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He made a sound. Not a word. The bed on his end.

“Take it off,” he said.

“I’m not —”

“Nobody’s in that hall. Nobody’s in this room but a boat. Take it off, and tell me you’ve done it, and then put your hand where mine would be.”

She should have laughed. She’d have laughed at any man on earth, on a phone, in a motel, saying that. She lay there in the dark with the phone on the pillow and the fan going and the house asleep, and she got the T-shirt off over her head one-handed, and lay back down, and said, “It’s off,” and heard him breathe out.

“Where’s your hand?”

“On my stomach.”

“Lower.”

“Brody —”

“Lower. Slow. The way I’d do it. Tell me when you’re there.”

She went lower. Slow, the way he’d do it, and she was already wet and she hadn’t known till her fingers found out, and she said, “There,” and her voice had gone, and he said, “Good. Now do what I’d do. You know what I’d do. Do it slow and tell me.”

She told him. She’d never in her life said a thing like that to a man out loud, and she said it, in the dark, with her fingers moving and his voice in her ear telling her slower, and then not slower, and she could hear him, too, his breath and the bed and the sound a man makes when he’s got his own hand around himself in a motel in Odessa with the lights off and a woman two hours away telling him where her fingers were. It built. It built faster than it should have, with nobody touching her but her, because it was his voice, and she’d learned that voice in a dark room for two months and her body knew it as well as it knew his hands.

“I’m going to —”

“Go on. Let me hear it. Don’t put your hand over your mouth, there’s nobody there, let me hear it.”

She let him hear it. She went with the phone against her ear and her back off the bed and his name in her mouth and no hand over it, and on the other end he said hers, twice, Sunny, and then the other one, Rose, and then nothing but breathing, his and hers, in two rooms two hours apart with a boat on one wall and a fan in one window.

“Well,” he said, after a while.

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said well. Well is something.” She got her breath. She was laughing, a little, and shaking, a little, and she put her hand over her eyes. “I’ve never done that.”

“Me neither.”

“You have.”

“Not with anybody I wanted to see in the morning,” he said, and that was closer to liking than anything in two months, and neither of them said so, and she lay there with her T-shirt on the floor and his breathing on the pillow and thought, seven more nights, and then thought, don’t count, and counted anyway.

Indiana called again on the twelfth night, at eleven-forty, ten minutes after Brody had hung up.

She was half asleep. It was the only reason. The phone lit the ceiling and she reached for it with her eyes shut thinking he’d forgotten something, thinking Brody, and her thumb was on it before she’d read the screen, and she’d said “What” into it, warm, the way she said it to him, before she’d understood it wasn’t him.

“Sunny. It’s me. Don’t hang up, I just want to —”

She hung up.

Four seconds. Maybe three. His voice, the way it had been in the shop with the flowers, reasonable, warm, a man who just wanted to talk, and she’d said “what” to it the way she said it to Brody, and now he was in the room. In her room, in the house, in the dark, two states away from where she’d left him, and he’d heard her voice, and she’d heard his.

She sat up. She put the light on. She held the side button till the phone went dark and put it in the drawer of the nightstand and shut the drawer, and sat there on the edge of the bed in the T-shirt with the fan going and her hands between her knees, and didn’t shake, because she’d used that up on a county road in July, and didn’t cry, because she’d used that up in Indianapolis.

She sat there till the window went gray.

Nobody, she’d said. Nothing. In the dark, in the only voice he believed, with his arm over her. And he’d believed it, she’d felt him believe it all down her back, and gone to Odessa, and called her every night from a room with a boat in it, and asked her what she was wearing.