Page 30 of The Drifter

I hadn't stopped. I'd been thinking about him under everything, the way you think about a bill you haven't opened. Now, there was nothing on top of it anymore, and it came all the way up.

Clint.

He'd dislodged something. He came into my building and asked me one plain question. It was like a man putting the flat of his hand on a wall and finding out the wall was a door.

What would you be doing if you weren't standing there?

I had been standing there for so long. My mother stood there before me. I'd been sitting in that linen closet with a coloring book since I was old enough to be told to be quiet. In all those years, all those thousands of people I have handed a key to, not one of them had ever turned the question around.

And he wasn't even doing anything. That's what kept getting me. He wasn't charming me. He'd stood at my counter with his hands empty and his bag on the floor and just—waited. Like a man with nowhere on earth to be. Like my answer was worth the wait.

I put my forearm over my eyes.

Dubai.

Even in my own bed, in my own head, it made me want to laugh at myself. It made my face go hot. That was a woman in a hallway talking big to a stranger. The woman lying in bed in the morning light knew exactly what stood between her and Dubai.

I didn’t have a passport.

I have never had one. Not once. I had never held one in my hand, never filled out the form, never had the photograph taken.

I had been out of South Carolina—Savannah, a wedding in Charlotte, a bad weekend in Atlanta with a man I don't think about. But I had never been on an airplane that went over water. Most of my life had happened inside a circle you could drive across before lunch. I had told a man that circle was ten miles wide, and I had been rounding up.

So, Dubai wasn't a plan. Dubai was the moon. It was a thing I said out loud once, in a hallway, to a stranger who looked at me like it was reasonable.

I lay there in the light and thought about that a while.

And then, I thought about his hands.

My mind went there the way water goes downhill. I let it, because there was nothing else I was supposed to be doing.

The forearms. Sleeves shoved up and the muscle running down them like rope under the skin. The veins standing up along the back of the hand. The way he had set that bag down on the floor of my lobby. Quietly. Like the marble was mine and he knew it.

The way he crossed the room. That unhurried, ground-eating walk, like the floor belonged to him and he had graciously decided not to bring it up.

And the three feet.

That was the thing that took me apart, lying there. He had walked me the whole length of that lobby and up in that elevator and down that hall. He had never once come inside three feet of me. Not once. Not a hand at the small of my back. Not a body angled in. Not one inch taken that wasn't offered.

I have been touched by men who never asked. I have had a hand land on my hip at that desk while I was printing a receipt.

He had stood in a hotel hallway with nowhere to go and given me every inch of air I had put between us. He had done it on purpose, and he had done it like it was nothing.

Something turned over in me, low down.

I lay still.

Absolutely not, I thought. It came out weak, and I heard how weak it came out.

I do not masturbate. It isn't a rule and it isn't a virtue. It's just that a woman who gives the whole day away comes home with nothing left in the tank—not for herself, not for anybody. I would get into that bed at night and I would be gone before my head found the cold part of the pillow. There was no room in my body for wanting anything.

I had almost forgotten it was a thing my body did.

And now, the light was coming in across my bed, and I had a whole morning in front of me that belonged to nobody, and there was a man in the Magnolia Suite with gray eyes and old boots who had looked at me like I was a question worth the wait.

I turned my face into the pillow.

Then, I rolled onto my back. I let the sheet slide down, and I stopped arguing with myself.