Chapter Twenty-Three
SHE DID IT again the next night, and the night after that, and neither of us ever said one word about it.
That was the arrangement, and it was the strangest damn arrangement I’ve ever been party to.
She’d take the bed. I’d take the floor. We’d say goodnight like two reasonable people.
And then somewhere in the small hours I’d hear the covers move, she’d come down, lie against my back on that hard floor with her hand over my heart, I’d hold still, breathe slow and let her go on believing I slept through it.
Every night. Like clockwork. And in the morning she’d be back up in that bed with the blanket pulled to her chin like she’d never left it.
Then she’d come out of the bathroom with her hair up and ask if there was coffee, and I’d tell her where it was, and neither one of us would look too hard at the other.
I couldn’t have told you which one of us the lie was for.
It went on that way until she woke up one morning with a crick in her neck so bad she couldn’t turn her head and spent the next hour pretending otherwise.
I watched her turn from the waist every time she reached for her coffee, watched her grit her teeth getting her boots on, and by the time I was in the garden that afternoon I’d had enough of both of us being stupid.
She was sleeping on a plank floor because she was too proud to ask for anything else, and I was letting her because I was too much of a coward to offer.
So that night I made the bed with two pillows, and I lay down on top of the covers on the far side of it with all my clothes on, and I didn’t say a word about why.
She came out of the bathroom and stopped dead.
I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t explain. Just left the other half of that bed sitting there empty, and let her decide what to do with it.
It took her a long time.
Then the lamp went out, and the mattress dipped, and she lay down on her side of it, a good foot of air between us.
I could hear her breathing in the dark, could feel the slight pull of the mattress under her weight, and my heart was beating hard enough I figured she could probably hear that too.
But underneath all of it was something quieter, something that mattered more, I’d left the space open, and she’d chosen to fill it.
That’s how we did everything, that whole month. In the dark, sideways, and never out loud.
Ten minutes later, asleep, she rolled into me.
Her forehead found my shoulder and one hand curled into my shirt like it knew exactly where it was going, and every muscle in my body locked down at once.
She was warm and loose against my side, breathing soft against my neck, while I stared at the ceiling and tried every useless trick I knew to keep my mind somewhere else.
Plants from my mother’s notebooks. Parts on the bike. Long division, for Christ’s sake.
Nothing worked.
There was a woman I loved asleep against me, and if I turned my head inches my mouth would be in her hair.
I didn’t turn my head.
Near morning she made a little sound and tucked herself closer, and I shut my eyes.
I was in so much fucking trouble.
* * *
It got worse.
Second night she didn’t wait to fall asleep to come over. She lay down facing me with her eyes open, six inches away in the dark, looked at me for a long while, then reached out and put her hand flat on my chest without waiting on me to go to sleep.
“Is this alright?”
Was it alright.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out of a gravel pit. “It’s alright.”
She left her hand there and closed her eyes, apparently satisfied, while my heart tried to beat its way straight through her palm.
She had to feel it. There wasn’t any damn way she didn’t, but she never said a word, and after a while her breathing went deep and easy and I lay there looking at the ceiling with the strangest combination of misery and happiness I’d ever known.
Third night she took my hand.
One night she put her leg over mine, in her sleep, I lay awake until morning with her thigh across my hip and my hands fisted in the sheets on either side of me like a man holding onto a ledge.
Fifth night I got up at three, went and stood in the garden in my bare feet and put my head down and breathed like I’d run a mile.
* * *
So here’s the truth of my life.
I want her. I want her so bad I can’t see straight. I’m a grown man, I’ve had women and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want Amy, and lying next to her every night is the closest thing to hell I’ve personally experienced, and I wouldn’t give it up for a place in Heaven.
And she’s testing it.
She doesn’t know she’s doing it, or she does and won’t say, and I couldn’t tell you which is worse.
Little things. She started wearing my shirts to bed, took one off the chair one night without asking, which about killed me, now it’s a thing, she’s a small girl in a big man’s shirt and I have to leave the room sometimes.
She turns her face into my neck. She fell asleep the other night with her mouth against my throat, I lay there and prayed, actually prayed, for the first time since I was a boy.
And she’s started catching me looking.
That’s the newest thing. She’ll be talking and she’ll stop, and I’ll realize I’ve been staring at her mouth, she’ll go still and pink, neither of us will say anything, then she’ll look at my mouth, then the cabin will shrink, and one of us will find something to do with our hands.
Last night she came out of a bad one — thrashing, that awful strangled sound — and I got her back the way I always do, arms around her, breathing slow, saying her name.
And when she came all the way up she didn’t pull away.
She stayed right there with her hands on my chest, her face inches away, her breath going fast, and we looked at each other in the dark for what felt like a year.
And she said, “Rune.”
Just that.
I have never wanted to do anything as bad as I wanted to close that gap.
“Go back to sleep, Amy,” I said.
She looked at me a second longer. Something went across her face I couldn’t read and didn’t dare try. Then she rolled over with her back to me, and pulled my arm across her, and held onto it, and didn’t say another word.
I lay there against her back all night with my arm caught in both her hands, my heart pounding, my body demanding me to take what it needed, and I understood that I was standing on ground that was going to give.
Not tonight. Maybe not this week.
But it was going to give, and when it did, it had to be under her foot and not mine.
So I held still.
Fuck me, I held still.