Chapter Sixteen
The camisole comes out of the dryer warm and I pull it on standing in the kitchen.
I don't think about it while I'm doing it.
I fold the towels, I set the black one aside because it's his, I put the camisole on because it's mine and it's clean and it's what goes next to my skin now.
It's the same motion as reaching for a t-shirt.
There used to be a second in there, a little hitch where I decided, where I felt the straps go over my shoulders and clocked what they were.
The hitch is gone. I couldn't tell you when it left.
One of these weeks I just stopped catching myself, and putting it on became the kind of thing your hands do while your head is somewhere else.
The panties are already on from the morning.
The plug is seated where it lives. The cage sits small and snug like it has since the night he swapped it, the little bow flat under the fabric, the name I can't see pressed warm against me.
None of it announces itself anymore. That's the part I'd have never believed a year ago, not the wearing of it, the not-noticing.
The body gets bored of alarm. Give it enough ordinary Tuesdays and it files anything under normal.
Graham's not home yet. He had a site walk that ran long, a text around five, back by seven, eat when I get there.
So the apartment is mine for a little while, the lamps low, how he likes them even when he's out because I bring them down now without deciding to, and I move around in the quiet doing the small nothing things.
Water the plant by the window. Wipe the counter he already wiped this morning.
It's a good apartment to be alone in. It was built to be easy and it's easy.
I end up at the hall closet without a plan.
I tell myself I'm looking for the spare batteries, and there are batteries in there, in the drawer with the tape and the picture hooks. But I open the top part too, the shelf above the coats, and I already know what I'm reaching past the extra blankets for before my hand finds it.
The robe.
It's folded at the back, how it's been folded every time.
Soft. A washed-out floral, little blue flowers gone pale from a hundred cycles.
Not mine. Not his, obviously not his. Too small for him and the wrong everything for me, no camisole, no seam-flat panty, a whole different idea of what a person wears in a house like this.
I take it down and hold it. It doesn't smell like anything anymore.
I stand there in the hall in my own thin straps holding somebody else's robe, and the name comes back up like it has a few times since the spring, quiet, from nowhere.
Elise.
He said old label. He said nothing. He peeled the tape off the box and put it in his pocket and I let it go, because letting things go is the thing I'm good at now, and I have let this one go clean for months.
Except here I am with it in my hands again.
Somebody's robe, kept folded and clean on a high shelf in a house where the only two people are me and a man who throws nothing away and explains nothing he doesn't want to.
I fold it back how it was. I get the batteries I don't need. I close the closet.
It's nothing, I tell myself, and mostly it works, and I go start the rice so there's something for him to come home to.
* * *
Dev catches me on a Thursday, which is the only reason it happens at all, because on a Thursday I don't have a reason ready.
beer. the usual place. don't tell me you're busy you've been busy since march. And then, before I can build the out, a second one. im already here.
So I go. It's the bar we used to close down, the one with the good tap list and the bad lighting, and Dev's got a stool held with his jacket and two beers already sweating on the rail.
"He lives," he says. He's grinning but he means it a little. "I was about to file something. Missing bro. Last seen flaking on leg day."
"I've been slammed," I say. "The big manual finally shipped."
"Yeah, you said. In February." He slides me the beer. "Then you said it in April. That thing's been shipping for a year, man. It's a manual, not a kid."
I laugh because it's funny and because Dev is easy to laugh with, he always has been, and for a second it's the old thing, the two of us on stools talking about nothing.
He tells me about a girl from one of the apps who's great over text and a stranger in person, about his boss, about a supplement that's supposed to fix your sleep and just makes your dreams weird.
I nod in the right places. I know how to do this. I've done it my whole life.
"You should get back out there," he says, and he means the apps, he means the whole machine he's been running for me since we were twenty-three.
"I'll build you a new profile. Better pictures.
We'll pick a good one where you look like you have a job and a dog.
