“Morning,” I say quietly against her lips.
She opens her eyes.
“Morning.” She’s slightly breathless.
The corner of my mouth pulls up.
Memphis appears between us and plants himself in the center of the kitchen floor, looking up with the satisfaction of a dog who has been paying attention to things his human hasn’t.
Sophia looks down at him. “Don’t look at me like that,” she tells him.
He tilts his head and looks at her exactly like that.
She laughs, that easy, unguarded sound, and the morning settles properly around us.
“Sit down,” I say, already turning toward the stove.
“I’ll make breakfast.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.” She is already reaching for the pan, moving through the kitchen with the ease of someone fully at home in it. I sit at the island with my coffee and watch her, and I let myself have that too.
She makes eggs, scrambled, the way she’d figured out somewhere around the second week without being told, and toast, and we eat at the island side by side, the morning light coming through the glass doors and lying warm across everything, talking about ordinary things. The Ember project. Something Victoria Chen said in an email. Whether Memphis has figured out the sliding door.
At some point, she reaches over without thinking, steals a corner of my toast, eats it without asking, and I let her.
She looks up, catches me watching, goes slightly pink, and looks back at her plate. “Sorry. Habit.”
“It’s fine.”
She looks sideways.
“I like it.”
The pink deepens slightly, she looks back at her plate, and the kitchen feels considerably warmer than it did a moment ago.
***
The afternoon finds us at the pool.
Her idea.She appears in a swimsuit with her laptop, the energy of a woman who has decided today is a pool day and isn’t taking questions about it. I follow her out because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
Memphis stretches between us in the sun with the contentment of a dog who has decided this is exactly how life should be.
I work through club business on the phone, and in between, I watch her.
The way she frowns at her laptop when something isn’t working. The way her hand finds her water bottle without looking for it. The way she pushes her sunglasses into her hair and then forgets they are there.
Small things—the kind you only notice when you’ve completely stopped trying not to.
At some point, she pushes the laptop aside, lies back, and closes her eyes, turning her face up toward the sun.
Within ten minutes, she is asleep.
The phone goes down.
The want of her moves through me like heat through stone, slowly, deeply, and entirely unstoppable. Not just her body, though her body in that swimsuit in the Nevada afternoon is a difficulty all its own, but something larger.
