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She did. She bore down and went rigid all over, clenching around me in fast, fluttering pulls, and dropped down against me and caught my name in her teeth against my collarbone and held on through every second of it. I rolled her under me without leaving her, planted my knees, and gave her a few more hard strokes that she took with her breath gone to pieces, and I went over right behind her with her legs locked at the small of my back and her mouth at my ear saying yes, yes, and meaning every one.

She’d crossed the bed in the dark and taken me without anyone asking her to, and nothing else that night mattered to me more.

Later, in the small hours, she said my name in the dark with no want in it at all. She said only my name, checking that I was still there. I said here and put my arm across her.

I came awake all at once at two in the morning, the same as on the road, and lay there working out which room I was in.

She was asleep on her front with one hand under the pillow and her hair across her face and my sheet down around her waist. The streetlight cut through the gap in the blind and lay across her back in a bar.

There had never been a woman asleep in my bed, not once in this house, and not in Edmonton after Katya. There had been me, and a monitor on the nightstand until Iris outgrew it, and the door open a crack so I could hear the hall.

The door was shut.

CHAPTER 20

Delaney

I woke up in his bed and knew where I was before I opened my eyes.

The cold told me. He kept his room colder than any sane person would, and for weeks the air had kicked on at all hours while I failed to see the point of it. The point was plain now, under a heavy sheet, with my back warm from hip to shoulder where a man had been pressed against it most of the night. The sheet had real weight in it, cool everywhere on me except the strip down my spine.

I opened my eyes and didn’t close them again. The blind was still down and the sun had cleared the top of it, and the light coming through the vinyl was flat and white and left every edge in the room soft.

I’d been in his room before. Since September I’d carried his laundry in a couple of times a week and set it on the end of the bed, then turned around and walked straight back out with the empty basket on my hip. I went in, put it down, and went out, with my eyes on the basket. I’d run that rule for weeks and never asked myself why, and I had a pretty good idea why now, lying naked in the middle of his mattress with the sun well up.

So I looked.

It was almost empty. There was a bed, and a dresser with a lamp on it and not much else. There was a chair with no clothes thrown over it, which in a man’s bedroom was practically a medical condition. There was no art. The walls were the color the builder had left them. The room smelled of him and of nothing else.

There was one photograph, on the dresser beside the lamp, propped against the wall instead of hung. It was a much smaller Iris asleep face down on his chest in a chair that was obviously a hospital chair. The photo sat a little crooked inside the frame, with a soft line of dust along the top edge where nobody had moved it in a long time.

On the nightstand, at the edge nearest the bed, there was a clean rectangle in the dust about the size of a paperback, where an object had sat for years and didn’t anymore.

I worked out what had been there, and when I got it I put my hand over my mouth. It was the monitor. He’d had it there until she outgrew it. Then he’d taken it off the nightstand and hadn’t put another object down where it had been. He’d left the space. I studied the shape of what he’d taken away, and my eyes stung, and I let them.

Last night, with my hands on his dresser and my dress four inches open, I’d told him the truth about myself out loud. I hadn’t hinted. I’d told him. He’d listened to all of it without moving his hands off my zip, and then he’d carried right on. That would still be true at breakfast, and at every breakfast after. There was no version of this morning where I got to take it back.

I was sore, but not badly. I was sore between my legs and across the backs of my thighs, the good sore, from a man who took his time and never once stopped to ask whether I was all right in the soft voice a man used when he wanted to be told yes.

I was sore in two other places, a band across each wrist where he’d pinned them over my head against his headboard and kept them there, not hard, nowhere near hard, calm and completely not up for discussion. I put my thumb on one of them under the sheet and pressed until I found it. There was no mark at all. It didn’t bother me. I pressed it again to make sure. It didn’t bother me at all, which was its own piece of news.

There was coffee on the nightstand, not in a mug from the kitchen but in the travel cup with the lid on, the one he kept in his truck. He’d made it and brought it in and set it down within reach of a sleeping woman, a few inches from the clean rectangle, and driven out to the rink without waking me up to be thanked. The cup was still warm. The lid had his thumb marks on the rubber.

I sat up with the sheet clamped under my arms and drank his coffee with my knees pulled up under it. It was too strong and had no sugar in it at all, and I drank every bit of it and remembered what day it was.

It was game day. That meant morning skate, the pregame meal, the nap, and the drive out to the rink, and the schedule on his fridge in my own capital letters had tonight circled in red, because I was the one who’d circled it.

The route back to my own bed ran through his house, from his room down the hall and past the kitchen to my door. I’d walked it the other way a hundred times with a laundry basket on my hip. It was a different walk in a green dress with the zip only half done up, because I couldn’t reach the rest of it and the man who could was at the rink.

I did it with my shoes in my hand and got as far as the kitchen doorway and stopped. The kitchen had never been the problem before. A lunchbox was drying upside down on a towel by the sink. The pickup schedule was on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a cactus. A booster seat sat at the table. A plastic dinosaur lay on its side by the fruit bowl, mid-catastrophe. It was the setup of the job I was paid to do, and I was standing in the middle of it holding my shoes, with a bruise at the base of my throat that his mouth had put there.

There was a mirror in the hall and I caught myself in it and stopped again. My hair was crushed on one side, with a knot in it at the back the size of a walnut. My bottom lip was puffy and sore where he’d bitten it. The mark sat just above my collarbone, dark as a thumbprint, and no shirt I owned would cover it except one buttoned to the collar, in November, in Arizona.

I wasn’t embarrassed. For the first time in six years I got a full breath. I got my own door shut behind me and put my back against it and laughed at the ceiling until I had to slide down onto the floor and do it properly.

Zamboni was on my bed. She must have slipped in past my ankles when I went out last night, and she’d claimed the good pillow and showed not one flicker of remorse.

“Don’t,” I said. She yawned at me.