had sorted itself out the way it sorted itself out on the better evenings, Cole and Wade finding their respective corners by some unspoken negotiation, the back hallway going quiet, and Lila still at the table with the particular look of a woman who had no immediate plan for the next few hours and had not yet decided whether that was a relief or a problem.
I had a plan. The plan involved the old couch and the quilt from the cedar chest and a comedy I had seen enough times to have considered opinions about, and it had been taking shape in my mind since roughly the second course.
I got the laptop from the shelf in the back room and the quilt from the chest and carried them both out to the living room with the air of a man executing something logistically complex, which I felt was the correct energy.
The couch was the good one, the old one with the deep cushions that had been broken in by years of people with better sense than to sit anywhere else on a January evening.
I spread the quilt across the length of it and got the laptop situated on the coffee table at the angle I wanted, which took two adjustments and the kind of mild concentration usually reserved for meaningful tasks, and I was still frowning at the screen when Lila appeared in the doorway with her hand resting on the curve of her belly.
She looked at the couch. At the quilt. At me.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Setting up,” I said.
“For what?”
I patted the far end of the couch. “Film night. I’m going to watch a film and you’re going to sit there and benefit from my company.”
She looked at the couch for another moment, then at the dark pressing against the windows, and the cold outside it which she could probably feel from where she stood even with the fire going.
Then she sat down. She did it at her end, pulling her feet up and letting the cushions take her weight with the slow, organized economy she’d developed for moving around furniture these days.
I handed her the near end of the quilt without being asked, which she accepted without acknowledging, and I stretched out on my side of the couch and got the film going.
It opened the way it always opened, the particular comic timing of the first scene that I had never entirely gotten over despite having seen it going on eleven times, and I settled my arm along the back of the couch behind her shoulders, not touching, just there, the casual architecture of a man arranging himself comfortably, and I let the room be what it was.
The fire breathing in the hearth. The woodsmoke and old wool smell of the house in winter.
The Montana dark holding the windows the way it held everything past the fence line, patient and absolute.
About four minutes in, I knew the punchline was coming.
I knew it the way you knew a road when you’d driven it enough, the particular curve of it, the exact moment before the turn.
I let it build the way the film built it, and then, a half-beat before the line landed, I said it.
Low, not performing it, just saying it under my breath the way you said things you’d been carrying around long enough to feel like yours.
Lila turned her head and looked at me.
I looked back at her with the expression I had prepared for this eventuality, which was to say: no expression at all. Completely neutral. The face of a man who had done nothing notable and had no idea why he was being regarded with that particular quality of scrutiny.
She turned back to the screen.
I waited.
Two minutes later, same process. A different line, different scene, same half-beat of lead time. I was quieter about this one. More restrained. A man exercising real discipline.
She looked at me again.
“How many times have you seen this?” she said.
“Enough,” I said.
“That’s not a number.”
“Eleven,” I said. “Give or take.”
Her eyes narrowed in the way they narrowed when she was working out whether something I had said was worse than her first estimate. She turned back to the screen, and I returned my gaze to the laptop with the mild satisfaction of a man whose position on a matter had been made fully clear.
The third act of the first scene was where it really happened.
There was a sequence I had always thought was funnier than anything else in the film, funnier by the specific quality of something that had been set up for twenty minutes and arrived with complete commitment.
I did not quote it this time. I let it play.
But I had already been running about eight minutes of low-grade commentary, observations delivered in that particular undertone I reserved for an audience of one, self-deprecating enough that they didn’t require agreement, dry enough that they didn’t demand a laugh, just sitting there in the warm air between us like something left out in case it was wanted.
The observation I made during the sequence was not my best work.
It was, in terms of craft, the kind of line that succeeded primarily through timing and delivery rather than content.
I delivered it at the correct moment in the correct register and then looked at the screen as though I had said nothing at all.
Lila made a sound.
It started as a managed sound, the kind she produced when she had found something funny and had made an administrative decision not to reward it.
And then something in the management failed, and the snort got through, loud and involuntary and completely unguarded, and she put her hand over her mouth fast, but not fast enough for either of us to pretend it hadn’t happened.
Her shoulders were shaking. She pressed her palm harder against her mouth and her eyes, above her palm, were bright with the effort of containing something that had already escaped containment entirely.
I turned and looked at her.
I did not reach for more. I did not press any advantage.
I simply looked at her with the expression I actually felt, which was a particular variety of delighted that I was not in any hurry to perform or qualify.
I looked at her until she lowered her hand and pressed her lips together and tried to put the composed expression back on, which she managed with moderate success and which neither of us was fooled by.
“There it is,” I said. “I’ve been working toward that all evening.”
“You have not,” she said.
“I have,” I said. “This has been a structured effort. You should feel respected.”
She shook her head at me in the specific way she shook her head at things I said that she did not intend to dignify with a real response, but her mouth had the particular shape it took on when something had gotten past her defenses and she had decided, rather than do anything about it, to let it sit there.
I looked at the screen. The film kept going.
Outside the windows the dark pressed its cold geometry against the glass, and the fire worked its low orange core in the hearth, and the room held its warmth around us in the way of rooms that had been lived in long enough to mean it.
The film was loud in the specific way of comedies that trusted their material, not frantic, just committed, everything hitting the way it was supposed to hit.
I did not quote anything else for a while.
I let the film do its work and I let the commentary sit and I watched Lila watching the screen, where her face was doing the thing it did when she was genuinely enjoying something she had not expected to enjoy: the small, incremental relaxation of it, the tightness around her eyes going out degree by degree, the line of her shoulders settling toward the cushions.
At some point she shifted.
She resettled against the armrest, adjusting the quilt, and when she finished moving her feet had found their way under my thigh.
Not deliberately, or not obviously deliberately, just the natural consequence of two people sharing a couch for long enough that the space between them becomes a negotiation rather than a fixed distance.
I registered the warmth of her feet through the quilt and the denim of my jeans and I did not comment on it.
I reached down and adjusted the quilt without breaking my attention from the screen, pulling the corner of it more fully over her feet so the cold didn’t get in from the side.
She did not say anything about this.
A few minutes after that, she reached behind my back and took the throw pillow.
I had been leaning against it. The removal of it left a minor structural gap in my situation, which I resolved by shifting closer to the armrest, and I did not say a word about the theft because I was a reasonable man and also because the throw pillow was the right size for what she was doing with it, tucking it behind the curve of her lower back in the way she had been engineering for the past ten minutes without a good material to work with.
She arranged it and settled and something about the set of her exhaled breath told me she had solved a problem she’d been quietly managing.
I kept watching the film.
The commentary had drifted, by the second act, into something more ambient, less the sharp delivery of a man working toward a specific response and more the natural running observation of a person who thought out loud sometimes in the company of someone he was comfortable with.
She answered some of it. Not all of it, and not always verbally, sometimes a sound, sometimes a look, sometimes the slight shift of her attention that meant she had heard me and had decided the remark did not require formal acknowledgment.
It was the kind of exchange that didn’t have a name and didn’t need one.
At some point our shoulders were touching.