Page 14 of Soft Erasure

He had given me the blind spot and called it small.

“Trust is faster,” he had said, “when you give a person a small thing first.”

In the paperback light, the second one was clear too: the night itself, lucidity handed like the blind spot.

He told me and didn’t tell me. That was the only kind of telling this building did.

I counted to seven. I put it back on.

Adherence: 96 → 94. Two points. The cost of knowing.

I did the math where it could not be logged.

They had told me the floor they wanted me to fear: below sixty the front door stops knowing the band.

They had not told me what waited under that floor. I looked down anyway. The looking was new.

The number ran two directions.

They had built the system for a woman who only counted up.

I dressed. I sat at the breakfast bar. The tray had not come.

The tablet sat six inches left of where it had been at three. I didn’t move it back.

I waited.

I told myself I was waiting to read him as he read me, and that was true, and it was not all of it.

I had put my back to the door so I would hear him before I saw him, and I had stopped pretending the feeling was only fear.

The other half of it had a shape now, and the shape was him.

I hated how much of me had turned toward that shape. I hated it and let myself have it anyway, for one dishonest minute: the gap he’d measured in the car, finally closed, his mouth where his fingers had only ever checked for a pulse. I was aching low, in places the band didn’t have a column for, my skin too warm for a floor doing exactly what it was built to do, and no one coming to check. If he’d engineered this feeling like he’d engineered the floor, I couldn’t find the seam, and not finding it scared me more than wanting him did. Some nights hating a thing and needing it occupied the same hour, and I couldn’t tell them apart anymore.

At seven-fifty-eight the lock of 6B clicked: the quiet one.

Not a warning. A fact, arriving.

The sound went through me where the count goes. My pulse moved. The band logged it.

He would read the log later and know the lock had a sound inside my body.

At eight Matthew came in with the tray.

He had a key to a room that was not mine, and he used it.

He came in carrying food for the person he kept, and my body turned the last inch toward him before my head gave the order. I let it. I always let it.

I had told myself in the dark that his face would wait, that some entries you don’t make until you’re ready to be searched for them. In the morning light I gave that up in under a second. The sweater sat different on a real body than it had in memory, more weight than I’d let myself imagine. His jaw was cleaner than the version I had built behind my face. I finished the entry I had refused to start. It did not make the room any easier to stand in.

He had not knocked. He had not needed to.

He had kept me awake all night, and I had spent it with my back to the door, waiting for it to open, and that was the sentence I would not write down even behind my face.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Tray