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"You can kiss me."

One corner of his mouth lifts. "Then I'll kiss you when I decide to. Your ribs?"

"Better."

"Better isn't healed. I'll decide what they can take."

He sits back down and puts the pistol together while I watch. His hands do it without looking, putting it back together than I could button a shirt.

"Go to my bedroom," he says. "Take off your shoes, and wait for me."

My knees nearly give, and he hasn't even raised his voice.

I go. His bedroom lamp is already on, throwing yellow light across the bed. I toe off my sneakers and set them side by side by the door. A straight-backed wooden chair with no arms sits in the corner, back where the lamp doesn't reach.

The window over the back pasture is black, and the glass reflects the whole room, the way it did the night I went blank in his bed.

His boots come down the hall, heavy and slow, the way he promised he'd always walk. He comes in carrying the pistol, a full glass of water, and a folded quilt over his arm. He sets the water on the nightstand and lays the quilt across the foot of the bed.

The pistol goes into the top drawer of his dresser, and he shuts the drawer. He shuts the bedroom door and turns the lock.

He crosses to that chair and sits down in it, out in the shadow. He watches me from the dark without a word.

My whole body locks. The man in the cigar room sat exactly like that, in the shadow of his corner, saying nothing, watching. This morning that same man held his hand out to me in church. My eyes go to the dark corner and stick there, and I can't make them move.

Knox stands up. He lifts the chair by its back, carries it out of the corner, and sets it down in the lamplight at the foot of the bed. He sits down in it again, with his knees nearly touching my legs and the lamplight full on his face.

"I won't do this from a corner," he says.

He saw my face when I looked at that corner, and he fixed it without making me explain. My eyes sting.

"Sit on the edge of the bed."

I sit down on the folded quilt, right in front of him.

"Eyes on me."

I look at him. In the cigar room they kept my eyes on the floor, so I'd never see who was giving the orders. Here I can see every scar on his knuckles and the vein standing out in his throat. There's no question who I'm obeying.

"You used to sit on a hay bale by my back door every Saturday you could sneak out," he says. His voice is low and unhurried. "You sat with your knees pressed together like you were in church. Tell me what you wanted."

"You know what I wanted."

"I know what your face said. I want to hear you say it."

I've never said it out loud to anybody. I've barely let myself think it in words.

I make myself say it to his face. "I wanted you to turn around and talk to me the way you talked to that ring. I wanted you to tell me where to sit and what to do with my hands. And I wanted to do it because it was you telling me."

His hands flatten on his thighs and press down hard.

"Then that's what you're going to get," he says. "Knees together. Hands on your knees."

I press my knees together and lay my hands on them, palms down, with the cuffs of my sleeves pinched under my fingers. I'm a grown woman sitting on the edge of his bed like a girl in a pew, and my pulse is pounding between my legs.

"Take off your jeans. Leave your shirt on."

He leaves me to do it myself. I stand and unbutton my jeans, and my ribs pull as I bend to push them down with my underwear and socks. I step out of them and kick them aside. Then I sit back down, bare from the waist down, with my shirt hanging to the tops of my thighs.