" He grins. "You don't have a dog. Details. "
A year ago that would have been Friday night. The two of us hunched over his phone picking photos, him talking me up like a used car, me half believing it. It was the whole engine of my life for a decade. Now he says it and it goes past me like a bus I'm not catching.
Then he tilts his head and looks at me a beat too long.
"You good, though?" he says. "Real question."
"I'm good."
"Because you look like you dropped weight you didn't need to drop." He says it plain, not unkind. "And you got this... I don't know. You keep going somewhere." He waves his hand at my face like he's clearing smoke off it. "Right now. You're doing it right now."
"I'm tired, Dev."
"Sure." He turns his glass on the rail. "The apps still on your phone?"
"They're on there."
"But you're not on them."
I don't have anything for that. It's true and there's no version of the truth I can put on the bar between us.
I could tell him I haven't opened one since before Christmas.
I could tell him the reason, and the reason is a man rinsing a wineglass in a kitchen across town who has a key in his pocket to a thing Dev couldn't picture if I drew it for him.
So I do the thing I do now. I let the quiet sit and I let him hand himself a reason, because people always will.
"Work's just been a lot," I say.
"Okay." He lets it go, mostly. He starts in on something else, a trip he wants to plan, guys' weekend, we should do it before everybody's got kids.
But he keeps checking me while he talks, quick little looks, like you check a friend's car when it's making a sound they swear isn't there.
He can hear the sound. He can't find it.
And I sit there and drink my beer and I'm the one thing in his life he can't get a read on, and the worst part, the part I take home with me, is that I'm not sad about it the way I should be.
Dev is trying to hand me back to myself and I don't want him to.
There's nowhere in me to put what he's offering.
Graham didn't take Dev from me. He just made it so I've got nothing to say back.
We split the tab. He hugs me hard in the parking lot and holds my shoulders and looks at me one more time.
"Answer your phone," he says. "That's it. That's the whole ask."
"I will."
I won't, not really, and we both stand there knowing it, and then he gets in his truck and I get in my car.
* * *
Graham's got dinner going when I get home, which means he beat me back, which means he heard about the beer or he didn't and it doesn't matter which.
He never asks where I've been in a way that sounds like asking.
He just looks up from the pan and takes me in, top to bottom, and finds whatever I brought in the door.
"Good?" he says.
"Dev," I say. "A beer."
"How is he." He says it like he already likes the answer.
"Same." I don't say the rest. There isn't a rest that survives being said out loud in this kitchen.
We eat. He asks about the manual and I tell him about the midnight guy with the wet hands and he listens like it's the only thing being said anywhere.
After, he doesn't rush me down the hall.
He sits back on the couch with the lamps low and pats the floor by his knee, easy, and I go, because that's where I go, and I don't need to be walked there.
I kneel. I put my hands on my thighs like I've learned.
I don't wait to be told what I am tonight.
Some nights he says it and some nights I get there first now, and getting there first has stopped feeling like a stunt and started feeling like manners.
The cage sits useless between my legs and I think it before he can, plain, no drama in it.
Useless. That's the honest word and it's mine to use.
He undoes his belt and he's heavy and thick like he is, the size that was always going to be the size, and I go down and do the one thing my body never fumbles.
The word comes up while I'm working him and this time I don't let it come up on its own.
I reach for it. Clitty. I put it on myself, on purpose, before any of it could come from him, and it still snags going by, the same small catch it's always left, except now I'm the one who set the snag.
That's the difference and I feel the whole shape of it in half a second and then I let it go too.
He's what matters in this room. The thing behind the little pink shell was never going to be.
I know that the way I know the lamps are low.
I service him slow and thank him without words and the plug shifts when I move and the cage strains at nothing and gets nowhere, and none of it is being done to me.
I'm doing it. Nobody's in here making me.
"There she is," he says, low, one hand resting in my hair, not steering. "Good girl."
It lands soft and it lands true and I lean up into the flat of his hand.