“Yes,” he said.
He was absolutely not watching the TV.
I turned back to the screen. The couple in question had met approximately eleven minutes ago and were already in serious trouble, which I chose to leave alone.
The knock at the door came while I still had dye in and was in no condition for any public-facing situation. He went. I heard the exchange at the door—brief, cash, bags—and then he was back and the room smelled like garlic and sesame oil, which was, unreasonably, the best thing I’d smelled since Beverly Hills.
“You’ve got ten minutes,” he said.
“Ten minutes,” I confirmed. And went to finish the job.
THE WATER RAN WARM, then hot, the color coming out in long ribbons that turned the drain pink and then clear. I worked the conditioner through, rinsed again, wrung my hair out, and stood in front of the mirror.
Medium Brunette.
My grandmother’s jaw was there—the line of it, clean and sharp, visible without the product and the angles and the ring light. I closed that thought fast.
And then I sat down on the lid of the toilet and cried anyway.
Quietly, into the towel, for a few minutes. No ring light, no Bree, no comment section—just a fluorescent bulb and the last forty-eight hours arriving all at once.
“London.”
I heard him get up.
“I’m fine,” I said.
The door opened. He’d moved the moment he heard me—the floor, the handle, no ceremony.
He was across the bathroom in one step and stood in front of me—no phone, no product, Medium Brunette, eyes wet—and said: “It’s not so bad.”
“I know,” I said.
“You’re a beautiful woman.” It wasn’t flattery—the same voice he’d used to tell me it was above five thousand feet and the hot dog was still warm. “The color doesn’t change that. Come here.”
He pulled me in.
I don’t know exactly what I’d meant to do. I think I’d meant to keep a reasonable amount of structural dignity about the whole thing. What I did instead was put my face against his chest and stay there, and he was exactly as solid as I’d registered the first time I’d seen him—solid in a way you press against and feel actually held, warmth moving through the thermal into my skin, a chest that had been in enough bad situations to be entirely unfazed by one woman crying in a motel bathroom about her hair.
His arms came around me. One hand, steady, at my back.
And I was in serious trouble.
My breath came back wrong—thinner and warmer than it should have been, nothing to do with the crying. The flush moved up from my chest in a way that had nothing to do with temperature, and my hands were fisted in the front of his thermal before I understood I’d moved them. The most embarrassing data point I had generated in recent memory, and I was generating it in real time.
I felt the shift in his hold—fractional, certain, the arm at my back going tight—before I understood what I’d done. His jaw came down against the top of my head and I felt theslow, deliberate set of it—a man with a decision already made, working to hold it.
Then he cleared his throat.
“We should eat,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “We should.”
I stepped back. Neither of us said anything. He went out first.
I stood at the sink with both hands on the cold edge of it and faced my own reflection—Medium Brunette, cheeks flushed, no armor whatsoever—and thought: well.
Then I went and got my lo mein.
