Chapter 15 #2
I pulled her in closer with the hand at her jaw without thinking about it.
She came. Her knees turned in against my thigh.
Her hand slid up my chest under the open collar of the shirt for half a breath, the pads of her fingers tracing the side of my neck and the warmth of her palm spreading over my collarbone, then she set her hand back at my ribs as if she had caught herself.
I did not want her to catch herself. The pendant on her chain was pressed between her chest and the cotton of my shirt, and I felt the small cold weight of it against my own chest through two layers, a small fixed point in the middle of all the moving warmth.
I went somewhere when I kissed her that was not a memory.
It was the same place a memory used to live.
The shape was right. The address was right.
The door was the same door, only the room behind it was empty, and the kiss was the lamp I had carried in to find out the room was empty, and the empty room was warm. Warm because she had stayed in it.
I pulled back half an inch. My forehead went down to hers.
My breath was not steady. I let her hear that it was not.
If I kept kissing her, I was not going to be able to keep my hands where they were.
She knew it too. She did not move toward me.
She did not move away. She breathed against my mouth and let me hold the line.
Her hand on my ribs did not move. Her thumb at the side of my jaw, where her hand had ended up without my noticing, stroked once across the small fading bruise there and did not press.
"How did that feel?"
Her voice was soft against my mouth.
"Like a thing I gave up a long time ago and forgot I needed."
She breathed out a laugh against my lips. She brought her hand up to the side of my face and gave me one more small closed kiss at the corner of my mouth, the way a person puts a marker down on a page so she will not lose her place.
"Whatever you say, sir. I should get back to Rhea."
She stood. She made the small physical adjustment a woman makes when she has just been kissed and has somewhere else to be.
The shirt at her shoulder pulled straight.
The hand at the back of her hair. The pendant settled back inside the open neckline.
She bent and picked the tablet up off the floor where it had ended up.
She crossed to the door. At the door she turned and she looked at me once. The look had more in it than her mouth had been allowed to put on the page yet. The look stayed in the room after she had gone through the door and closed it behind her.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute after she went.
The image of the bowl in her hands at the foot of this bed was still in my head.
Dim. Fading at the edges already. The shape of her shoulders inside the swallowing t-shirt.
The way the steam from the bowl had lifted up past her chin.
The look on her face that had been the look of a woman deciding something.
It was going. I let it go. I did not chase it the way she had told me not to chase it.
I put a hand flat on the place at my ribs where her hand had been. The cotton was warm there still. I breathed in. I breathed out. I waited for the last of the dull pulse at my temple to go, and it went.
I stood. I buttoned the rest of the shirt. I went out.
I found them in the small upstairs sitting room off the hall.
The tablet was on the low table between them.
The two of them were on the rug in front of the couch with their heads close together over the screen.
Rhea had Beom-Beom in her lap. The bear's one good ear was up and the other ear was the small soft tragedy it had been since I had known him.
Rhea was pointing at the screen with both her index fingers at the same time.
A green dress with small white flowers on it.
Chloe was laughing at something Rhea had just said.
She looked up when I came in. The color was not in her cheeks anymore. The corner of her mouth had the small careful smile on it that I now knew was the smile she kept for me.
"Good. We need your card. Rhea's wardrobe is a tragedy."
I pulled the wallet out of the back pocket. I pulled a card. I crossed the rug and went down on one knee beside them and put the card in her open palm.
"PIN is the last four of my passport. The girls have it written down somewhere."
She looked at the card in her palm. She looked up at me.
"Aren't you afraid I'll steal this from you?"
"You can have it. Keep it."
"You're insane."
"Insane is a stronger word than I deserve. Take the card."
She closed her hand around the plastic and looked at the closed hand for a beat longer than she had to and then she put the card down on the table next to the tablet.
Rhea had been watching us with both eyes wide and Beom-Beom's good ear gripped tight in her small fist.
"He is being a boyfriend, Chloe."
Chloe choked on the small breath she had just taken in.
"Stop it, Rhea. Don't make it awkward."
Rhea swung her head around to me with the seriousness of a kid making her closing argument to a courtroom she had built in her own head.
"If you don't want her, brother, that's fine. The tall guard who walks the gate at night thinks she's pretty. I heard him tell the other guard. I will introduce them."
The voice came down out of me a half octave into a register I had not put it in for a while. It came down without me reaching for it. It came down the way a thing comes down out of a high shelf when the hand has not asked the shoulder for permission first.
"Tell me which guard?"
"I'm not telling you."
"Rhea. Which guard?"
Chloe's hand went up to her mouth. She was laughing. Not the careful laugh. The one she had not been allowed to use in front of me yet.
"Don't remember anything, but don't forget to be possessive."
"I am not possessive."
"Sure."
The corner of my mouth lifted on one side. I could not help it. The lift came up without my permission, the way the voice had gone down without it.
I went around behind the couch and sat on the arm.
They went back to the screen. Rhea wanted the green dress with the white flowers.
Chloe wanted the yellow one with the small collar.
They argued about it without looking at each other, both of them tapping at the screen with the kind of focus a kid puts on a thing she has decided is the most important thing in the world for the next four minutes.
The light from the tablet was up on Chloe's face.
It put a soft cool color along the side of her cheek and into the hollow under her eye.
Rhea reached back without looking and patted my knee twice with her small flat hand, the way a kid pats the wall on her way past a room she knows her brother is in.
I looked at the back of Chloe's head, and at the side of Rhea's small braid, and at the green dress on the screen.
I have this.