Chapter 13
SASHA
Iwoke up on him.
That's the first thing. Not beside him. On him, with my ear over his heart and my leg thrown across his thigh and one of his hands still in my hair. The light in the room had gone the color of a peach.
I lay very still and took inventory.
My mouth was dry. My hip ached in a way that was going to be a whole conversation with me tomorrow. There was a man in my bed. There was a man in my bed and the man was huge, and warm, and his chest went up and down under my cheek like the deck of a boat.
His heart was slow. Absurdly slow. I lay there and counted it against my own. Mine was going about half again as fast. I couldn’t tell if that was the man or the moment or years of caffeine.
He was awake. I knew it before I looked. His hand hadn't stopped moving in my hair.
"You're up," he said.
Gravel and somewhere else, and rougher for the sleep in it. I felt it in the bones of my face where they were resting on him.
"Mm."
"You want water."
I lifted my head. "How did you—"
"You swallowed twice."
He was looking at the ceiling.
I got up.
That stupid, small, ordinary moment took more out of me than the rest of the day combined.
I got up off that bed, and my hand went out for something to put on.
It wasn't a decision. It was less than a decision. It was the same reflex as reaching for the light switch in a dark room in a house you have lived in your whole life. My hand went to the chair and found his shirt. I had it half off the back before I even had my feet under me.
"Sasha."
I stopped.
He hadn't moved. He was up on one elbow now, and the sheet was down around his hips. He didn’t care about that even slightly. He was looking at me with his head tipped a little to the side.
"Don't," he said.
"Don't what?"
"Put that on."
Something in my chest went tight and hot and unpleasant.
"I'm getting water," I said.
"I know."
"It's ten steps."
"I know."
"So, I'll just—" and I lifted the shirt again. My voice did something I didn’t authorize. I heard it.
He heard it, too.
He sat all the way up. He didn't come toward me. He put his back against the headboard and folded his forearms on his knees. He looked at me across that room and gave me every inch of air in it.
"Come here," he said. "Or don't. Either's fine."
I didn't come there.
I stood right where I was with the shirt in my hand and my arms wanting very badly to do something with themselves. I felt my face go hot, and I hated it.
"I'm not—" I stopped. Started over. "It isn't about you."
"I didn't think it was."
"I don't have a problem with my body."
"All right."
"I don't." My chin came up. "I like my body. I've made peace with my body. I have looked at this body in a mirror, and it and I have an understanding. It’s not shame, if that's what you're—"
"It isn't," he said.
And it wasn't. That's the maddening part. He wasn't arguing with me. He was sitting up in my bed with his hands loose and letting me stand there and take myself apart out loud. The more room he gave me, the faster I unraveled.
"Then what?” I asked.
He thought about it.
That's what he does. He takes a question and turns it over like a stone and looks at the underside of it before he hands it back. It makes me want to scream, and it makes me want to lie down on the floor.
"I've been watching you two days," he said. "You put something on every time it gets close."
"That's not—"
"The blouse." He lifted a finger off his knee. "Behind that desk, the pink one, ironed to death. That's not a shirt. That's a uniform."
"It is a uniform."
"And the voice."
I went quiet.
"You've got two," he said. "You've got the one you used on me at the counter, and it's beautiful, and there's not a seam showing in it anywhere.
And then you've got the one that came out of you in that hallway when you were talking about the boiler, and the one that came out in the lobby this morning when Otis got you going, and the one that came out this afternoon in this bed.
Which is your real one, and you don't use it in that building.
I don't think you use it much anywhere."
I stood there with his shirt hanging off my fingers.
"So, no," he said. "I don't want that shirt on you. Not because I want to look at you naked, though I do, and I'd be a liar to say different. Because that shirt is a uniform, too. And you were about to put it on to walk ten feet in your own house."
The room was very quiet.
Outside, the water was going about its business. A boat went by somewhere with its motor low.
"I don't know how to be looked at," I said.
It came out of me flat and plain. I didn’t decorate it. It landed in that room like a plate hitting a floor.
He didn't say anything.
"That's the whole thing," I said. "That's it.
I'm not ashamed and I'm not modest and I'm not shy. I have been useful my entire life. Every room I have ever walked into, I walked into with something in my hands. A key. A folio. A towel. A tray. There is always something between me and the person looking at me, and it’s always something I’m doing for them, and that's the—"
My voice cracked and I stopped.
"There's nothing in my hands," I said.
Clint Dane sat in the middle of my bed and looked at me for a long moment.
Then, he reached over and took the sheet and pushed it all the way off, and he stood up.
He was naked. He was completely, unhurriedly naked, and he stood there in the copper light in the middle of my bedroom with all of it—the shoulders and the abs and the thighs and every rough, scarred, sun-cut inch of a man who had been in some places—and he did not put a hand anywhere near himself.
