Page 68

He blinks, like nobody’s asked him that since the funeral.

“Ruth,” he says. “Ruth Barrett. She sang in the car. Terribly. She knew she was terrible. She did it anyway, to make me laugh.”

“That sounds like someone I’d have liked.”

“She’d have liked you,” he says. “She’d have been scared of you. She’d have liked you anyway.”

* * *

I stand up. I take his hand and lead him down the hall. He follows on his crutches at the pace his leg allows, and he doesn’t look at a single window or test a single lock or ask which side of the bed faces the door.

At the bed, I take the crutches and lean them where he can reach them.

I open my mouth to say it. The door. The keys. Either of us can stop. I’ve said some version of it every time, and so has he, and I get halfway into the first word and find I don’t need it. The door is open. My keys are on the dresser. He knows. I know he knows.

So I don’t say anything. I pull my shirt over my head, and he watches me do it, and neither of us asks the other a single question.

He watches me undress and doesn’t turn his stillness into a show. His hands stay open on the sheet. I take his shirt off for him. A week out of his old job hasn’t made him any less formidable. It’s just made the cost easier to see: the yellowing bruise on his forearm, the tiredness under his eyes, the careful way he holds his leg.

I work his loose pants down, left leg first, then the right, without bending his knee or touching the bandage. Being practical survives being naked. I’m not sorry about that.

When I come back to him, he reaches for me without waiting to be asked, one palm on my waist, the other sliding up my back, and it takes me a second to understand why that undoes me. It’s the first time he has. He just holds me, and I kiss him, and he opens under me with a low sound that I feel all the way down.

I lie along his good side. He cups my breast and rolls my nipple between rough fingers and watches my face instead of asking how it feels. I slide my hand down his stomach and wrap it around him, and his head goes back against the headboard.

“You look troubled,” I say.

“I’m adjusting to excellent conditions.”

“Try not to make a crisis out of it.”

I put my mouth on him before he can answer.

His fingers slide into my hair. Not pushing. Not steering. Just spreading against the back of my head and staying there while I set the pace. The sound he makes is rough enough that I feel it.

“Sofia.”

It’s a warning and a thank-you and a surrender, all in two syllables.

I lift my head before he comes. “My turn.”

I move around him carefully, knees on either side of his shoulders, facing his feet, my weight on the mattress and nowhere near his leg. The first slow pass of his tongue makes me grab the sheet. I take him in my mouth again, and he groans against me, and for a while there’s nothing in the world but that. His tongue and his fingers inside me, my mouth and my hand on him, both of us losing the rhythm and finding it and losing it again, nothing hidden, nothing held back.

He curls his fingers and finds the exact place, and I come with him still in my mouth, my thighs shaking, my free hand flat on his hip.

I lift up enough to breathe and keep going with my hand and my mouth. His stomach goes hard. His hips stay down. His bad leg stays still. His hand grips the sheet instead of my head.

“Sofia.”

He comes hard, with a sound I want to keep, and I stay with him through all of it.

Afterward, getting off him takes more coordination than seducing him did. I check the pillow under his leg and settle along his good side, and his hand opens over my back and stays there.

Morning light lies across the open bedroom door. Neither of us says anything.

I think it then. Lying there with my cheek on his chest, feeling his heart slow down under my ear. I love you. The words are right there, behind my teeth.

I don’t say them. Not yet. I want to say them somewhere he can’t mistake them for something I owe him for this morning.