Chapter 7 #2
Her hand slides. Slow. Not fast. Her hand at her mouth moves down to the pillow.
The movement uncovers her mouth, the bow of it, the small stitch of a scar at the corner of the lower lip that I had not seen yet.
Her hand lies on the pillow a quarter inch from her chin.
The hand is not reaching for the sheet. The hand is not reaching for anything. The hand is lying there.
The sheet is where it is.
The sheet stays where it is.
She looks at me.
She holds the look long past where another woman would look away, and if I were somewhere else, on a radio, in a stairwell, on an engine, I would call it a held look.
It is a held look. It is held by her. It is held by the part of her that is not panicking, which is every part of her.
She is awake, she has found a woman she met three days ago sitting in a chair watching her sleep naked, and she is holding the look.
A small heat comes up under her collarbone. I watch it come.
Her lips part a quarter inch more.
She says, "Good morning."
Her voice is low and a little rough with sleep. It is the voice of a woman who has just been looked at the way I was looking at her, and who knows the look, and is not going to pretend about it.
She is sexier than anyone I have ever seen.
"Good morning."
"How long have you been sitting there?”
“A while,” I say.
"Yeah."
A pause. Her eyes do not leave mine. Her hand on the pillow does not move. The sheet on her hip does not move.
"You should have said something," she says. Not quite a sentence. Half a question.
"I know."
"Why didn't you?”
"Because you were asleep."
"I'm not asleep now."
I have nothing to say to that.
Another pause. The light at the window goes pink at one corner. My eyes graze hungrily over her body again.
"Are you going to say something?” she says.
"I don't have anything to say."
"That's a lie."
"Yes."
"Why are you lying?”
"Because the thing I want to say isn't the thing you want to hear at six in the morning on your third day in a stranger's bed."
She holds the look. She does not smile. She does not frown.
She looks at me with the steady look of a woman who has been composed her whole life and is, for the first time in my presence, not quite fully composed, and is letting the not-quite show on purpose.
She moves slightly and her other breast is exposed and I know she knows it and she doesn’t move to cover them.
"Maybe I want to hear it?” she says.
I sit in the chair.
I sit in the chair because if I get out of the chair we are going to be on each other.
I know it the way I know the four-minute mark.
I know the shape of what happens if I cross the room in the next ten seconds.
I know she is not going to stop me. I am going to have her hand in my hand and her face against my throat and her mouth under mine before either of us can get any of these thoughts out of whatever part of our heads our thoughts are still in.
I do not get out of the chair.
"Not today," I say.
"Not today."
"No."
"Why?”
"Because you buried a husband this week."
"I didn't love him."
"I know."
"So."
"So you get a few days to be in a bed alone without somebody in it with you. That's the version where I come out of this a person I can look at in a mirror."
She closes her eyes.
She closes them slow. Not out of shame. Out of the same want I have in me. I watch her close them and I watch her open them again, and when she opens them she has not pulled the sheet up and she has not moved her hand.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
My phone rings on the side table.
I feel it in the wood under my hand before I hear it. I have had it on silent. The vibration is a drill and a drill only. I do not take calls on vibration from anyone but Val and Dani. I look at the screen without picking it up and it is Val.
The want stays. I push it under the call.
"I have to take this."
"Okay."
I stand up. I pick up the phone. I walk out of the bedroom, pulling the door to the same hand's width I found it at, and I cross the living room and I step out onto the porch and I shut the front door behind me, and only then do I answer.
"Chief."
"Hale. There's a fire in the industrial strip on Fourth. It's going to be ours at oh-nine-hundred. I want you on it by eight."
"What's the scope."
"Small. Storage unit. A man's car. I need you walking the scene before the other crew gets it. You'll know what I'm looking for."
"Yes, Chief."
"You at the cabin?”
"Yes, Chief."
"You'll be here by eight."
"I'll be there."
"Hale."
"Chief."
"Your head in it this time."
"Yes, Chief."
"Good."
She hangs up.
I stand on the porch in socks in the cold morning and I look at the drive and I breathe. I breathe out through my teeth. I let my shoulder drop. The scar on my forearm gives me a low hum. I roll it out with my other hand.
I go back in.
I stand in the kitchen. I put the phone on the counter. I lift the keys off the peg. I cross to the drawer with the spoons in it and I open the drawer and I put the keys to the old truck in, beside the spoons, as promised. I close the drawer.
I walk to the bedroom door.
She is sitting up in the bed now with the quilt pulled around her shoulders. Her hair is pushed back. Her eyes are on the door when I open it. She has not gotten out of the bed. I can still see her breasts and they are beautiful and I like it.
"I have to go," I say.
"A fire."
"Yes."
"Is it the kind of fire you stop, or the kind you start?”
The question walks across the room and stops a foot from me. I look at her. She looks at me. She says it plain. She says it the way she says all right. She says it with her voice flat and quiet.
I have a second to choose how to answer.
I choose the truer of two lies.
"The kind I stop."
She nods.
"Okay."
"Truck keys are in the drawer."
"Thank you."
"Stew in the fridge. Eggs. Bread. If I'm back by ten, I'll make dinner. If I'm not back by ten, don't wait."
"All right."
I stand in the doorway. I do not cross to the bed. I do not say any of the words I want to say. I do the last thing I have left to do, which is leave.
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"I don't know when I'll be back."
"I know."
"I'll be back."
"I know."
I close the door.
I pick up my boots at the mat. I put them on.
I put on the jacket on the peg. I take my phone off the counter.
I lift the truck keys out of the drawer where I just put them, because they were not for me to leave behind today, they were for her.
I stand in the kitchen with my truck keys in one hand and hers on the hook and the spare on the hook next to them, and I leave the spare.
The spare fits the truck. It fits the cabin. It fits the shed.
I walk out of the cabin in the cold pink morning with a woman in my bed behind me and a fire down in the city in front of me, and I get in my truck and I start the engine, and I sit with my hand on the wheel for the length of three breaths, and then I drive.
Halfway to the county road I realize I did not eat this morning and I am not hungry. I don't know when I last wasn't hungry in the morning. I drive on.