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His hand moved another two inches up and his thumb was at the seam of my leggings, and he had to be able to feel how wet I was through the fabric, and I was right on the edge of the rest of my life.

Then he stopped. He put his forehead down against my collarbone and stayed right where he was. His hand didn’t move, and it didn’t leave either.

“Not like this,” he said.

I couldn’t get a word out.

He lifted his head. He was wrecked. His mouth was swollen and his hair was a disaster and the black eye made all of it worse.

“Not in a hallway,” he said. “Not with my daughter on the other side of the kitchen and her door open.”

“Eli.”

“When I get you I want the whole night.” His hand was still on my thigh. “No clock on it. Nobody in this house but us. I am not doing this against a door in eleven minutes because we couldn’t wait.”

“Then when?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He laughed. It broke out of him rough and surprised, and he put his forehead back down on my collarbone.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. I’ll get you one.”

I stood there with my back against my own door and his thumb still resting at the seam, and every nerve I owned still pointed at it.

“Okay,” I said. His hand flexed once on my thigh. “Okay,” I said again, and the second one was a yes to the night he was building, and his face changed with it.

“I know,” he said.

He kissed me again, hard and short. Then he took his hand back himself, because I had no intention of helping him do it.

“Go to bed, baby girl.”

“You have got to stop saying that to me while you’re sending me away.”

“No,” he said.

He had said I’ll get you one in the flat voice he used for lineup changes and grocery lists, which in his house was the sound of a decision made, with only the scheduling left.

I had run a classroom of twenty-two five-year-olds through a fire drill without raising my voice. I stood on the wrong side of my own door with my legs shaking and couldn’t make myself open it.

I let myself in eventually and turned on the desk lamp and opened the laptop.

The document was fifty-one pages long. I read the last paragraph I’d written, a woman in a hallway with her eyes on a man in a doorway, and it was careful and it was good and every honest line in it had been moved one room over.

I deleted it.

Then I wrote the hallway, the hand on the thigh and the forehead on the collarbone, what he said, word for word, and what I said back. For the first time in fifty-one pages I didn’t change what happened to make it easier to put on a page. I typed out what I’d asked him for, the fuck and all, and my face burned in an empty room with no one to see it, and I kept typing.

I wrote for three hours. Deep into the night I stopped and read it from the top, and I sat there with my hand over my mouth, because it was the best writing I had ever done and there was no version of my life where I could ever let anybody read it.

Then, through my wall, the kitchen tap turned off. He was still up too.

CHAPTER 15

Eli