Chapter 15
SASHA
The next morning, I called in again.
I did it before I was all the way awake, which was the only way it was ever going to happen. I reached over the sleeping bulk of the man in my bed and got my phone off the nightstand and typed it with one thumb, face still half in the pillow.
Going to take today, too. Missy and Devon can hold. Call if it's real.
Then, I put the phone face-down on my chest and lay there and waited to be struck by lightning.
Nothing happened.
The man beside me breathed. The light was coming up gray-gold at the edges of the blinds, early, the harbor just starting to say something out past the glass. My heart was going, but it was going the way it goes at the top of a staircase you've decided to walk down, anyway.
The phone buzzed.
take it!! take the week if you want honestly. everything's fine here. YOU good??
I looked at that for a while.
Two question marks. That was Izzy leaning in.
She'd let the first day go by without a word, the way you let a strange dog cross the road—you don't move, you don't spook it.
But two days was a pattern, and Izzy Harper had run that front desk beside me once upon a time, and she could read this.
A woman who has not taken a day in fifteen years does not take two in a row over nothing.
She knew that. She was already working it.
I'm good, I wrote. Better than good. Talk soon.
I put the phone in the drawer of the nightstand and slid it shut.
"That your work?" Clint said, into the pillow.
"That was my work."
"You going in?"
"No."
He didn't say anything to that. But his arm came across and gathered me back into him, all of me. He pulled me in against the long, warm wall of him, and I went. I went easy. That was the frightening part, how easy I went.
We lay there a while in the gray light.
"You're supposed to argue with me," I said.
"About what?"
"About taking another day. Everybody argues with me. Otis argues with me. My aunt argues with me. I argue with me."
"I'm the last man on earth going to tell you not to take a day." His hand moved slow up and down my spine. "I've taken years of them in a row."
I laughed into his chest.
And then, because the morning was soft and he was warm and the phone was in a drawer, I did a thing I do not do.
I stayed. I lay there in a bed with a man and a whole free day in front of me and I didn’t get up to be useful to anybody.
I let the light come up. I listened to his heart do its slow, absurd, unbothered thing under my ear.
Then, he got up to make coffee. I reached for the sheet. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me.
"Sasha."
"I know," I said. "I know."
I let the sheet go.
I got up out of that bed in the gray morning light with nothing on and I walked out into my own kitchen naked.
It was easier than yesterday. Not easy. Easier.
My hands still went looking for something to hold and still came up empty and still had to learn, over and over, to just hang there at my sides and be hands.
But it was easier, and that told me something, which was that a person can get used to being seen the way a person gets used to anything.
Fast. Faster than you'd think. And then, they need it.
He made coffee wrong.
"That’s not how you make coffee."
"It's coffee."
"You put the water in like you're mad at it.
" I came around him and took the pot out of his hand, naked.
He let me, and stood back against the counter with his arms crossed and watched me fix his mess with an expression that was doing its best not to be a smile.
"There's a way. My grandmother had a way.
You don't just—Clint, are you laughing at me? "
"No, ma'am."
"You're laughing at me."
"I'm watching a beautiful, naked woman get het up about a coffee pot," he said.
I threw a dish towel at him. He caught it without looking.
That was the thing I kept running into, all that gray-gold morning.
The ease. I have been comfortable with people my whole life—I am professionally comfortable with people, I put strangers at ease for a living.
But comfortable and at ease are two different things.
I had been in the first one so long, I'd forgotten the second one existed.
I stood in my kitchen, naked, and made coffee and got teased and teased back. There was no counter between me and anybody, and nothing in my hands, and I was fine. I was better than fine.
That should have been the warning. It wasn't a warning. It was just the morning. It was good. I let it be good.
We took the coffee out onto the balcony.
He put a towel down on one of the chairs first, for me, without a word about it.
I understood that this was the concession—that a man who wanted me bare in every room was also a man who had noticed the metal chair would be cold, and had done something about it before I had to ask.
I sat on the towel. He sat in the other chair with his coffee, not caring, a big, naked man on a balcony over the harbor in the morning like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The city was waking up down there. A jogger on the point. A shrimp boat coming in. The water doing its coin-toss thing with the early light.
"Tell me about the room," he said.
I went still.
He said it easy, into his coffee, not looking at me. Not pushing. Just laying it down between us.
"You said you weren't going to ask."
"I said I wasn't going to ask last night." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the arm of the chair. "It's morning."
I looked out at the water for a while.
"It's a nursery," I said. "It isn't a nursery.
There's nothing in it. But that's what it's for.
That's what it's been for since I bought the place.
I bought a two-bedroom because one bedroom felt like giving up.
Then, I closed the door on the second one.
I've been keeping the good morning light in there for a person who doesn't exist, for a lot of years. "
He didn't say anything. He let it sit.
"I'd have been a good mother," I said. "That's not a small thing to know about yourself and never get to use.
