He nods, and doesn't leave. I wait.
"I'll walk you back up," he says. "Make sure you have what you need."
I almost point out that I've already been to the room, that Cora showed me, that I've been sitting here for an hour and navigated the common room and the kitchen and the bathroom without incident.
But something in the offer feels less like logistics and more like a man who has spent the last four hours in a truck withsomeone and hasn't figured out how to stop yet, so I close the laptop and stand up.
He walks me back upstairs with the careful distance of someone who has decided where the line is and intends to stay behind it. I appreciate the precision of it even as I notice it.
In the room he stands in the doorway while I set my bag on the bed and open it. He doesn't come in. He leans against the frame with his arms crossed and watches me pull out the camera body, the lenses, the cards in their case, laying each one on the bed with the automatic care of years of doing this in borrowed rooms in the dark. The room is quiet except for the muffled sounds of the compound below: someone's laugh, a door closing, the music that seems to live in the walls of this building.
I work without talking, he watches without talking, and the silence between us has the same quality it had in the truck. It’s not uncomfortable, just present, just two people occupying the same space without needing to perform anything for each other.
"You can go," I say, without looking up. "I'm fine."
"Making sure you're settled."
"I'm settled."
"Mm."
I look up at him. He looks back, and there's nothing readable in it. Not the pointed interest of a man who is here for reasons he's pretending aren't reasons, not the blank politeness of someone performing duty. Just a man in a doorway watching a woman unpack her cameras, not entirely sure why he hasn't left yet. Which is honest, at least. I've been doing this work long enough to know the difference between a man who doesn't know what he's doing and a man who knows exactly what he's doing and wishes he didn't.
I'm not sure yet which one he is.
"I'm settled," I say again. "Thank you. For today. All of it."
Something moves across his face; not quite an expression, more like the shadow of one, there and gone before I can get my eye around it. He pushes off the doorframe.
"Door locks from the inside," he says. "Bathroom's next door. Kourtney's at the end of the hall if you need anything."
"Okay."
He goes.
I stand in the bare room and listen to his boots on the floorboards of the hallway, counting the steps without deciding to count them, the way you do when your ear has attached itself to a sound and won't let go. Fourteen steps. The sound of a door.
Silence.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the cameras laid out in front of me. Fifty-three frames on a card in that case. Frame thirty-one with Delacroix's face in it, clean and clear. The whole morning sitting here on a bed in Magnolia Bend, Mississippi, four hours from the bayou and a long way from anything that resembles my ordinary life.
I lie back and look at the ceiling.
The paint is old and has that texture of a surface that's been repainted too many times, layered history showing through where the light catches it. I've stared at a lot of ceilings in a lot of rooms like this one. It's the occupational hazard of field work. You spend so many nights in borrowed spaces that you become fluent in the architecture of temporary.
This one doesn't feel entirely temporary. I don't know what to do with that so I leave it alone.
I close my eyes and in the dark behind them the day plays back: the blind, the herons, the engines, the cargo lights, Delacroix's smile across a café table. The truck cab and the highway running out under the tires and the gas station fluorescent light and a man watching me over the roof of a truck with an expression he didn't know I was cataloguing.
Fourteen steps to wherever his room is.
I hate that I counted them. I hate more that I'm lying here in the dark still thinking about it, because today was the worst day I've had in a long time and I have more important things to think about than the specific weight of a man's attention in a gas station parking lot in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
I know all of that.
I'm thinking about it anyway.
The compound settles around me; old wood and distant voices and the particular quality of a building full of people who belong to each other, and I lie on the borrowed bed and stare at the borrowed ceiling and hear Demi's voice in the back of my head.
