For a woman raised the way she was raised, the brain wakes up looking for the bill.
I feel it start. The small stiffening. The breath she pulls to start apologizing, or explaining, or folding herself back up small.
"Don't," I say, before she gets a word out.
I pull the blanket up over us both and keep my hand moving slowly through her hair.
"Whatever you're about to say—that you're sorry, that that was too much, that you don't usually—don't. There's nothing tobe sorry for. Nothing happened here that you have to explain to anybody."
Her breath shudders out of her.
"I don't know how to do this," she says into my chest, very small. "I don't know how to just—have something. Without it being wrong, or owed, or?—"
"I know you don't."
I get up. She makes a small sound of protest, and I come right back with a glass of water and press it into her hands.
"Drink. All of it."
I wait while she does. I take the glass and set it down. I pull her into me again and tuck the blanket around her shoulders and keep my hand moving through her hair until I feel her go heavy against me.
"You don't have to know how tonight," I tell her. "You just have to let me show you it's allowed. Same as I showed you in there. One thing at a time."
She's quiet a long moment.
"That's the most anybody's ever said to me," she murmurs, half asleep already, the day finally collecting what it's owed. "And you barely talk."
Something close to a laugh moves through my chest. She smiles against it.
Within a few minutes, her breathing goes slow and even, and she's gone, heavy and trusting in a way that lands on me harder than anything has in two years.
I lie there in the dark with this woman asleep on my chest, and I do the thing I do.
I look at what I'm feeling. I name it. I check whether it's the kind that stays put or the kind that climbs.
It's bigger than it was last night. A lot bigger. It's filled the whole room and most of my chest and it's got her name on it, andit isn't going anywhere—and I wait, the way I've trained myself to wait, for the lift underneath it.
The racing. The warning.
Nothing.
No lift. No racing. No locked-ward feeling, no climb toward a cliff I can't walk back from.
It's just real. It's just hers, and it's just real, and for the first time in two years I'm not bracing against a single thing.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulder and let myself have it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sophie
It comes back the second I wake up—all of it, the rain, the lawyers, and the plate of his mother's cooking, the things he said to me in the dark and the things he did after—and my whole body goes hot, and the very first instinct I have, before I've even got my eyes all the way open, is to get out.
To slip into my clothes and out the door and back through the fence before he wakes, so neither of us has to look at what I let myself have last night in the daylight.
To make it small. To pretend, the way I've pretended my whole life, that I never wanted anything at all.
I actually get one foot out from under the blanket before I hear him.
