I pressed up into her, slow. She made a sound that wasn't a moan and wasn't a gasp and was somewhere in between, a small privateyes.
I felt it then—the thing I'd been holding off all night without naming.
It dropped through me clean.
I was falling for her.
Not a little. Not in the manageable way a man my age was supposed to fall for women who were too young and too kind and too poor and too hopeful. Falling the whole way. With my eyes open. In a bathtub in Charleston in the gray morning light, with raspberry jelly still on my tongue, and a federalinvestigation aimed at my family two miles away, and my mother forgetting another word in a care home outside Marfa, and the rest of my life suddenly arranging itself around the body of a girl whose ninety-four dollars I was going to figure out without her ever knowing it.
She moved on me, slow.
I let her.
Outside the curtain, somewhere past the window, Charleston was continuing its slow, dreaming process of becoming morning.
Inside the curtain, I held the woman I had no business loving, and loved her, anyway.
17
REBECCA
He left mid-morning.
I knew it was coming, and I'd spent enough time in my own head to have prepared something reasonable. A casual goodbye. A smile that didn't ask for anything. The kind of exit that left a person their dignity and didn't make the leaving into a thing it wasn't yet.
What actually happened was that he pulled me into him in the doorway and held me for a long moment with his chin on top of my head and his hand flat on my back, and I pressed my face into his chest and breathed him in like I was making a record of it. Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then he pulled back just enough to look at me.
"Give me your phone," he said.
I got it from the counter. He put his number in, typed his name—justTommy, nothing else—and called himself from it so he'd have mine. Handed it back. Simple and matter-of-fact, the way he did things he'd already decided.
"On the smartphone," I said, because something made me want to say it before he didn't say anything and I spent the restof the day wondering if he'd noticed. "It's through a government program. Lifeline. For low-income?—"
"Rebecca Lynn."
"I just wanted you to know I'm not?—"
"I know what you are." He said it quiet and level, no pity in it, no performance of not-pity. Just fact.
I looked at him.
He kissed my forehead and saiddon’t go too farand walked down the stairs.
I stood in the open doorway and listened to his footsteps go.
Three floors down. The glass door. Gone.
I closed my own door and leaned my back against it and looked at the apartment—the two mugs still on the nightstand, the plate with the toast crumbs, my guitar leaning against the sofa where he'd set it—and I stood there until the standing still became something I'd done long enough. Then, I went and made more coffee because that was the sensible thing and I was a sensible woman.
Mostly.
Tasha found me at the kitchen window a while later.
She didn't say anything at first. She just poured herself a cup from the pot I'd made and came and stood beside me and we looked at the live oak together, the way we did, and after a while she said, "He seems good."
"He is," I said. "I think."
