I closed my eyes.
I went home in my head, because it was the only place I let myself go when I couldn't sleep. Valentine sky in August. The pasture behind the barn. The smell of horse and cut alfalfa and the dust kicked up under the wheel of an old truck. Seven boys whooping like idiots on horseback through the back forty playing the cowboys-and-Indians game my mother had stopped letting us call cowboys-and-Indians somewhere around 1998 and which we had renamed, with the moral seriousness of children,cowboys-and-natives.Mucking stalls in the cool hour after sunup. My mother on the porch in a sweater she'd had longer than any of us, calling us in for breakfast in the voice that got us moving without arguing.
The voice that got us moving.
I fell asleep on the sound of it.
I woke to an empty bed.
That was the first thing. The second thing was that I hadn't felt her get up.
That was a thing.
I had not failed to feel a woman get out of a bed I was in since approximately my fifteenth year on this planet. Operators slept on a thread. Light came on, you came up. Door cracked, you came up. Body moved next to you, you came up. Tommy Dane did not snore through a woman crossing her own bedroom in her own apartment and slipping out into her own hallway. That was not a thing that happened.
It had happened.
I lay there for a second with my hand on the warm spot on the sheet where she'd been, and I couldn't decide whether I was alarmed by it or pleased about it, and the fact that I couldn't decide meant the answer waspleased.
The bedroom door opened.
She came in sideways because her hands were full, and what her hands were full of was two coffee mugs balanced on a small plate and the small plate had two pieces of toast on it, and the toast was already buttered and already spread thick with raspberry jelly.
"Surprise," she said.
She was wearing my t-shirt. It came down to mid-thigh on her. Her hair was tied up loose in a knot that had the casual perfection of a knot that had been tied without a mirror by a woman who did not know how good she looked.
I sat up.
"Rebecca Lynn, are you trying to ruin me?"
"What?"
"That. All of that. You're going to ruin me."
She smiled. The slow private one, the one I'd gotten in the donut shop. She crossed the room and sat down on the bed and handed me a mug and a piece of toast on a plate.
"I thought you might be hungry," she said.
"I am hungry."
"And I thought maybe—" she paused, the careful pause she did when she was about to take a risk— "after we're done with these, we could shower together."
I held still for a second and looked at her over the rim of the mug.
"Rebecca Lynn."
"Yeah."
"You've got to be careful what you ask for. I'm liable to get addicted to a thing real quick, given the right reason."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a public service announcement."
She laughed. It was the morning version of the laugh, lower and rougher, a laugh that hadn't quite woken up all the way.
We ate in bed.
