Page 79 of The Drifter

"Work?" Clint asked.

"I'm not going in."

He didn't say anything, but his hand came up and moved slow through my hair. I lay there in the gold light and did the calculations I'd never let myself do. The banked weeks. The years of them, sitting in a spreadsheet like a receipt for a life I'd disappeared out of. I had told myself for so long that I couldn't take the time. It turned out the time had been there the whole while, stacked up and waiting. All it had ever needed was a reason.

I had a reason now. He was lying in my bed.

"I have so much time saved up," I said, mostly to the ceiling. "Do you know that? I could not go to work for—months. Literal months. I've been standing at that desk telling myself I was indispensable, and the truth is I've been indispensable the way a person is indispensable when they've arranged their whole life so nobody ever has to learn to do without them."

"That's a hard thing to say about yourself before coffee."

"I'm feeling brave."

He smiled and kissed the top of my head. For a while, we lay there in the wreck of the bed and were simply happy. It was the kind of happy that has no plot in it, no want, no next thing. Just two people and a morning.

Then, he got up to make the coffee wrong, and I let him. I lay there and listened to him moving around my kitchen like he belonged in it.

And that was when it started.

There was no single moment, no thing I saw, no word he said. It came up the way everything comes up in me, from underneath, through the floor, slow. One second I was warm and loose and listening to a big man hunt for the coffee filters in a drawer he'd already been shown. The next second, there was a cold thing sitting in my chest, and it had been sitting there a while before I noticed it, the way you don't hear the vacuum until you do.

I got up. I put on his shirt—he let me have that one now, on a body he'd already looked at every inch of—and I went and stood in the doorway of my kitchen and watched him.

Watched the way he stood. Watched him set the coffee pot down and, without seeming to, glance at the window. Watched his eyes go, once, fast, to the door, to the locks, cataloguing the exits in this home the way I catalogue a lobby.

Watched a man who could not stop being ready.

What have you done? I thought.

It came in his voice, almost—flat, level, no heat. What have you done, Sasha?

Because I knew what I was looking at. I had always known.

And I had let it into my bed. I had said I love you to it. I had agreed to walk into Dominion Hall—the one place on this earth I had told him, to his face, that I did not trust—and stand at a table full of those men, as his.

The coffee finished. He poured two. He turned around and saw my face, and he set both cups down.

"Hey," he said. "Where'd you go?”

"I'm right here."

"No, you're not. I watched you leave." He came around the counter and stopped in front of me, inside the three feet now, because the three feet were gone—but he read me and gave a little of it back, anyway, a half step, the old courtesy. "Talk to me."

And I almost didn't. I almost reached for the built voice, the smooth one, the one with no seam in it. Nothing, I'm fine, I just need coffee. It was right there. It's always right there. It has never once failed me.

But he'd told me I had two voices and one of them was fake, and he'd know. He'd read it coming off me.

"I'm scared," I said.

He went still.

"Not of you." I said it fast, because his face had done a thing, and I couldn’t stand the thing. "Never of you. Of—" I stopped. Made myself find the true words instead of the smooth ones. "Of what you are. Of what you're in. Clint, this morning I woke up happier than I have been in my whole adult life. It took me about an hour to remember that the reason I'm this happy is a man who walked out my door with a gun and wouldn't promise me he was coming back. And now, the coffee's made and the sun's out and it feels like a normal morning, and it isn't. It isn't a normal morning. There is nothing normal about any of this and I've been letting myself pretend there is, because pretending felt so good."

He didn't argue. That was the worst part. He didn't tell me I was wrong.

"There was a woman in a red convertible outside my building last night," I said. "When you came. I saw her out my window this morning, too—a different car, but I'd bet my condo it's the same person. I've read strangers for a living for fifteen years, Clint. That woman is not reading a paperback. She is watching my door."

Something crossed his face. He didn't confirm it. He didn't deny it either, and I have met the whole family of not-denying-it.