Page 7 of Soft Erasure

The leather was ordered. The locks were the point.

We drove.

The car held his smell. Cedar, and under it something clean from the clinic. I hadn’t decided to learn it. It was already filed, in the drawer where the count lived.

I watched the city go by like a television bolted into the corner of a hospital room, on for the sound of it, not for anything happening on the screen. It was easier with my eyes on the window instead of on him. The clinic sat on a quiet block off a wider one. The wider one fed into a boulevard. The boulevard fed into a road I didn’t know the name of. At the end of that road there was a gate. Behind the gate there was Crownhill Residences.

“Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” Matthew said.

“No.”

“You should.” He said it like a fact already filed, not a question left open.

I looked at him. He was looking out the window, and the light did something to his profile I gave myself exactly one second to notice before I made myself stop. His ring hand was on his knee, the green seam visible, close enough to my own knee that I could measure the distance and count what it would cost him nothing to close. He didn’t close it. That was starting to look like his whole method: close, and doing nothing, until doing nothing became the thing that moved you.

I was supposed to be afraid of him. He’d just told me to be. I wasn’t, and I filed that too, the same place everything about him kept ending up lately.

The space between touching and not touching yet. I wanted it gone. It was the same need that had followed his fingers off my wrist that morning, awake again now, low and patient, with nowhere to go and no one to tell. Fear and want had taken the same room in me, and I couldn’t get a blade between them.

“Ask me for something,” he said.

“What?”

“Anything you want. Test it.”

The card was in my closed palm. The matchbook was in the watch pocket at my waistband. The jeans were the only piece of clothing they had let me keep through intake, because Matthew had said, “Some of the old life can come, Amber.”

I hadn’t slept right since intake.

I had done the seven-count breath three hundred and fourteen times by my count. The seven-count was not mine. It was older than Crownhill. Older than Matthew. Older than my mother’s voice, which I had been obeying my entire life without knowing I was obeying anything at all.

“What if I don’t ask for nothing?” I said. The grammar was wrong. It was the only thing I had left that was mine.

Matthew turned his head. He held me in his line of sight.

“Then you’ll starve.”

Adherence: 95.

Caleb’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. He looked and looked away.

Matthew’s phone buzzed. He took it out and held it so I could see.

Edward: The file is secure. Waiting on your go.

I read the text. Matthew watched my wrist.

Not my face. My wrist.

The number on the band didn’t move. Adherence: 95. He held the phone there like a man holding a thermometer he expects to rise.

But I had seen him in the moment before the screen was fully visible. His face unguarded, a man who had never cared about anything as much as he cared about knowing what I was feeling right now, in this car. Then he remembered he was supposed to be clinical. But I had seen.

He put the phone face-down on his thigh instead of back in his pocket, close enough that the ring still caught the last of the screen’s light. I felt him go still beside me, the specific stillness of someone waiting to see what I’d do. I didn’t move away. That was the answer, and it was already given.

“Caleb’s wife asks after you,” he said. “Marissa.”

He watched the number.