Page 49 of The Drifter

"I'm not doing anything."

"You’re doing something."

"I'm looking at you." He said it plain. "That's all I've been doing since I walked in that lobby."

We stood there.

Then, I put my hands flat on his chest, because I wanted to, because there was no reason not to, because it was mine to do.

"I want water," I said.

"Then, get some."

"Come with me."

We went into my kitchen naked.

It was the single most ridiculous thing I have ever done, and it was also one of the best.

I drank a glass of water standing at my own counter with nothing on. He leaned against the doorframe of my kitchen with his arms crossed and watched me do it. He offered no commentary. The light off the harbor came in and lay all over both of us, and I did not put anything on.

It was awful for a few minutes.

I kept catching myself. My hands kept going places—over my stomach, up to my collarbone, folding across me. Every time they did, I would notice, and put them down, and stand there. He never once said a word about it. He never looked away and he never made a show of not looking. Slowly, by degrees, it stopped being a thing I was surviving and started being a thing that was happening.

By the end of it, I was leaning against my refrigerator eating cold rice out of a container with a fork, naked, arguing with a man about whether Tommy Bahama constituted a crime.

"It's a crime, Clint."

"It's a shirt."

"It has fish on it."

"It's comfortable."

"So is death."

He laughed.

He went looking for the bathroom after that. I told him down the hall, second on the left. I was rinsing the glass.

I heard the door open.

The wrong one.

I stood at my sink with the water running and my whole body went cold. I knew exactly which door he'd opened, because I know the sound of every door in that condo, the way I know every stair in that hotel.

The empty room. The one with the dresser and the good morning light and nothing else in it at all.

I turned off the water.

I stood there in my kitchen with my hands on the edge of the sink and my hair down my back and my heart going, and I waited for him to ask.

He was in there a moment. Not long.

Then, I heard the door close, soft. Not slammed. Not left open. Closed, the way you close a door in somebody's house when you’ve understood something about them and have decided you’re not going to say so.

He came down the hall. He came back into my kitchen and he leaned in the doorframe again. He looked at me, and his face had nothing on it but calm.