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When I collapse beside him we're both breathing hard. Come is cooling on his skin and mine. I reach for the edge of the sheet and clean us up roughly, then toss it aside.

After, he lies on his back on my bed with one arm thrown over his eyes, the way he lay in Denver the first night.

I'm on my side next to him. The room's gone dark around us. Neither of us has turned on the lamp. The only light is from the city coming in through the window, orange and gray, and it lands on his chest and on the scar through his eyebrow and on the pale stripe on his finger where the ring was.

He hasn't said anything for a while.

"You okay?" I ask.

He takes his arm off his eyes. He looks at the ceiling.

"I don't know," he says. Then, after a second: "Yes."

"Which one?"

"Both." He turns his head and looks at me. His face is different. Not the closed restaurant. Something with all the lights on. "Is that allowed?"

"Everything's allowed," I say. "There's no list."

That almost gets a laugh. He breathes it out through his nose.

"You said my name," I tell him.

"I know."

"Four times."

"You were counting?"

"I'm always counting." I prop my head on my hand. "That's three days in advance. You're covered till Wednesday."

He looks at me. Then he reaches over, slow, and pushes my hair back off my forehead with his fingers. His hand stays there, against the side of my head.

"Rémy," he says.

"Five."

"Rémy."

"Six. Now you're just showing off."

He's smiling. Not the ghost of it, not the place where a smile would go. The whole thing, all the way up to his eyes, lines at the corners of them I've never seen before because he's never used them in front of me.

I got it. I told myself on opening night I'd get it before the season was over.

It's the second week of November.

I lie there next to him in the dark with his hand in my hair. Down the hall, the ice machine drops another load, and this time neither of us jumps.

Chapter Thirteen

OWEN

I wake up at five in the morning in the wrong bed.

It takes me a second to understand where I am. The ceiling's wrong. The light's wrong, gray and thin, coming in around a curtain that's on the wrong side of the room. There's a weight across my chest, warm and heavy, and I can't figure out what it is until I look down.

It's his arm.