I know how to make a scared person feel safe.
I do it many times a day for strangers." My voice did something and I let it.
"I just never had the time. That's the whole stupid, ordinary tragedy of it.
I was always at the desk. And you can't—there's no version where you tell a child hold on, baby, I've got a group checking in. "
The harbor went on shining.
"Anyway," I said. "That's the room."
Clint was quiet a moment. Then he said, "You've got time now."
"I've got two days off, Clint."
"That's not what I mean and you know it.
" He looked at me, then. "You called in twice.
World didn't end. Building's still standing.
That thing you thought was going to fall down if you stepped out from under it—it's holding itself up fine.
" He drank his coffee. "You've got more time than you think.
You've been telling yourself a story about how much room there is in your life, and the story's old.
I don't think you've checked it lately."
I sat on my towel and looked at him.
Because that was the thing about this man.
He didn't flatter. He'd told me I had two voices and one of them was fake.
He'd told me my blouse was a uniform. And now, he was sitting naked on my balcony telling me I'd been lying to myself about my own calendar.
The maddening part was that he was right.
"You know what you are?" I said.
"Tell me."
"You're a man with nothing to lose telling a woman with everything to lose that she should hold it looser.
" I said it without heat. "That's easy advice from where you're sitting.
You carry a bag. Everything I have, I built.
This condo. This view. That desk. It took me my whole life and my mother's whole life before it, and you're telling me to hold it looser like it's a thing a person can just decide. "
He took that. He didn't flinch from it. He turned it over the way he turns everything over.
"You're right," he said. "It's easy for me.
I don't have anything, so I can't lose anything.
That's not wisdom, it's just an empty pack.
" He looked out at the water. "But I'll tell you what I've watched.
The people holding on hardest are the ones already losing the thing.
Every time. The grip is what does it. I've seen a man hold onto a rope so hard he couldn't reach the hand that was trying to pull him up. "
We sat with that.
"Who was that?" I asked. "The man with the rope."
"Nobody," he said, which meant somebody, and I let it be, the way he let my things be.
The phone rang in the drawer inside.
I knew it was ringing before I heard it, the way you know. And I knew who it was, too, because there is exactly one person who would call instead of text after I'd said talk soon.
I got up. Clint watched me go. I felt him watching, and I didn’t reach for anything to put on. A day ago, I couldn’t have walked to answer a phone without a robe.
I got the phone out of the drawer.
Izzy.
I stood in my bedroom, with the man I'd broken my promise for sitting bare on my balcony behind me, and I looked at her name lighting up my phone. I didn’t answer it.
I let it ring out.
That was new, too. I have never once in all the years let Izzy Harper ring out. Not in the middle of a shift, not in the middle of the night, not in the middle of anything.
The phone went quiet in my hand. Then it buzzed.
call me when you can. no rush. just want to hear your voice. A pause, the dots coming and going. Then: you sound different, Sash. good different. but different. and I know you. so.
So.
That one word sat on the screen and looked up at me.
She knew. She didn't know what, but she knew that.
Izzy had spent enough years reading the same strangers I read across the same marble, and she had known me since before either of us owned a thing.
She could feel the change in me from across a bridge.
Two days off. A voice that sounded good-different. A friend who let her ring out.
She was going to come find me. Not today, maybe.
But soon. She was going to walk into that lobby and take one look at my face and know, the way I'd know if it were her. Then, there was going to be a conversation I didn’t know how to have—because the thing I'd done, the man I'd done it with, the promise I'd broken, all of it ran straight back through her.
Into her family. Into whatever it was her family was in the middle of, the thing that put nameless men in comped suites and blood in rooms I had to make disappear.
I don't even know what he's doing here, I thought.
That stopped me cold, standing there.
I didn't. I had spent two days with that man, taken him through my city and into my bed and out onto my balcony with nothing on, and I didn’t know one single thing about why he was in Charleston.
A brother nobody had ever mentioned. Flown in.
Comped. Held. Told to get a haircut and new boots by a brother who came by at seven in the morning with a piece of plastic and jokes.
Something was happening. Something was happening around that man, and around this whole family.
I was the woman at the desk who had always known everything, who read every guest, who never missed a thing—and I had missed it, because for two days I had not been looking at him like a Dane. I'd been looking at him like a man.
I put the phone back in the drawer.
I stood there a second with my hand on the dresser.
Then, I went back out to the balcony, where he was sitting in the early light over the water with his coffee going cold. He looked up at me. Whatever was on my face made him set the cup down.
"Come here," he said.
And I did. Of course, I did. I crossed the three feet that weren't there anymore and folded down into his lap, bare skin on bare skin in the cool morning air. He wrapped both arms around me and held on. I put my face in his neck.
"Clint," I said.
"I'm right here."
"Why are you in Charleston?"
He went still under me. And for a long moment, he didn't answer.