Page 46 of Soft Erasure

He didn’t look at me at all.

He looked into the chrome, where his reflection stood, where mine stood beside his, where Jess and Noah stood at the far edge of the metal.

The chrome gave back two of every motion, his and its twin. In the half-second between them I couldn’t have said which was the hand and which was the glass.

That was the box. Not to hide the touch from a camera. To take my own eyes out from under me while it happened.

He didn’t look at Jess. To him Jess was furniture, a resident, and residents watched things they couldn’t stop.

“Amber,” he said, to the chrome. “Roll the shoulder back. Two clicks.”

I didn’t roll. I held.

He turned. He didn’t step toward me.

He stood the way he had stood in my kitchen, at the distance he had measured out. The body set on an angle so that anything he did would come out as half a gesture, what a man calls an adjustment and no one is ever asked to explain.

He raised his hand. He didn’t bring it to my shoulder.

He brought it, index finger out, to the small hollow over the collarbone on the right side, and he stopped it there. He didn’t close the last of the distance.

The platinum sat half an inch off my skin and the heat of the finger came across the gap ahead of the finger.

He didn’t press. There was nothing to press.

He said my name. Lower than he had said it to the chrome.

“Drop the chin. Half a click.”

I didn’t drop.

Nothing landed, and my skin came up to meet it anyway.

A half-degree of warmth in the hollow, the place waking to a pressure that wasn’t there. The want ran under it, low and insistent, for the half-inch he was keeping for himself.

My body leaned the smallest fraction into the almost, before I caught it, before I hauled it back.

The wanting came up as it came now, without my leave, ahead of me, a motion in the body that had no column on my wrist and answered to no number.

I knew what he had done. I knew the nine days.

I knew the folio under the carpet and the name I wouldn’t say.

I knew the finger over the hollow was a man putting a mark on the place he had decided was his and doing it without touching me, so that nothing in the room could be written down after.

And I wanted the hand to land.

Both were true, the knowing and the wanting, and they didn’t cancel, and they didn’t soften.

They didn’t move my feet or my face. They moved the one thing in the room that could be read.

Jess was looking at the ceiling. At the camera in the ceiling. Making her own face the thing the lens could not turn from.

Noah was looking at my wrist.

The charm on my band caught the chrome light. Noah looked at the place the 7 lived.

He’d done it in my kitchen with the bread going cold on the counter, and no one had explained the band to him then either.