Later in my room, I call Lena. She answers on the second ring. She was waiting.
"Hi," she says, breathless.
"Guess what?”
“What?”
“I told the band about us."
"Really? Wow, that's great."
"But I'm—" I pause. The words are right here. "I miss you alot. I've missed you every second since I got in the van last week. I miss your apartment and your coffee and the way you type so loudly in the kitchen."
"I don’t type that loud."
"I miss your hands."
Silence.
"I miss your hands," I say again. "Your hands on me. Your hands reaching for my face in the dark."
“Tell me more,” she says, and her voice has changed—lower, right up against the phone.
“I miss your hands.” I shut my eyes in the dark of the car. “I miss what they do. I miss the way you never rush.”
“Where are you?”
“In my room. Everyone’s asleep.”
A pause, and then, soft and certain: “Tell me what you’d do. If I were there.”
So I do. Quiet, into the phone, frost blooming across the windows and the cottage dark behind me, I tell her—slow and specific, the way she taught me words matter—and she gives it back, her breath catching in the way that undoes me, telling me where her hands are and what she wishes they were doing, until the distance stops being distance and turns into just the dark and her voice and the two of us coming apart across three hundred kilometres of nothing. When it breaks for her I hear my name in it. When it breaks for me she stays on the line and says “I love you,” gentle, like she’s reached through the phone to hold the back of my neck.
After, we lie in our separate dark and breathe.
"I made the pasta," she says. "The one you like."
"Which pasta?"
"The one with the cream and the garlic and the?—"
"Oh. The one you burned the first time you tried it."
"The one I burned the first time, yes. I got it right this time."
"I want to eat that with you."
"Then come home."
“I can’t. Not tonight.” And it pains me to say it. “The record isn’t finished, the band needs me up here, and there’s one van and five people—I can’t strand them on a mountain because I finally grew a heart. But Lena?—”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I wasn’t really asking. I just wanted to hear that you want to.”
“I want to more than I’ve wanted anything.” I sit up in the dark. “So here’s what I’m going to do instead. I’m going to finish this record. And then I’m coming home, and I’m going to do this properly—in the open, in front of whoever’s in the room, no more separate entrances, because I am done being careful about the wrong things.”
“Rhonda.” Her breath catches.
“I mean it. No more separate entrances. No more room with no windows. Just—wait for me. Two weeks. And then I’m going to make you the least invisible woman in any room I’m ever in.”
