I thought: I am going to need a bigger category for what this is.
I thought: I have time to find it.
* * *
My father left at seven to check into the hotel Dominic had arranged, two weeks, enough time to stabilize, enough time to work out what came next. I walked him to the door.
In the hallway, he stopped and looked at me.
"He's a careful man," he said.
"Yes."
"Careful men don't always know when to stop being careful."
I looked at my father. "Neither do careful women."
He made the sound that was almost a laugh. Then he pulled my in once more, briefly, just a moment, his hand at the back of my head the same way Dominic's had been in the building on Tchoupitoulas, the gesture that meant I am holding something I do not want to break, and then he let go.
"I'll call you tomorrow," he said.
"I know," I said.
I watched him go.
* * *
I stood in the closed doorway for a moment. The apartment behind my was quiet. The city outside was beginning its evening, the sounds shifting from the daytime register to something slower, warmer, more itself.
I turned around.
Dominic was standing at the end of the hall.
He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything. They stood at opposite ends of the hallway with the apartment between them and the accumulated weight of seven weeks and one specificevening in a building on Tchoupitoulas and everything they had both been precise enough not to say yet.
I walked toward him.
When I reached him I stopped, close enough that the space between them was a decision rather than a distance.
"He likes you," I said. "He won't say so for at least three more weeks. But he does."
Something moved at the corner of Dominic's mouth. "I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because you like me." He said it evenly. Without performance. The simplest possible statement of what was true. "And you have the same tells."
I looked at him.
"I don't have tells," I said.
"You have one," he said. "You stop leaving the room."
I stood with that.
I thought: He has been paying attention for seven weeks.
I thought: So have I.