Page 42 of Havoc

She's got a right to that. It's hers more than it's mine.

And she stood there in a hallway with her back to me and her hands doin' somethin' she didn't want me seein' and told me to hold it till mornin', and I understood exactly what she was askin' for, which was one night where the clock wasn't in the room.

So I hold it.

I get up off that floor and I go down the hall and I stand outside that door for about as long as a man can stand outside a door.

She opens it before I knock.

* * *

It's slower.

That's the whole difference and it's the difference that ruins us, because the first time you can put a name on. First time was a doorway and a fight and nine days of somethin' with nowhere to go. You could call that weather. You could get up the next mornin' and call it a thing that happened to two people who were standin' too close together.

This one she takes my face in both hands first.

Doesn't say anything. Just holds it, and looks at me for about four seconds in the dark with the window unit goin', and there ain't one thing accidental about any of it.

The cut comes off this time. She takes it off my shoulders herself and she does it slow, and she sets it on the dresser instead of the floor, and she knows what she's doin' when she does that, and I don't have a single thing to say about it.

Bed's too small. Neither of us mentions it.

She's got a hand on the back of my neck the whole time and she keeps it there. I've had women hold on. This ain't holdin' on. She's got two fingers up in the hair at the base of my skull and she keeps steady pressure there like she's makin' sure I don't go anywhere, and every time I get some distance she takes it back.

"Look at me," she says.

I do.

"Don't stop lookin' at me."

There's a wet stripe of light off the water comin' through the window and across the bed and it moves when the wind moves. She's got a scar under her collarbone I didn't see in the hallway. She's got a place on her left side that makes her laugh, once, before she stops laughin'.

I say her name a lot. More than I mean to.

She says mine at the end, and it's the wrong one, and it's the only name she's got for me, and that's a thing I turn over a long time afterward.

It's over slow and it's over quiet and neither of us gets up.

We lay there in the dark in a bed built for one person, and she puts her forehead against my shoulder, and outside the frogs are goin' and somewhere out on the water somethin' big goes down under.

"Okay," she says. "So that one wasn't a mistake."

"No."

"Damn."

"Yeah."

She laughs into my shoulder. I feel it more than hear it, and I lay there with my hand flat on her back countin' her breathin' and I don't sleep for a long while.

When it’s finally morning, I try to make her breakfast.

That's an actual crime. Not the woman in the house, not the lyin', not what I did to Roy Duplessis's door frame. What I did to that skillet.

"What is it?"

"Eggs."