He did not perform it. And he did not make a joke.
He just stood there. Empty-handed.
"Now there's nothing in mine," he said.
I stared at him.
"That's not the same."
"It's exactly the same."
"You are a man—"
"I've got a body that's been used hard," he said.
"There's things on it I'd rather you didn't ask about yet.
I've been shot twice and one of them was ugly. I've got a knee that tells me when it’s going to rain.” He held his hands out to the sides, palms open, and he said it without one ounce of self-pity.
"And I’m standing in a strange woman's bedroom in a strange city with nothing on me.
No pack. No boots. Not even the pistol. I want you to understand what that means, because I don't do it. "
I couldn't say anything.
"You want to be useful," he said. "So, be useful. Come here and let me look at you."
"That is not being useful."
"Sasha." And there it was—the country a smile comes from. "It's the most useful thing anybody's ever done for me."
I dropped the shirt.
It made a soft sound on the floor. I heard it land and I stood there with my hands empty and my arms hanging at my sides and my heart going like a bird in a box.
He didn't come and get me. He stood in the middle of that room and waited, with all that air between us.
So, I crossed it.
Again. It didn't get easier.
I walked across my bedroom naked in the copper light with nothing in my hands. I stood in front of that man and I let him look at me.
He looked.
He took his time about it. He looked at my face first, which is a thing men do not do.
Then, he looked at all the rest of me, slow, the way he'd read the boot leather, the way he'd read my lobby.
He looked at the stretch marks on my hips and at the scar on my knee from a bicycle and a curb when I was a kid. He looked at my hands.
He looked for so long that my skin came up. The flush went from my chest into my throat. I had to fight myself to keep standing in it.
"There," he said. Quiet. "That's it."
"That's what?"
"That's the woman who was in that hallway."
And he didn’t touch me.
That was the thing. He stood there close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him and he did not lay one hand on me. He let me stand in front of him with nothing on and nothing to do, and something in me that had been braced since I was nine years old in a linen closet let go, all at once.
My eyes went hot.
"Don't," I said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You’re doing something."
"I'm looking at you." He said it plain. "That's all I've been doing since I walked in that lobby."
We stood there.
Then, I put my hands flat on his chest, because I wanted to, because there was no reason not to, because it was mine to do.
"I want water," I said.
"Then, get some."
"Come with me."
We went into my kitchen naked.
It was the single most ridiculous thing I have ever done, and it was also one of the best.
I drank a glass of water standing at my own counter with nothing on. He leaned against the doorframe of my kitchen with his arms crossed and watched me do it. He offered no commentary. The light off the harbor came in and lay all over both of us, and I did not put anything on.
It was awful for a few minutes.
I kept catching myself. My hands kept going places—over my stomach, up to my collarbone, folding across me.
Every time they did, I would notice, and put them down, and stand there.
He never once said a word about it. He never looked away and he never made a show of not looking.
Slowly, by degrees, it stopped being a thing I was surviving and started being a thing that was happening.
By the end of it, I was leaning against my refrigerator eating cold rice out of a container with a fork, naked, arguing with a man about whether Tommy Bahama constituted a crime.
"It's a crime, Clint."
"It's a shirt."
"It has fish on it."
"It's comfortable."
"So is death."
He laughed.
He went looking for the bathroom after that. I told him down the hall, second on the left. I was rinsing the glass.
I heard the door open.
The wrong one.
I stood at my sink with the water running and my whole body went cold. I knew exactly which door he'd opened, because I know the sound of every door in that condo, the way I know every stair in that hotel.
The empty room. The one with the dresser and the good morning light and nothing else in it at all.
I turned off the water.
I stood there in my kitchen with my hands on the edge of the sink and my hair down my back and my heart going, and I waited for him to ask.
He was in there a moment. Not long.
Then, I heard the door close, soft. Not slammed. Not left open. Closed, the way you close a door in somebody's house when you’ve understood something about them and have decided you’re not going to say so.
He came down the hall. He came back into my kitchen and he leaned in the doorframe again. He looked at me, and his face had nothing on it but calm.
"Second on the left," he said. "You were right."
And that was all. He never asked.
I stood at my sink and looked at him and couldn’t breathe.
Oh, no, I thought.
Because I had been so careful. I had made a promise in my own lobby with my hand on a leather book, and I had told myself all afternoon that this was a day.
It was boots. It was a body. It was a woman taking the first thing she had ever taken for herself, and she was going to take it, and then, she was going to give it back and go to work.
And now, here was a man standing in my kitchen with nothing on, who had opened the door of the room I don’t open, and looked at it, and closed it.
You are not going to survive him, I thought.
"Come here," I said.
And he did.