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“I know.”

“No, I mean it. Oh, Brody. It’s perfect,” she’d said, and gone up the steps ahead of him.

They hadn’t done anything. She’d gone to sleep on his shoulder over the second slice of pie, the way she had in the bed of a truck at the drive-in, and he’d sat there with a woman asleep on him in his own house on his own ground and not moved for an hour. Then he’d eased her down onto the jacket and lain beside her and looked at a tarp till it went gray.

She woke up. She did it the way she did everything, all at once, and looked at the tarp, and at the fire, and at him.

“You’re awake.”

“I’ve been awake.”

“How long.”

“Since about the time you started snoring.”

“I don’t snore.”

“You snore in a house with no roof. It’s the acoustics.” He didn’t move. “It’s six-thirty. There’s no stove, no coffee, and Chase is coming at nine with a ladder and an opinion. If you want to leave before he gets here, I’ll drive you.”

She lay there and looked at him.

“I’m not leaving.”

“I know.”

“I said it in a bar. I said it three times.”

“You said it four. I counted.” He put his hand on her face. “I’m asking anyway. I’m going to ask every morning for a while, till it stops feeling like a thing a man has to ask. You can tell me when.”

She turned her face into his hand.

“Nobody ever asked me to stay before,” she said. “That’s what I couldn’t say at the bar. I’ve had a foster home and a dorm and a duplex and a house in Indianapolis and a guest room at the top of your father’s stairs, and not one soul in any of them ever once said, stay. They said, you can if you want. They said, there’s a room. Lorna said it with her hands, folding my clothes back into a bag for twelve years, and never once with her mouth, because she didn’t want to make me. You stood in a room and said it twice. Plain. To my face. And I went down the hall.” She shut her eyes. “That’s what I’ve been sick about. Not the lie. The lie was what I did with it. You asked, and I’d never been asked, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I did the thing I know how to do, which is go.”

He lay there with his hand on her face and let her say it, because he’d learned that on the porch step.

“I’m asking,” he said. “Stay.”

“Yes.”

“That’s five.”

“Shut up,” she said, and her eyes were wet, and she was laughing, and he kissed her before she could say anything else.

It was slow, because they had nowhere to be and nobody down the hall and nothing agreed and nothing owed, on a bedroll on a floor in a house with no roof, in November, with the light coming in gray and gold over a tarp and a fire he’d have to feed in a minute.

He got her out of the T-shirt with the light on her, and it was the morning that undid him, her on her back on his jacket with her hair everywhere, the fire on one side of her and the sun on the other, no wall between them and anybody, nobody coming. He put his mouth on her stomach and felt her hand come to the back of his head the way it had the night before Odessa, and stay.

“Brody.”

“I’m here.”

“I know where you are. I can see you. It’s daylight and there’s no roof.” She looked down the length of herself at him. “Don’t go slow because you think you have to. Go slow because you want to.”

“I want to.”

“Then that’s all right,” she said, and put her head back.

So he went slow. He put his mouth on her and she didn’t cover hers, because there was nobody for two miles to hear it, and she let him hear all of it, in his own house, with his name in it, and her hand in his hair, and when she went she went with her heel in the bedroll and her back off the jacket and the sun on her face, and he stayed with her, and came up, and she was crying.