He watches me. The look lasts too long and contains too much. He sees it, the gap widening.
I kiss him. Because kissing stops conversations, and this is a conversation I’m not having.
He slides from my stomach to my hip—the grip, familiar now.
But that look, when I pull back. The thing behind the want. The acknowledgement that saysI know what you just did.
He knows.
He lets me do it anyway.
My body against his, the heat rebuilding. His mouth on mine and the taste of coffee and the convergence of two things that shouldn’t exist in the same place.
His hand, my hip. The bruise he made last week is still tender.
He presses into it. Holds.
Later. Much later. The flat is doing the almost-silent thing again. Laurence is in the shower. Water hits the tile through two doors and a corridor. He hums, barely, no tune. The ghost of music, formless.
I get out of bed. Pull on his t-shirt, the soft navy one with the collar stretched by my own hands, and pad barefoot into theliving room because I am nosy, because I am eighteen, because the call at three in the morning two weeks ago left a word in my head that I’ve been carrying around like a coin in a pocket. I want the book it came out of.
A travel guide from 1987. Patient hinges—a confection of masonry.
The bookshelves.
I’ve looked at these shelves before. First morning after the hallway, in my boxers, trying to read him by spines. Pure on top, applied below, the novels are out of place like escapees. Evidence of a mind split between logic and beauty. Physics. Philosophy. A shelf of dead men’s words.
I didn’t look at the bottom shelf.
The bottom shelf is travel books.
This is a small surprise. Laurence strikes me as the type to stay in conference hotels alone and read about other people’s loneliness. And yet, a whole shelf. Neatly aligned. The spines are older than the maths, faded cloth, the cracked gold of titles from the eighties and nineties, the palette of a secondhand bookshop in a town whose name ends in-by-the-sea.
I crouch. Tilt my head to read the spines.
Spain on Foot. The Naked Hebrides. A Year in the Ardèche. Walking the Alpujarras, the Dordogne Road.A set of yellow Michelin guides with the spines broken at particular pages. A slim dark-green hardback with the title in silver:The Châteaux of the Loire: a Traveller’s Companion.
I pull it out.
The cloth is faded to the colour of a river in winter. The corners are bumped. The gold of the title is half-gone from the front cover. However, you can still read it at an angle,Châteaux of the Loire, and underneath, smaller, the author’s name: some Englishman with three first names and an OBE after them; thetype to have known a locksmith’s father in a French village, well enough to write eight pages about hinges.
I sit cross-legged on the rug with the book in my lap.
The photos are appalling, Laurence was right. Appalling: everything is slightly too green, the skies have gone magenta at the edges, the entire spectrum is offset like all mid-eighties colour printing was offset. A woman in a headscarf in the foreground of a shot of Chambord is frozen mid-blink like evidence in a murder trial. The captions are worse.Chenonceau at dusk, a bridge in a dream.The Loire at first light, the river knowing kings.
I find the chapter onpatient hinges. It’s real. He wasn’t inventing it at three in the morning to put me to sleep. Eight full pages on a gate in a village I can’t pronounce. The locksmith’s father. The way the hinge sounds in summer versus winter. A photograph, captionedA gate having known a century, of what is unambiguously just a gate.
I’m grinning. I didn’t mean to.
I turn back to the front.
The flyleaf.
And there, in black ink, in a hand that is not Laurence’s. Smaller, more slanted, the g’s looping backwards in a pattern no left-handed person’s g’s take. There is a dedication.
To Laurie. Because you said you’d never been. Because the hinges are patient and I am not. Because the masonry will still be there whenever you can bring yourself to go.
Four lines of white space.
