I tucked her against the pillow.
Not under it. Against it. Propped on her back, her head on the linen, her new brown eye and her old black eye both open to the rafters. I smoothed the blanket near her feet and told myself Iwas tidying, and the lie tasted a little thinner than lies usually did.
I reached for the coffee.
The warmth went through the ceramic into my palms. I brought the mug to my face and breathed the steam and it was the good coffee again, the filter method, dark and even and miles better than it had any business being on a camp stove in a cabin on a mountain.
I drank.
He didn’t turn around.
That was the part I couldn’t figure out. Couldn’t categorize. A different kind of man — any kind of man I had ever encountered — would have turned around. Would have checked. Would have said good morning, or how did you sleep, or how are you feeling, or some other sentence designed to force me into a response, a performance of okay-ness, a small daily accounting of my state for his information or his reassurance. Every man I had ever lived with or under or around had needed some version of that transaction, and I had learned to produce it before coffee, before thought, before my eyes were properly open.
Dante didn’t need it.
He typed. He let me wake up alone, with the mug already there, in a room he was also in. The care was structural. It asked nothing of me except to be received.
I didn’t know how to receive it.
I drank the coffee.
***
He finished typing at some point. “Breakfast,” he said.
He stood up from the desk, rolled his shoulders once — I watched the small favoring adjustment in his right leg, thecompensation he still wasn’t acknowledging — and crossed to the camp stove.
I set the mug down. Swung my legs out of the bed. The floorboards were cold through my socks.
“I can make it,” I said.
“I know.” He was already reaching for the pan. “Sit.”
I sat at the table — the small square pine one that I had been using for maps and papers, now cleared down to bare wood, wiped clean. There were two plates on it. Two forks. A jar of strawberry jam I didn‘t recognize, which meant he’d either had it in the cupboard all along or picked it up on one of his trips into town and not mentioned it. Butter in a small dish. A loaf of bread, the good kind, sliced thick.
He worked the stove without speaking. Eggs cracked one-handed into a bowl, whisked with a fork, poured into the pan with a small controlled hiss. Toast on the second burner, in a wire rack I hadn’t seen before. The smells came up one after another — butter going brown, egg cooking, bread crisping — and my stomach tightened around a hunger I hadn‘t admitted to.
He plated everything. Set a plate in front of me. Eggs, two slices of toast, a spoon of jam on the side. Then his own. He sat down across from me.
I picked up my fork. He picked up his.
We ate for maybe two minutes before he put his fork down.
“I want to talk through a framework,” he said.
The word landed in the space between us and stayed there, right where he‘d set it down — precisely where he’d set it down, the night before, when his mouth had still been warm against mine and his hand had been on my face.
My fork paused on the way to my mouth. I put it back on the plate.
“Fine.”
I didn’t know why, exactly, but I was bracing for something.
He pushed his plate aside. Not away — just enough to clear the space between us, to create a working surface that wasn’t shared with food. The gesture was small and deliberate and I registered it the way I registered everything he did: as information.
He folded his hands on the table.
“Do you know what a Daddy Dom is?” he asked.
