Chapter 4 #2
"Bismarck," she said. "He drives a shuttle at the airport. That's how I know North Dakota. That's the only reason I've ever been in this state — I come up twice a year and I ride his shuttle and I tip him two hundred dollars in cash and he thinks I'm a woman who's had a good year."
The rain went on.
"That's the one," she said.
"That's the one."
"And here's the problem." She looked up. "You can't verify a word of that. Not one. I could have made every piece of it up in the last four seconds, and you'd never know, because your thing is broken on me."
"And you can't check me either."
"No."
"So we're just two people," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "Turns out that's terrifying."
And that — I want to be honest about this, because I've never been honest about anything else — that was the moment. Not what came after. That.
Two liars in a borrowed house deciding, with no evidence, no leverage, no gift, no read, nothing but the choice, to believe each other anyway.
"I believe you," I said.
"You can't know that."
"That's what the word means," I said. "I looked it up once. I was very disappointed."
She laughed — one breath of it — and then she was crossing the room.
She stopped a foot away with the blanket falling off one shoulder and the fire putting an edge of gold down the side of her.
"Say a true thing," she said.
"I don't want to be anywhere else."
"Another."
"I've wanted to put my hands on you since a parking lot in Dickinson and I've been managing it very badly."
"That one I'd already worked out."
"Then here's one you haven't." I stood up. "I don't want you to believe me because I'm good at this. I want you to believe me because it's true. And I've never wanted that off anybody in my life, and I'm about ninety percent sure it's going to cost me everything, and I'd like to do it anyway."
She took my face in both hands.
"Then stop talking," she said. "You're extremely bad at it."
The first kiss was slow because we were both, I think, waiting for the other one to run a play.
Neither of us did.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. It was firelight and rain and somebody else's house, and none of it was staged, and neither of us was performing, and I hadn't touched another person without a script since I was nineteen years old.
She got my shirt open and stopped with her palm flat over my sternum.
"Your heart's going," she said.
"Yeah, well."
"I like it."
"That's rude."
"I like it," she said again, into my mouth, "because you can't fake it," and I laughed and she laughed and then neither of us was laughing.
We ended up on the rug in front of the fire because the couch was white and even I have limits.
It was unhurried. That surprised me — I'd have bet on frantic. But there was a storm outside and no power and nowhere on earth to be, and she kept stopping to look at me, actually look, with her hair everywhere and her hands braced on my chest, and every time she did it undid me a little more.
"You're staring," I said.
"I'm learning your face."
"It's a good face."
"It's an exhausting face." She traced the corner of my mouth with her thumb. "It's been getting you out of things since you were six."
"Not tonight."
"No," she said. "Not tonight."
At some point the fire went low enough that we were mostly dark, and she said my name — my real one, the one my mother used, the one I'd let her have out of pure carelessness three days earlier — and I said hers back, and there was nothing clever left in either of us.
That's the part I'd never had.
Nothing clever left. Just the two of us, being unbearably literal at each other, in a house that belonged to a man in Portugal.
After, she pulled the blanket over both of us and put her cold feet directly on my leg like a war crime.
"Rules," she said sleepily.
"We're doing rules?"
"We're doing rules. One. We don't work each other. Not even small. Not even funny."
"Agreed."
"Two. If either of us gets scared, we say the actual thing out loud, because we've got no other way to check."
"Agreed."
"Three." She yawned. "You're never allowed to say 'per diem' to me again."
"That's not a rule, that's a—"
"Three," she said, and was asleep in about ninety seconds, which I found personally insulting.
I woke up at some point in the grey and she was gone from under the blanket.
She was standing at the deck doors in my shirt with her arms crossed, absolutely still, in the way people stand when they've been still a long time.
"Hey," I said.
She didn't turn around.
"It stopped raining," she said.
Her voice was fine. Completely fine. Level and dry and hers.
I didn't have a gift to tell me otherwise, and I didn't need one, because I'd spent fifteen years watching people's shoulders and hers were up around her ears.
"Nadia."
"Go back to sleep," she said. "It's early."
"Come back over here."
"In a minute."
"Nadia."
"In a minute, Silas."
And I did the thing I'd promised her on rule two and did it badly, which is to say I said the actual thing out loud.
"I'm scared," I said, to her back, at six in the morning, in a house belonging to a man in Portugal.
Her shoulders came down about an inch.
"Yeah," she said. "Me too."
That was true. Every word of it was true, from both of us, and it was the last completely true conversation we had for four days.
She'd been awake for eleven minutes.
She'd been standing at that glass since the moment she'd looked down at the dock and seen a man standing at the end of it in a charcoal three-piece suit with the lake fog around his knees, dry as a bone in the last of the rain, looking straight up at the house.
And he'd taken off his hat.
Not to me. He hadn't looked at the house at all, really.
He'd tipped it to her.
I didn't know any of that for another two days.