Page 71 of Soft Erasure

I went into the bathroom.

I didn’t decide to. My body decided it the same as it had decided the seven-count on the dock, before my mouth caught up. The bathroom had no lens. It was the only room in that apartment that didn’t, and whatever the band was reading off me in that kitchen was going to sit on a server in Penelope’s office by noon, filed under a name that was not mine. I would not give him that. Not this. Not the read on my face right now.

I heard him behind me before the door closed.

He didn’t knock either.

“You don’t get to walk out of a conversation about my family.”

“I’m not walking out of it. I’m walking out of the part of the room that logs it.”

That stopped him. Nothing in the kitchen had.

He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame, not on me. For the first time since the lake I watched Matthew Caldren look at a door he was not sure he had permission to come through. Thirteen months he had walked through every door I had. He had never asked.

“Close it,” I said. “Or don’t. But you don’t get to be in here and still be the man who reads the wire on Thursday. Pick one.”

He closed it.

The tile was cold through my socks, as it always was. I’d taken the book off the shelf on the way in, an old habit my hand ran without asking me. The matchbook was in my palm before I noticed I had worked it out of the spine. Green foil. Callow’s card still folded inside it, Jess’s note behind it, my mother’s two lines behind that. The only things I owned that had never been logged.

He was watching my hand.

“That’s the one from the lake.”

“You know what it is.”

“I know you have never once put it down.” He had not moved from the door.

“You came in here to keep something off a readout,” he said, “not off me.”

“Both.”

“You can’t have both.”

“Watch me.”

He crossed the tile. Three steps, the whole distance, and he didn’t stop where he had stopped on Saturday. His hand came up the same as it had in the courtyard, the soft place under my jaw, and this time there was nothing behind it counting. I felt for it anyway, the old reflex, the six that should have been coming.

It didn’t come.

“No count,” I said, half a question.

“No count.” His voice had gone somewhere I had not heard it go. Not the elevator voice. Not the discharge voice. A voice with no readout built for it yet. “I don’t have one for this.”

I put the matchbook down on the closed lid of the toilet, the only flat surface in the room, because I needed my hand for something else and because the wanting knew better than to be the thing holding the evidence when it happened.

I said his name the way I had in the courtyard, out loud, on purpose, the only two syllables in that entire apartment that had never belonged to the machine.

“Matthew.”

His control went out from under him on the second syllable. I felt it go, the way you feel a held door stop being held. His mouth found mine and there was nothing careful in it this time, nothing reset at the eye, nothing measured for a camera that could not see us anyway. His hands were in my hair and then not, my back finding the cold tile. I understood somewhere under all of it that I was the one who had walked into this room and I was the one still choosing it, second by second, with everything in me that could still say no and didn’t.

He stopped with his mouth an inch off mine. Both hands still where I could see them.

“Tell me to stop.”

“No.”