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My hip answered before my mouth could get the lie out. It rolled toward him. It leaned into the weight of his palm after a day of wanting that one hand, and there it was again, the piece of me I’d never once figured out how to pack.

“Hey,” he said, low. It wasn’t a question. It was the word he used when he’d decided a thing and was giving me the half second to catch up.

“I’m tired.” The sentence was all I had, and he heard the lie in it as he heard everything in that house.

“You’re not.” His hand moved, slow, up the dip of my waist and back down. “You’ve been somewhere else all week. Come back a minute.”

Coming back was the one thing I couldn’t afford. A woman halfway out a door couldn’t stand all the way inside it and let herself clock how warm the room was. I knew it. I’d written it on the inside of my own skull every morning since New Year’s.

I came back anyway. My body had made up its mind well before I made up mine, and my arithmetic never stood a chance against it.

He got up over me on one elbow and put his mouth on mine, unhurried, as if we had all the nights left in the world and not a countdown only I could see. He kissed me until I quit listening for the casita, for the clock, for the careful version of me that was supposed to be managing all of this. Then he pulled back an inch.

“Same as always,” he said, against my mouth. “You tell me to stop, we stop. Here, in a minute, at the end. Tell me you’ve got that.”

“I’ve got it,” I said, and my voice had already dropped low, into the register I only ever used for him.

“Good.” There was no flourish on it. It was the plain word he set down over a thing done right, and I shut my eyes in the dark so he wouldn’t catch what it did to me, because I’d decided to leave this man and here I was coming apart at the seams of his one-word approval.

He undressed me his way, which was slow and not mine, peeling the shirt up and waiting while I lifted for him, drawing the rest off and dropping it over the side of the bed where I’d have to hunt for it at four. I’d spent days carrying my things down the hall, and here he was taking the last of them off me and setting them on his floor, and some stubborn animal part of me kept score of that and hated how glad it was.

“Still.” He caught my hand when it went for him and set it back on the mattress. “Let me.”

So I let him. I lay in the dark and let him have the run of it, which was the arrangement, which was the hunger I’d found out I’d been starving on through six years of reaching for a man’s belt on a schedule and calling it love. He took his time. He always took his time, and tonight I understood, plainly and without mercy, that I was counting his hands while he worked, memorizing the span of them, the callus at the base of each finger from a stick, the weight he leaned in and the weight he held back, because a morning was coming when I’d wake in a bed in Boston or Mesa with twenty-two cubbies waiting on me and no one in the dark who knew to go slow.

When he moved over me there was nothing between us, what we’d decided at Christmas, his skin along the length of mine, and I’d believed that first night it couldn’t get closer than that and been proven wrong every night since. He pushed in slow and stopped deep and held there, his forehead down on mine, breathing with me, giving me the second he always gave me first.

“Where’d you go?” he said, into the few inches of dark between our faces, because even here he could feel the half inch of me holding itself off. He felt everything. He’d always felt everything, and he had aimed it at making sure of me, and he had no idea he was making sure of a woman with two applications in and a new timing belt in her car.

“I’m here,” I said, and for the length of that sentence it was even true.

“Stay,” he said, and started to move. “Right here. With me.”

I stayed. I couldn’t run the trick I’d gotten so good at, the leaving while present, the handing over of the bright funny surface while the real one packed a crate in the back room. It didn’t work here. Here there was no surface to hand him. He had the actual one of me, the one under all the rest, the one that answered his hand and his weight and his low voice and had never managed to pretend with him, not once, not in a bed. Laid out plain in the dark, it was the real devastation. I could lie to him at the sink. I could lie to Iris about a sweater. I couldn’t lie to him here, in the one room where the retracting didn’t work, where I couldn’t carry myself out a quiet piece at a time, because the second he had his hands on me there was only the one of me and she was his and she was grieving him mid-breath and couldn’t make herself stop.

He moved in me slow at first, long and deep, drawing almost all the way out and pushing back to the hilt so I had every inch of it, reading every sound I made and giving back what it asked for. Then he changed it, shorter and harder, grinding against me at the top of each stroke where it undid me, and when I started to climb he spread his hand flat on my stomach and pressed me down into the mattress.

“Not yet.”

He held me there on the edge of it, still moving, still working the same place, until I was begging in a voice I used nowhere else on earth.

“Please. Eli. Please.”

“Now.”

I went over with his name breaking into pieces in my mouth and his lips on my throat, and it didn’t crest and fall so much as lock, every muscle drawing down tight around him and holding there, my back bowed up off the mattress and into the only hands I had ever fully trusted. I was coming and grieving him in the same breath, my body clamped around him and the loss coming up right behind it, the two so tangled I couldn’t have told a living soul where the one stopped and the other began.

He followed me a few strokes after, deep and shaking, my name once into my hair and then no words at all, his weight coming down over me and his breath gone ragged at my neck, and I held his head there with both hands and let myself have the full press of him pinning me to the bed, the realest thing in the dark house, for as long as it lasted.

Then it was after, and after was where I lived now.

He gathered me up the moment his breathing eased, got an arm under me and turned us so I lay along his side with my leg thrown over his and his hand moving slow up and down my back, settling me, the part he never once skipped, the part six years of a grateful man had never thought to include and I hadn’t known to miss until this one handed it over without my asking. He brought me down easy. He always brought me down easy.

“There you are,” he said, low, pleased, reading the loose quiet of my body for the only thing it had ever told him before.

It wasn’t that tonight. I lay against him with my face where his pulse ran slow and let him believe it was, because the truth would take from both of us what I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and I ran the arithmetic one more time against the warm skin of the man who thought I was his, counting the weeks, counting the cushion, counting the nights like this one I had left and couldn’t make myself stop taking.

“Better,” he said into my hair. It wasn’t a question. He thought he’d brought me back. He’d mended the quiet at the sink as he mended everything in that house, with his hands and his certainty, and he was already most of the way under, sure of me, sure of the house, sure of an arrangement with an end date on it only one of us could read.