Chapter 15
DANIIL
The shower had gone long. Hot water until the tile fogged and the mirror was a flat white wall and the bruise on my jaw had stopped aching under the heat.
I stood in front of the dresser with the towel slung low at my hips and the wet hair pushing droplets down the line of my back.
There was the bruise still fading along the jaw that I caught in the dresser mirror.
Yellow now at the edges. Almost gone. The shorter hair sat strange on me.
I kept catching the shape of it in glass and not knowing the man it belonged to.
I pulled the top drawer open. A row of folded black shirts. I lifted the first one off the stack.
The bedroom door opened.
It opened the way a door opens when the person on the other side has not thought to knock because she has been in and out of this room for a long time without thinking about it.
Chloe came through with the tablet up in her hand and her mouth already moving.
"So I was looking at this thing for Rhea, and I think we could "
The sentence stopped on the second clause.
Her eyes had found me. The tablet did not lower.
Her mouth stayed open on the word she had not finished saying.
The color went up her neck in one clean line the way ink takes paper, fast and even, and reached the underside of her jaw before she remembered her hand.
She pulled the door closed in front of her own face.
I stood there with the shirt half lifted and listened to the latch click.
A laugh came out of me. Low. One short note. The kind of laugh that surprised me out of myself because I had not heard it in this body yet and did not know I had it.
I put the shirt on and worked the buttons up from the bottom.
Soft black cotton, washed too many times.
I left the top two open. I stepped into the dark pants and pulled them up and ran one hand through the wet hair to push it off my forehead.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my forearms on my thighs and waited.
The knock came small and polite.
"Can I come in now?"
"Yes."
The door opened the way it should have the first time.
Careful. A hand's width. Then the rest of the way.
She came through it with the color still high in her cheeks and a small half smile pinned to one side of her mouth and the tablet held in front of her chest like a thing she could put between us if she needed to.
"I'm so sorry. I should have knocked."
"Sit beside me. You're fine."
She crossed the rug. She sat on the edge of the bed at arm's length from me, both knees together, the tablet across her thighs. The mattress dipped under her weight by a small amount. I turned my body toward her. The mattress dipped a little more under mine.
"What were you going to say?"
She breathed out. Found the sentence again.
"Rhea hasn't been in school in over a month. I was thinking we could start her on an online thing for now. There's a program the boys I used to nanny were in. It's not perfect, but it's something. She's smart. She'll eat it in a week and ask for more."
"Can you set that up for me?"
"Anything you want."
She smiled. Not the wide smile she used on Rhea. A small one that lived only at the corner of her mouth and did not reach the other corner. A careful smile. A smile that knew what it was being careful around.
I looked at her. I kept looking. The light from the window above the headboard was on the side of her face.
The pendant on her chain sat in the open neck of her shirt.
A small flat bar of gold with a character cut clean through the middle of it.
I knew the shape of that character without knowing how I knew.
Something at the back of my head moved.
Not a memory. Not yet. The shape of one. The shape of one coming forward through the dark the way a thing comes forward in a hallway when the light has not been switched on, and you cannot see it, but you can hear the way the air changes around it.
I was in a bedroom that was this bedroom.
I was in this bed.
The light was the morning light from the window above my head, gone gold along the edge of the sheet.
She was at the foot of the bed in one of the soft grey hoodies from the guest room down the hall, the sleeves down past her knuckles.
She was holding a bowl in both hands and the bowl was steaming.
Her hair was a tangle she had not bothered with.
She was looking at me the way a woman looks at a man she has decided to be careful with.
The image was one second long.
It was a single beat of a memory and then it was gone, and the back of my head went white at the edges of my vision, and the temple set up that dull steady pulse that had been my warning sign for a month.
I put a hand to my temple. I bent my head forward.
"Easy."
She was instant. She was close. She had moved before the word was out. Her arms came around my shoulders from the side and she held me there, the tablet pushed off her lap onto the floor with a soft slap I barely heard.
