I reach over to the nightstand where I set my watch. Pick it up.
"You came here to stop this," she says.
"I had a whole speech."
A beat. "How much of it did you get through."
"One line."
She turns her head. "Which one."
I look at the watch in my hand. The face of it. The familiar weight.
"I don't remember," I say.
She looks at me for a moment. Then she makes a sound. Small. Genuine. Surprised. She turns her face back to the ceiling with something that I understand, after a moment, is her trying not to laugh.
I put the watch on the nightstand.
She falls asleep before midnight. On her side. Facing me.
I don't sleep.
The freckles on her left shoulder. I count them in the lamplight because I'm awake and they're there and I have apparently become a man who counts freckles at two in the morning. Eleven. I count them twice to be sure. Eleven.
I am aware this is not a normal thing to do.
I do it anyway. I don't examine what that says about me.
I get dressed at four. Quietly. She doesn't stir. I pick up my jacket from the hallway floor and I feel the weight of the paper in the inside pocket. Seventeen items. My handwriting. I take the list out and look at it in the half-dark.
Reasons this cannot happen.
Number one: Ronan.
Number seventeen: I will not be able to stop.
I fold it. Put it back.
I let myself out.
The road. The dark. The weight of everything I'm choosing and the weight of everything it costs.
11
Billie
I've been to Declan's house only a few times in my life. Every time I was inside for under twenty minutes and each time I thought:very clean, slightly insane,and left.
I'm here now and it's still very clean and still slightly insane and I've been sleeping with him for a week so I'm taking the tour at a different pace.
The kitchen counters have nothing on them. Notalmostnothing. Nothing. No mail pile, no random mug, no charger living in the corner because that's where the charger lives. I open three drawers looking for nothing in particular and everything is exactly where it should be, organized by some logic that is internally consistent and probably proprietary to Declan Maguire.
"Do you have a system," I say.
"Yes," he says, from the living room.
"For the drawers."
