The word came out before I'd approved it. My voice was hoarse—I hadn't spoken to anyone but Midge all day, and the single syllable sounded rough and strange in the quiet room. He stopped. His back to me. His hand on the doorframe. The hallway light behind him, making him a silhouette, wide shoulders, dark, the same shape I'd seen from the study doorway the night he stitched himself up while I watched from the dark like a woman who'd already lost control of the situation and hadn't admitted it yet.
"Sit," I said. Then, because the word had come out like a command and I was in no position to command anything: "Please."
He turned. His eyes found mine. Something moved in them—not surprise, exactly, but a recalibration. The look of a man who'd expected the routine and gotten a deviation and was deciding, in real time, what to do with it.
He sat on the floor.
Back against the wall, legs stretched in front of him, arms loose at his sides. The position put him below me—below the bed, below my eye level, his head at the height of my hip. I could look down at him. He had to look up at me.
He'd done it on purpose.
I ate the pasta. It was good. Better than good—it tasted like someone had cooked it with care, which was a flavor I hadn't encountered in years and which sat in my mouth differently than anything else. Midge had her face in the chicken bowl, her stub of a tail going, the small wet sounds of a tiny animal experiencing bliss.
"Thank you," I said. "For helping me look after Midge."
The words came out stiff. Reluctant. Like I was pushing them through a door that didn't want to open. But I meant every one. I meant them the way I meant the things I never said—completely, totally, with the full weight of a gratitude that terrified me because it implied debt, and debt implied connection, and connection implied vulnerability, and vulnerability implied all the things I'd spent twenty years learning not to afford.
He nodded. Once. Downward. No triumph in it.
I picked up the Quasimodo book. It had been on the nightstand since this afternoon, the spine cracked open to the poem I kept returning to.
"The tattoo," I said. "Your ribs. It's from this."
Not a question. He looked at the book in my hands. Something crossed his face—quick, private, the flicker of a door opening and closing in the same motion.
“Surprised the tattoo was what you focused on.”
My cheeks burned.
“It wasn’t theonlythink I noticed.”
"My mother's favorite." His voice was low. Stripped. The words came out the way mine had—reluctant, like they cost something. "She was Sicilian. She loved Quasimodo. Read him to us when we were kids." A pause. "She died when I was fifteen."
I understood his feeling, the depth of it.
"I had a sister," I said.
His eyes came to mine. Dark. Steady. Waiting. Not pushing. Not probing. Just present, the way the wall behind him was present, the way the floor beneath him was present—solid, patient, there.
I didn't say more.
He didn't ask.
I ate the garlic bread. He sat on the floor. The heating system ticked. Midge finished her chicken and sat back on her haunches and licked her chops with the thorough satisfaction of a creature whose needs were simple and currently met.
Then she stood.
She walked to Santo.
The careful, deliberate approach of an animal making a decision, each step considered, each inch of distance closed with the full awareness that distance was safety and she was choosing to give it up. Her body was tense. Her stub of a tail was low. But she kept walking.
She reached his hand. The right one, resting on the floor beside his thigh. She lowered her head and sniffed his knuckles—the scarred ridges, the thick fingers, the hand that had pinned me to the floor and cut my zip ties and caught me around the waist in a frozen yard. She sniffed thoroughly, the way she always sniffed, with the commitment of a creature that believed the nose knew things the eyes didn't.
She didn't growl.
I watched the seven-pound arbiter of my emotional life walk up to the man I was supposed to hate and sniff his hand and notgrowl. She settled, not quite touching him, but close. Closer than she'd been to any man since I'd found her behind that dumpster two winters ago, shaking and feral and missing half an ear.
Something inside my chest rearranged itself.