"Breathe. Slow. Don't chase it. Let it go."
Her mouth was at my ear. Her breath was warm at the side of my neck.
I breathed. The white at the edges of my vision pulled back by a fraction.
The pulse at my temple stayed dull and steady and then started to slow.
I let her hold me. I let her hold me because the holding was the thing the body had been waiting to be done to it and had not known it was waiting.
The pain came down a step. Then another step. Then it was just a pressure at the side of my head and the small warm weight of her arm across the back of my shoulders.
She did not let go. I turned my face an inch toward her.
"I saw you."
"Okay."
"Soup. You brought me soup. In a bowl. I was in this bed."
She went very still for a beat. A breath she did not take. Then she nodded once against the side of my head and I felt the small movement of her jaw against my temple.
I lifted my head. My eyes were on her face. Hers did not leave mine.
"You're not a random nanny, are you?"
"Don't push it. You'll know when the time comes."
"Why won't you just tell me?"
"Because I do not want to put my version of you in front of yours. Let your memory introduce me to you. I will wait. You have to be patient."
The words came out of me without me choosing the shape of them. The contractions fell off. I did not notice them falling off.
"I do not like being patient."
She made a small breath at the back of her throat that was almost a laugh.
"I know."
We sat that way for a while. Her arm across my shoulders.
My hand at my temple. The window light moving by degrees across the floor.
The image of her at the foot of this bed in the swallowing t-shirt holding the bowl in both hands hung at the back of my head like a photograph someone had handed me of a man I had been before.
I lowered the hand from my temple. The pulse was gone.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"Can you kiss me?"
She laughed.
Not a big laugh. A startled, low one. The kind of laugh a woman makes when she has been waiting for a sentence and a different version of it comes back at her, close enough to the one she expected to recognize, far enough to take her by surprise.
"What is funny?"
"I'm remembering the first time you asked me that."
"I asked you before?"
"You did."
"What did you say?"
"I said no."
A beat. The corner of her mouth was doing the small careful thing again.
"And now?"
She looked at me for a long moment. The color came up her cheekbones again the way it had at the door, slower this time, less startled, more chosen. She did not hide it. She let me see it move.
"Now I want to."
I lifted my hand to the side of her face.
I moved slow because I did not know what I used to do with my hands on her face and I did not want to do it badly.
My palm went to her jaw. My thumb settled at the corner of her mouth.
I gave her every inch of the approach. Slow enough for her to lift the hand and stop me.
Slow enough for her to turn the head and refuse.
She did not refuse.
She came up to meet me by the smallest amount. The way a person tilts the chin up to a sun they have not been allowed to look at in a long time.
The first contact was closed-mouth. Careful.
The dry warmth of her bottom lip against mine.
I stayed there for half a breath. Then another.
I let the small warm fact of her mouth on mine be the only thing in the room.
I felt her exhale through her nose against the side of my face. I felt her not pull away.
Then her lips parted.
I answered. I opened my mouth against hers.
The first slow slide of my tongue inside her mouth was a thing I had no shape for.
Her taste was clean and a little sweet. Her tongue met mine in the middle of the kiss and the small sound that climbed the back of my throat was not anything I asked for.
She made the same sound back into my mouth, low and a little wet at the edges, and the two sounds met somewhere between her teeth and mine and stayed there.
Her free hand went to my ribs through the soft black shirt.
Her fingers spread flat. Splayed. The way a hand presses when the body it belongs to has reached for a thing to hold on to and found it.
The heat of her palm came through the cloth like she had set a coal against me.
I felt every finger. The bone underneath lifted on the inhale to meet her.
The kiss went from soft to long. From long to deeper.
I caught her bottom lip between mine, slow, and the small noise she made against my mouth that time was not small.
Her teeth caught the edge of my lip for half a second after, light, the way a person catches a thing she has been waiting to hold.
I felt her mouth smile against mine. My mouth smiled back without permission.