Page 23 of The Boo Next Door

"Please."

When I finally move over her, into her, the whole world narrows to the heat of her and the breath she takes — sharp, then long, then settling around me like the click of a joint finding true. She's ready for me, more than ready; she pulls me deeper with her heel at the small of my back and her eyes stay open, that's the thing I'm not braced for, that brown gone almost black, watching me like the answer to a question she's been running the math on for weeks.

"There you are," she whispers.

Both promises. The letter in the drawer. Every careful architecture I've built since Cleveland. I feel the whole system go, cleanly, like a strap cut at the anchor, and I stop being careful. I move with her slow and deep until slow stops being possible, until she's meeting me with her heel hard at my back and her nails scoring lines down my shoulders I'll wear under my shirt for a week like a commendation. The bed announces us to the house. The house can file a report. She pulls my mouth down to hers and we trade breath more than kisses now, too far gone for craft, and when I get a hand between us and find where she needs it she says my name like a fuse blowing, and her breath goes ragged and her spine bows, and the narration comes back in fragments — my name, a curse, a laugh, my name again — and when she tightens around me and comes apart the second time, I follow her over with a sound I haven't made in this house or any other, her hands holding my face like something worth keeping.

After, she lies across my chest in the lamplight, tracing the scar on my forearm from a car fire in twenty-nineteen, and her voice comes back the way it does, softer, unarmored.

"Your heart's going like a fire bell."

"It's had a night."

"Poor heart." She spreads her hand flat over it, proprietary, and is quiet for a while, and I think she's gone under, and then: "I haven't done this since Florida. Not the — this part. The staying part. I'm bad at the staying part, historically. I get loud and weird and I leave before anyone can inventory me." Her chin comes up off my chest, and in the lamplight she looks about as defended as the pine box on my shelf. "I'm informing you that I'm planning to be bad at leaving instead. As a pilot program."

"Noted," I say, because if I say more than one word right now, all of them will come out, every last one, and two of them are in a drawer in my garage.

"Mm." She yawns against my collarbone. The cat, who let himself in through some breach I'll find in the morning, is asleep at the foot of the bed on my side, a black stone with opinions, and I have never felt less alone in my life, and that is the exact moment the guilt arrives.

Because forty feet from this bed, under a tarp in my garage, is her inheritance. In the workbench drawer is a letter with her name in it that she's never read. And the woman asleep on my chest thinks the only thing I've been keeping from her is a fog schedule.

I'll tell her after the contest. All of it — the letter, the props, the money, where the money goes. After the Gourd is decided, when the truth can't tip the scale, when it's history instead of strategy. It's the right call. It's the careful call.

I run it twice more, and it holds, the way bad welds hold. Right up until they don't.

"Hey." Half-asleep, from somewhere against my ribs. "The moon in your garage. The paper one, with the chip. Where'd it actually come from? It looks hand-built."

The lamplight. The cat. Her breath already going long and even, asking on the way down, no suspicion in it at all. Now, says some load alarm, deep in the structure. Tell her now, while it's small.

"Came with the house," I say.

She hums, asleep before the lie even lands.

Two truths and a lie, the game goes. I've told her true things all night with my hands and my mouth and my stupid wide-open chest.

And I've just spent my lie.

Chapter 9

Lila

Iwake up in my own bed with someone else's flannel and a pilot program, and downstairs, before coffee, before consciousness fully boots, I catch myself humming.

"We don't hum," I inform the coffee maker. FILTERS ARE NOT OPTIONAL, LILA, the coffee maker replies, as it has replied for fourteen years, and I stand in Bee's kitchen humming and grinning at a fire-hazard appliance like a woman in a shampoo commercial, and this is what's become of me. Nineteen days. The town saint took nineteen days, and the flannel isn't even a good flannel, it's work-worn and it's enormous on me and it smells like cedar, and I have zero intention of giving it back, ever, and that's the whole diagnosis right there.

Here's what the week looks like, since the group chat is going to reconstruct it anyway.

Mornings, coffee gets handed over the fence. Whoever's up first walks it over — his tar, my cider abomination, the treaty's only stable clause. Days, we build separately, doors closed, because the cold war is still officially scheduled for November first and neither of us has the paperwork to end it. Evenings — evenings are a jurisdictional mess I decline to map. His kitchen. My porch.

The night it rained again, nobody's kitchen at all.

That one deserves a line in the record, actually, because it's Tuesday, and I'm crossing the yards at nine with a sample of scrim under my jacket for his opinion, strictly professional, and the sky just opens. No warning, no preamble, October dumping a full reservoir on Foxglove Lane, and I make his porch at a dead sprint, soaked in eight seconds flat, and he opens the door already laughing at me — openly, the real laugh, spending it like he's rich now — and I say something extremely dignified like don't, and he says come here, and we do not make it past the hallway.

The scrim sample dies for the cause. My jacket hits the floor, his shirt follows it on grounds of fairness, and he presses me up against the wall between his level pictures with rain hammering the porch roof and his mouth hot on my cold-rain skin, and it's nothing like the first time. The first time was careful, a man reading a gauge. This is two people who know exactly what they're doing and exactly what it costs and have decided, mid-hallway, wet through, to pay it: his hands and my hands in a fast unlaughing negotiation, my leg hitched over his hip, his breath gone rough at my ear saying my name and hold on in the same sentence, and I hold on. And when he lifts me, both hands, no ceremony, my back flat to the wall and my ankles locked behind him, the rain on the roof is the only thing in the world louder than us. It builds fast and breaks harder, his forehead dropped to my shoulder and my fingers buried in his wet hair, the two of us laughing and not-laughing into each other's necks. We come together right there against the wainscoting he definitely installed himself, urgent and gasping and gloriously undignified, and one of the pictures ends up crooked, and afterward, wrapped in the blanket off his couch with my chin on his chest and the rain still going, I look at that one tilted frame for a long, satisfied while.

"Leave it," I tell him, when he follows my eyes. "One degree. It's the only honest thing on the wall."

He leaves it. As far as I know, it's crooked still.