“Is that what I’m doing?” she asks mildly. “Not hiding?”
“You went to Echo today,” I say. “You watched a woman sleep with one shoe on because she didn’t think she could afford to take both off at the same time. You drew hands without looking at them. You stood in three doorways longer than you meant to. When the boy from yesterday asked if he could take a second sandwich, you didn’t look at me to see if he should. You told him to take two and one for later. Hiding is not what you did.”
She doesn’t answer. She wraps her hand around the mug until her knuckles go pale with pressure. When she finally speaks, it’s not to argue the point. It’s to push me to what she came here to test. “Does it still hurt?”
She’s looking at the scar. The T-shirt I pulled on did me the favor of failing to cover the upper edge. It is a pale line tonight, not angry, not raised, smooth where it runs along the ribs and hard where it meets a spot of tethered tissue. I’ve had it long enough that I forget sometimes. Then a door catches me at the wrong angle, or I forget to pull breath wide when I lift, or the weather decides to teach me who decides. Does it still hurt?Sometimesis the right answer. I don’t want to give her a sermon. I give her the single syllable she asked for.
“Sometimes,” I say. She waits.When.She doesn’t say the word out loud. She doesn’t have to.
“When I’m stupid,” I add. “When I think I can move through a room as if the room isn’t there. When a car door closes too fast. When I forget for an hour that I am not made of the thing I’m trying to be made of.”
She nods without looking up at my face, as if the line on my side is telling her more than anything my mouth will. “How did it happen?”
I have a dozen ways to tell the same story. Most of them are true. None of them are complete. The first girl I tried to bring across a parking lot when I was nineteen and sure that doing theright thing was a straight line and that people would behave like the diagrams in a first aid manual. The night we used a shelter’s back door because the front had a camera, because the man who bruised her face also had a credit card, because men who’ve been told things are theirs don’t like doors they can’t open. The knife was small. Kitchen-grade. He didn’t bring it for theater. He brought it to end an argument. I turned fast enough to get between him and her and slow enough that the blade found the wrong target. It was not an epic. It was a bad angle.
“Not a heroic story,” I say. “A stupid one. A parking lot. A back door. A man with a knife and a better stance than mine.”
“Was she safe?” she asks. She drinks. The mug tilts.
“For a while,” I say. Which is the hardest answer to give without also offering someone a map to an ending. I won’t say the name we used in the file. I won’t tell her whether the woman left the state or changed her hair or learned to sleep without a chair against the door. I won’t put a poem on top of a thing that was not. “It was long enough to matter.”
Her gaze drops to the keys. She touches one with the tip of her finger as if she expects her weight to break it. It makes a small sound and then the room swallows it. “Play something,” she says.
“I’ll mangle it,” I tell her.
“I don’t care,” she says, and the sentence costs her nothing because it’s true.
I put my hands on the keyboard the way my mother showed me when my wrists were thin and my patience was thinner. I don’t give her melody first. I give her the low notes I use to make the air in a room move. The sound isn’t pretty. It sits in the floorboards and decides not to leave. The jasmine pushes its scent harder into the space as if something shook it. The rain presses the glass like a palm. Out of the corner of my eye I can see her breathing find the pattern and follow it. Hermug empties. She doesn’t set it down. She just holds it to have something between her palms that isn’t me.
“My mother used to fall asleep on the couch when she thought I was practicing. She’d pretend she was reading a file. The book would slide onto the floor. She’d wake herself with the sound and claim she’d been thinking.”
“I like her already,” she says. “She sounds like Lila when she says she’s meditating and she’s actually listing drawers she wants to reorganize in her head.”
“She’d have liked Lila,” I say. “She liked anyone who filled a room to keep the bad out.”
The angle of Aurora’s mouth changes enough that I know the reference hit the right memory. “There was a stairwell in one of the houses,” she says, and her voice tells me she didn’t plan to say it. The sentences come as if she’s building them now and setting them down as she realizes they balance. “It smelled like wet laundry and bleach. The bulb kept going out, so there was this bruise of a shadow in the middle of the stairs every night. I started drawing on the wall with a stub of pencil. It was dumb. If they caught me, I’d get moved for ‘defacing property.’ But I kept doing it. Little things. A line for a window. A corner of a face. One night I used a marker I stole out of the office, and I drew a door at the landing. Full height. Paneling and everything. People laughed at me for a week because what does a door do when you’re already inside and nobody’s coming to open it. But it helped. When I climbed and I hit the shadow, I didn’t feel like I was going to fall through it. My brain saiddoorand doors meanchoice. Eventually someone painted over it, which is what always happens. But I kept the line of the paneling in my head. I still do it. When I’m scared, I draw doors.”
“Today, on your notes.”
“Yeah,” she says. “And sometimes in the air. Lila thinks it’s me swatting a fly. It’s not. It’s me remembering where the way out is.”
I don’t take her hand. I look at it where it rests on her thigh, paint absent for once, skin clean. If I touch her, anything could happen. We could pull a room down around us again. We could ruin the fragile thing sitting between us that isn’t sex and isn’t strategy and still matters as much as both. I make a decision to bring my hand to the bench and plant it there. Then I break my own decision and reach anyway, because there are moments when you’re allowed to ignore your better angels as long as you take something gentle with you.
Her fingers are warm from the mug. I take three of them in my hand and turn her palm up like I do when I want to check a pulse without making a show of it. She lets me. There’s a smear of charcoal near the base of her thumb from the drawings she made and then rubbed at with a sleeve. I run my thumb across it, and it comes away on my skin in a gray line like a seal.
“You keep painting to keep the ghosts out, and I keep building to do the same.”
“And yet here we are,” she says. She leans into the words enough that they move across the space and into me. I feel the shape of them, not just the content. Part confession, part complaint, part acceptance that neither of us is what the other needs, and both of us are what we’ll get. She leans into me, with her forehead, which she tips against mine. Our noses don’t bump. Our mouths don’t try for each other on their own. It is a point of contact designed by someone who needed closeness without making a mess of the next twenty minutes.
I close my eyes. Her breath moves against my face. She smells like tea and the shampoo she likes because it’s cheap and makes her hair feel like hair and not a styling project. I couldstay like this long enough for the jasmine to give me a headache and not regret a second of it.
We stay like that until the rain shifts from sheets to drops and the sound turns from white noise to individual hits. She’s the one who pulls back first. She does it slowly, like someone taking a finger out of a page to see if they’re on the right paragraph. Her hand leaves mine, but it doesn’t snap away. She takes the mug, which is empty and useless now, and holds it as a prop because humans hate walking away with nothing in their hands.
“I should go,” she says. “Before I forget what I came here for.”
“Goodnight, Aurora,” I say, because formality fits better than the names that live farther down my throat.
“Goodnight, Cassian,” she says, which is not the first time she’s said my name and not the twentieth, but it feels like the one where we both admitted it sits differently in her mouth now. She walks out barefoot because she doesn’t need shoes to cross the distance between rooms in a house that wants her. The door pulls itself almost closed and then stops before the latch catches because the weather got into the frame and made it swell.
