I turned the light off.
I went to bed.
* * *
The sweatpants were too long.I had known this before I lay down, and I had rolled the waistband twice to compensate, but by the time I’d been in the bed five minutes they had unrolled themselves and the excess fabric was bunched around my ankles like the hem of a different garment -- something longer, heavier, white -- and I pulled my feet up and pushed the fabric off and lay there in the flannel shirt and my bare legs.
The room was dark -- not the city dark of thin curtains and passing headlights but an actual solid dark that pressed in from the walls and sat on my chest.Down the hall, the refrigerator hummed its single, purposeless note.
I lay on top of the covers.
I lay under them.
I put them off again.
The bruise on my wrist had its own pulse now, a small tight throbbing that communicated its presence every time I shifted against the pillow, every time my arm lay at an angle that was not exactly right.I found myself holding it against my ribs again -- the same instinctive gesture fromHadley’sparking lot, from the bike, from the kitchen table -- and I made myself put it flat at my side instead.It ached.I let it ache.My other hand had found the hem of the sheet and was folding it back on itself in a precise crease, smoothing it flat, folding it again, a task I had apparently assigned myself.
I made my hand stop.
Sleep came: not all at once but in pieces, one rung at a time down a ladder I stopped being aware of, until the last rung was gone.
The dream did not announce itself.
It was just a doorway, suddenly, and the shadow filling it -- not a shape I could read but a weight, a specific quality of the dark that I knew before I knew it.Then his voice saying my name.Lennox.Two syllables that had never meant love, only attention, only the narrowing of a room to the square footage between him and me.And then the phantom at my jaw -- the curl of his fingers, the pad of his thumb, the nails I had watched him have done in a midtown salon on a Tuesday morning when I was supposed to admire the precision of the grooming.
The pressure.The tightening.
You will not embarrass me tonight.
I came awake all at once, every muscle already braced.
I was sitting upright.I did not remember sitting up.My hand was at my own jaw, my fingers pressed to the hinge of it where he had pressed his, and I was in the dark room, in the cedar smell, in the flannel shirt.None of it was the bridal suite.None of it was him.I sat there with both facts at once and waited for my chest to agree.
The bedroom door was open.
Not mostly closed the way Rogue had left it.Open -- the full width of the frame, the pale light from the front room lamp falling in a strip across the floor.He was in the doorway, one hand on the frame.Not in the room.Not moving toward me.Just standing there in a gray T-shirt and jeans in the light from the hall, his face quiet the way it always was, watching me with the steady stillness of a man who had not been asleep.
“You okay?”
He kept the urgency out of it.It was just the question, low and plain.
My breathing was still going wrong.I was aware of it, and I looked at him across the dark room.
I wanted to nod.It was the one gesture that asked nothing of anyone.The nod I gave was small and jerky and did not convince either of us.
He waited.
“You sure?”he said, softer.
I looked at my hand, still at my jaw.I made myself lower it to my lap.I shook my head.The honesty of it surprised me -- the ease of it.Two years of practiced composure and it had come apart in four seconds in a dark room in Tennessee with a man I had known for one day standing in the doorway waiting for me to tell him the truth.
“I don’t --” My voice came out smaller than I intended.I stopped.I tried again.“I don’t want to be alone in here.”
The words sat between us in the dark.
He held my gaze for a beat.Then he straightened from the doorframe and came into the room without rushing, without ceremony.He rounded the foot of the bed to the far side -- the side against the wall, the side with nothing on it -- and he lay down on top of the covers.Flat on his back.One arm at his side, the other across his stomach.He left a full foot of space between us, maybe more, and he looked at the ceiling.
He did not explain himself.He did not speak at all.