Page 27

It's the first thing I know, before the ceiling, before the light, before the weight pinning my arm to a mattress that isn't mine. For fourteen months there's been a high thin whine behind my jaw, a wire strung tight at the edge of every silence. I wake up in a gray Bloomfield dawn and listen for it and find a clean, empty quiet.

Out the window, a bird is working through the same three notes on a maple. Under my arm, Hollis breathes against my ribs.

She's turned half onto her stomach with her face in my shoulder and one thick, freckled thigh thrown over my legs. Her hair is a dark-auburn wreck across the pillow. The quilt has slid to her hip. In the light I can see everything I couldn't last night: the long slope of her back, the dimples above the curve of her hips, the way she presses against my side with each breath.

I keep very still. I would like to memorize it. I don't think I have enough hands.

My phone is on the nightstand, face up. It buzzed once while I slept, a short hard sound I only half heard. I tilt it toward me and read the preview with the screen dimmed against my chest.

Dale: Call me when you're up. Schedule change.

I set it back down. I tell myself it'll keep an hour.

"You're staring," Hollis says, into my shoulder.

"I'm not."

"I can feel it. It's a very loud kind of staring." She cracks one eye open behind no glasses, hazel-green and unfocused. "You have a good face for it. It's wasted on staring."

"I'll work on it."

"Don't you dare."

She stretches, the whole length of her, a long shiver of warm skin against mine. She catches my expression and laughs, low and rusty with sleep.

"Shower or coffee?"

"Both."

"Greedy."

"Yes," I say, and she looks at me. The laugh goes out of her face and something quieter comes in.

She pads to the bathroom naked, in the full light, with her hands loose at her sides and the sway of her hips steady. She doesn't reach for a robe.

I lie there for exactly three seconds. Then I follow her.

The bathroom is tiny, tiled in pale green from some year nobody wants to name. The water runs hot, and steam climbs the mirror. When I step in behind her the space becomes the two of us. Her wet shoulders, her hair darkened to the color of mahogany, the old pipes knocking.

She turns and puts both palms flat on my chest. Water runs down between her breasts. She looks at me with an expression that's half question and half dare.

"This is a very small shower," she says.

"I noticed."

"I have a bad knee and the tile's slippery, so you should know I'm going to need a plan."

"I have a plan."

"Of course you do."

My plan is her back against the warm tile and my hands in her hair and my mouth on her throat. She's laughing against my jaw one moment and gasping the next.

I kiss her neck. The soft place below her ear. The line of her collarbone. Water runs over both of us. Her hands slide up my chest, over my shoulders. Her nails drag lightly down my back.

I lower myself to my knees on the folded bath mat she kicks toward me.

I look up the long wet line of her. The soft stomach. The full chest rising and falling. The freckled shoulders. Her eyes gone dark without her glasses.