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She looked back at me over her shoulder.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you do.”

Then she stepped through the door. I sat in my own kitchen in a ruined pair of suit pants gone cold against me, with my pulse beating in my cheekbone, and a considerable number of promises made to a woman who had only heard the beginning of them.

I emptied what was left of the bag into the sink, ran the tap hot and burned the cold out of my hands, and hung the towel over the oven handle where it belonged.

I put Gerald back on Iris’s pillow, on his side with his head toward the door, which was how she left him. Then I put my back against the frame of my own doorway in a dark house with a black eye and a split lip, a woman on the other side of the kitchen who I’d have bet money was still awake, and I didn’t think about a single thing except how quiet it would stay until I went and got her.

CHAPTER 14

Delaney

I woke up before it was light with my thighs aching, and I lay there in the dark with my hand over my eyes and made myself put all of it into plain words, in order, the same as a statement to a cop.

I came on Eli Kovac’s lap with all my clothes on. He never got a single item off me. He held my hips and set the pace and wouldn’t let me speed it up, and I came apart on top of him on a bar stool in his own kitchen, in his jersey, with nobody in the house to hear any of it. Under the sheet I pressed my thumbs into my own hipbones, where his had been, and they were tender.

Then he came in his suit pants. I played back the noise he made when it happened, low and rough into my neck, a man losing an argument with his own body and not trying to win it.

I’d spent six years in a bed with a man who needed a diagram and a running start, and I’d built a theory out of it. The theory was that I was the problem. There was no single bad night in it. I’d simply arrived, around year three, at a quiet working assumption that the fault ran through me and the adult position was to stop bringing it up.

Nobody ever said it to me directly. I got there because David sighed when I told him what I wanted, and because he stopped talking afterward and still wasn’t talking at breakfast, buttering his toast with his back turned to me. I got there because he said you’re so hard to please on a Tuesday, lightly, as a joke, so that six months later I couldn’t produce it as evidence that he’d ever meant it. Six years of that and I stopped having preferences. My preferences had turned out to be expensive.

Last night a professional athlete came in his pants in his own kitchen because I moved on him for a few minutes fully dressed.

I lay in the dark and got angry. I didn’t get weepy. I got angry flat on my back with my hands over my face, at a level I hadn’t let myself reach in a very long time, and I didn’t make a sound doing it. I’d given that man six years and taken a verdict that belonged to him, and I’d carried it every day as if it were mine. I got smaller in increments so gradual I couldn’t point to the week it happened. From the first year to the last, my body had worked exactly as it was supposed to. It took a few minutes on a kitchen stool with my clothes on to prove it.

By the time the light rose behind the blinds the anger had burned down into a plain satisfaction. I stretched my legs out under the sheet. My thighs complained. I let them.

I did that to him. This body did it, in leggings and his jersey, on a bar stool. It wasn’t a compliment, and that was why it counted. His body did it for him before he got a vote.

I got up sure I could pick up the casita and move it three feet to the left, and stepped into the shower and put my forehead against the tile with the water beating on the back of my neck.

I want you to ask me for it. Out loud, in words, in the exact voice you’re using right now.

I’d done it. I’d said the filthiest sentence of my life to a man who wouldn’t let me nod, and instead of dying of it I’d come away forty pounds lighter, and I’d slept straight through for the first time since I got to Phoenix.

The sex didn’t scare me. The relief did.

I’d thought, in an abstract way, that if anything ever happened between us it would be a relief valve. The pressure would drain off. The pressure hadn’t drained off. The pressure had found out what it was for.

He was in the kitchen by the time I got there, with his back to me. He had on a gray t-shirt, his feet were bare, and his hair was wet and curling at the nape, and the shirt stuck to him in one damp patch between his shoulder blades.

He turned around. The eye was worse. The bone under it had turned a deep plum color that spread up toward his temple, and the left side of his face was swollen out of its shape. The tape was off the lip and the split had scabbed over dark, and he was carrying his jaw a little to the right of where it belonged.

We found each other’s eyes down the length of his counter. Everything I’d been rehearsing emptied straight out of my head.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

He poured the second cup, one sugar and a splash of milk, and slid it down the counter to me. My hand wasn’t steady.

“Your face looks terrible.”

“I told you it would.”

“I didn’t think you meant that.”