"There's one bed," I said.
"Section four addresses —" I started.
"I'll take the couch."
The couch was visibly too short for him by at least six inches, and I felt a pang that wanted to argue. But arguing about sleeping arrangements on the first night of a fake marriage to a man whose hands I couldn't stop thinking about seemed inadvisable.
He cooked dinner. Salmon in the cast-iron pan, butter, half a lemon, herbs stripped from the windowsill. I offered to help and he shook his head, so I sat on one of the counter stools and watched him move through his kitchen. He was looser here. The careful stillness he'd worn all afternoon had fallen away behind the counter, and what replaced it was a man moving without thinking, reaching for the butter before looking for it, adjusting the flame by sound. He'd done this a thousand times, and the ease of it, his hands working without hesitation, his shouldersdropped and unhurried, made my mouth go dry for reasons that had nothing to do with salmon.
I set two plates on the table while he finished at the stove. We sat across from each other. It was small enough that our knees nearly touched underneath, and I tucked mine back, which he either noticed or didn't, and I had no idea which was worse.
The salmon was excellent. I told him so and he nodded, which I was beginning to understand was how he accepted compliments. The conversation came in short exchanges. Where I'd flown from. San Francisco. How long the drive had been. Long. Whether I'd eaten on the way. A granola bar, which earned me a look I couldn't read but that seemed close to disapproval.
"You renovated this?" I asked. The kitchen was too well-made to be original, and I was curious, and he was sitting across from me in the low light and I needed to say words before the silence made me stare at his forearms resting on the table edge.
"Wasn't much when I got here. Took about a year."
"By yourself?"
"Mostly."
I looked at the kitchen. The herbs, the butcher block, the bookshelves visible through the wide doorway, the care in all of it. Then I looked at him. The gap between the man in the Mountain Mates profile and the man sitting across from me with salmon grease on his thumb was getting wide enough to be a problem.
He stood to clear the plates. I picked up the dish towel and dried while he washed, side by side at the sink, his arm brushing mine when he passed a plate. The river was audible through the window. Neither of us said anything. I hung the cast-iron pan back on its hook and he watched me do it, and the domesticity of the moment, the running water, the clean plates, his hip close to mine, felt more intimate than the ceremony had.
I went to my briefcase.
"There's something I'd like to go over." I set the binder on the table where our plates had been. "It covers household logistics, communication protocols, scheduling, and a conception timeline."
He sat back down across from me. He opened the binder.
"Forty-seven pages."
"It's comprehensive."
He flipped to a tabbed section. "There's a conception schedule."
"Organized by optimal timing windows, yes."
He turned another page and stopped. "You footnoted the conception schedule."
"Citing your sources is basic due diligence."
He closed the binder. He held it with both hands and looked at me over the top of it, and I waited for mockery and didn't get it. His expression had shifted into something I didn't have a framework for — like he was recalibrating, adjusting to ground that had turned out to be different than he'd planned for. Which made two of us.
"What's your favorite color?" he asked.
It was so far from any response I'd prepared for that I answered before I could filter it.
"Navy."
"Navy's just blue being uptight about it."
I surprised myself by laughing, a real one, not the polished laugh I used at client dinners. "And green before sunrise is just a man who wakes up too early."
His eyes held mine across the table. "Green. The dark kind. On the trees right before the sun comes up."
The specificity stopped me. Not green. A green that required waking before dawn and paying attention to what the light did to the trees before anyone else was awake. A green that lived in one specific minute of one specific morning, and he'd noticed it, andhe'd kept it, and the distance between us across this table felt closer than it had been ten minutes ago and I hadn't authorized that.
