Chapter 7
MAX
I'm awake at four.
The sofa is short for me the way it has been short for me for nine years.
I sleep on my side with my knees forward and my head off the arm and my feet off the other arm, and my spine settles into a shape that is not a spine's shape and is not improved by the turn of a cushion.
I have slept here three nights in a row now.
I could sleep upstairs, except there is no upstairs.
I could sleep in the bed, except she is in the bed.
I could sleep on the floor, and I thought about it last night around one, and I didn't because the sound of me dragging a quilt onto boards at one in the morning in a four-room cabin would wake her, and she was asleep.
She was asleep and I wanted her to stay asleep.
I sit up.
The stove is low. I feed it. I do it the way I did it yesterday, quiet, hand flat on the iron door so the latch doesn't click.
I put the kettle on. I grind beans in a hand grinder because the electric grinder I bought in 2021 has a motor that sounds like a table saw and I don't want to hear it this morning and I don't want her to hear it.
I make coffee.
I drink the first cup standing at the counter, watching the window over the sink go from black to gray.
The forest outside the window is not yet a forest. It is a darkness that will be a forest in twenty minutes.
I can hear the creek off to the east, low, running well after the rain.
A coyote, twice, east ridge. A branch in the wind.
I take the second cup and I walk to the bedroom door.
The door is open a hand's width. I left it like that last night when I came back from the kitchen at eleven to check on her.
She was under the quilt then with one bare foot out along the edge.
The foot was the only part of her I looked at.
I looked at the foot because it was the thing that wasn't under the quilt, and I said to myself the foot was the thing, and I walked back out of the room.
I push the door open.
The bedroom is warm. The stove on the far side of the wall has been going all night and the wall is a warm wall. The window above the bed is gray now. The quilt is off her.
The quilt is off her because she pushed it off in the night.
It is a heap at the foot of the bed. She is on her side facing the door.
She is naked. She has taken everything off at some point in the night, and she is asleep in her own skin on my sheets, and the gray light from the window is on her the way light is on a thing that has been carved from marble.
I stop in the doorway. She is strikingly beautiful.
I stop in the doorway with my hand on the frame and my coffee in the other hand, and the part of me that has always known what to do in a room does not know what to do with this room.
I have never walked into a bedroom where a woman I barely know and am obsessed with was sleeping naked in my bed.
I do not leave.
I should leave. I know I should leave. I know it the way I know the four-minute mark on a two-story, the way I know how many breaths are in a twenty-minute tank, the way I know the shape of Val's signature when she has been tired.
I know that the right move from this doorway is to back out, pull the door to the same hand's width it was at, go back to my kitchen, make another cup of coffee, wait for her to wake up, not look at her like this.
I do not leave.
I know what it is. I am in a room with a person who did not invite me in, and I am here because the door was open and I wanted to be, and those two things are not the same as a reason.
I cross the room.
I do it on the sides of my feet. I do it the way I cross a fire.
The armchair is in the corner where it was yesterday.
I sit in the armchair. I set the coffee on the side table next to the mug I left here two mornings ago that still has cold coffee in it from the first day.
The old coffee and the new coffee sit next to each other.
I look at her.
I look at her the way a woman looks at a thing she is not going to touch.
Her hair is on the pillow. Pale, loose, some of it across her face, most of it behind her shoulder.
Her shoulder has the line a shoulder has when a person is sleeping on their side and the arm underneath is tucked up close to the chest. Her arm is tucked.
Her hand is near her mouth. The bandage on her palm has come loose at one edge and shows the clean red line of the cut.
The sheet is twisted around her thigh. One knee is bent forward.
One breast is visible above the line of the sheet, the pale pink nipple soft in the cool air, rising with her breath.
Her hip is turned just enough that I can see the curve of it to where the sheet covers the top of her leg.
Her foot is out from under the sheet again. It's the foot I looked at last night.
I sit very still. She is perfect.
My coffee steams on the side table. I do not pick it up.
I sit.
I sit and I watch her sleep and I let the animal in me put its head up.
It comes up slow. It is not a lunge. It is the way a dog comes out of a long nap, stretch first, head second, eyes last. I have spent three days pressing the flat of my hand against the top of its skull. This morning I take my hand off. I sit in the armchair and I do not move and I let it look.
It looks at the curve of her shoulder. It looks at the way her hair falls across her throat. It looks at the hand at her mouth. It looks at the foot. It looks at her breast, her nipple, the curve of her hip. The cut on her palm is mine. That is a sentence I should not think and I think it. Mine.
She is mine.
I have not moved out of the chair.
I think, if I moved out of the chair, I would be at the bed in three steps.
I could kneel at the side of the bed. I could put a hand on the curve of her hip where the sheet falls back.
I could put my mouth on the arch of her foot.
I could put my mouth on the bandage. I could lift the sheet the rest of the way off her and look at her whole.
I could close my hand around her ankle, light, the way you close a hand around an ankle to keep it still.
I could trace the line from her ankle up the inside of her thigh with the backs of my fingers.
I could take the hand that is at her mouth, turn it, press my mouth to her wrist, feel the pulse.
I could push her hair back from her throat and put my face at her throat and breathe her in.
I could wake her up by doing any of these.
I think about waking her up by doing any of these.
I want to taste her.
I think about it with the flat of my hand on the arm of the chair and my jaw very tight and my breath slow.
I think about it the way I used to think about running up into a collapsed structure before I learned how long to wait before running up into a collapsed structure.
The want is in me whole. It is not a piece of a feeling.
It is not I kind of want this. It is a clean hard line of want, from the base of my spine to the roof of my mouth.
I have not wanted another body the way I want this one ever.
I want her under my hand. I want her under my mouth.
I want her under me in a way that I am not going to think about the whole words of yet.
I don't move.
I am counting the things I am not doing. I count them the way I count lies. I am not getting out of the chair. I am not putting my hand on the bed. I am not pulling the sheet down. I am not speaking. I am not breathing loud. I am not leaving the room. The last one is the one I am not doing hardest.
The light at the window comes up.
It comes up from gray to the pale silver a window gets fifteen minutes before sunrise.
The silver finds her hair. The silver finds the line of her shoulder.
It finds the edge of the sheet where it sits across her hip.
I watch the light move across her. She is asleep and the light is on her and nobody in the world knows she is in this room except me, and she is more than I came in here for, and I am a woman who set a fire under her bedroom four nights ago.
Her eyelids move.
Her breath changes. The breath of waking is a different breath. I have watched a lot of people come up out of unconsciousness. Fire rescues. Drills. I know the shape. She comes up slow. Her hand at her mouth opens. Her knee straightens an inch. Her hair shifts on the pillow.
I don't move.
I could still move. I have five seconds. I could get up, cross the room, be out the door before her eyes find me. Five seconds. Four. I count the seconds and I do not get up.
Her eyes open.
They come up to the ceiling first, which is what mine do, and then they come down the wall, which is the wall with the dresser on it, and they find the chair.
They find me.
For one second I watch her take it in: the chair, the person in it, me here in the half-dark. Her face tightens. Then she lets it go.
She does not move.
I watch her not move. I watch her eyes on mine.
She has been awake two seconds, three. Her hand is still at her mouth.
Her knee is still bent. Her shoulder is still bare.
Her breast is still visible above the sheet.
She is looking at me over her own hand. Her eyes are steady.
They are not the eyes of a woman who is about to pull a sheet up.
I don't look away.
I am not going to look away. I have already made the decision to be in the chair. I am not going to make the decision to look away while she looks at me looking at her. She has the floor.
Her mouth opens a quarter inch.
She lets a breath out. Her eyes do not leave mine.