“Hey,” I offer as I step outside in my bare feet. I hand her a mug of coffee. “Thought this would warm you up.”
“Oh.” She’s startled. She eyes my bare feet and says, “Your shoes,” but before she can get them off, I stop her. I say that I don’t mind. I like the look of it, her in my shoes. Her lying beside me in bed. I could get used to this.
“It’s cold out here,” I say. It’s fucking cold. Maybe twenty degrees.
“It is?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“I’ll leave you alone,” I say. Seems to me someone who chooses to freeze their ass off on a day like today wants to be alone.
It’s not as though anything happened, but lying beside her for all those hours just for the hell of it, just to be close to her, to feel the softness of her skin and the way her chest rattled when she snored, that happened.
“Your feet must be freezing.”
I glance at my feet. They stand on a thin layer of snow and ice. “They are,” I say. I turn to go inside.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
I don’t know what I expect her to say, but I expect her to say something.
“Yep,” I say and let the door slam closed.
I don’t know how much time passes—enough that I start to get pissed. Pissed at myself for being pissed at her. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t give a shit.
But then she appears. Her cheeks are ruby-red from the cold. Her hair cascades around her. “I don’t want to be alone,” she says.
She drops the blanket at the door.
“I can’t remember the last time anyone told me I was beautiful,” she says.
Beautiful doesn’t do her justice.
We stare at each other across the room, taking it all in. Reminding ourselves to breathe.
When she comes to me, she moves humbly. Her hands touch with caution. The last time I pushed her away, but the last time was different.
She was a different woman.
I was a different man.
I run my hand the length of her hair. My hands move down her arms. They memorize her fingers and the shape of her back. She stares at me with this look I’ve never seen before, not on her or any other woman. Trust. Respect. Desire. I commit to memory every freckle, every blemish on her face. I learn the shape of her ears and run a finger across the arch of her lips.
She takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. God knows she’s no longer my prisoner. What I want is for her to want to be here.
We pause in the doorway. Her lips find their way to mine, and I hold her head in my hands. My fingers stroke her hair. Her arms are locked behind my back. She doesn’t let go.
*
What changes is the way we touch. There’s contact, something that we used to avoid. We graze past each other when we enter a room. She runs her fingers through my hair. I let my hand linger on her back. She traces the lines of my face. We share the same bed.
Our hands and fingers memorize what our eyes could not. An uneven scalp. Patches of dry skin.
There is nothing frivolous about it. We don’t flirt. We’re beyond that. We don’t dredge up past relationships. We don’t try and make the other jealous. We don’t create pet names. We don’t mention the word love.
We kill time. We talk. We list all the crazy things you see in the city. The homeless pushing shopping carts around. Jesus freaks walking around with crucifixes on their backs. Pigeons.
She asks my favorite color. I say I don’t have one. She asks my favorite food. I let a spoonful of slop drop into a bowl. “Anything other than this,” I say.
She asks what would have happened to her if we didn’t come here. If I’d handed her over and collected my reward.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Would I be dead?”
We learn things we didn’t know before. That skin-to-skin contact helps keep us warm. That SpaghettiOs and baked beans do mix. That two can fit on the shaky armchair.
We’re eating some meal. What it is, I don’t know. We eat out of necessity. There’s no such thing as breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s all the same. It all tastes like shit.
She’s staring at me with those eyes of hers. They demand an answer. “I don’t know,” I say again. I see her being ripped from my car and tossed into the van. Her hands bound and her eyes blindfolded. I hear her cry.
I push my bowl away. I’m not hungry. I’ve lost my appetite.
She stands and reaches for my bowl. She says she’ll do the dishes tonight, but I gently clench her wrist when it comes within reach and say to her, “Leave it.”
We settle by the window where we watch the moon, a sliver in the sky. The clouds flicker by and sometimes we see the moon, sometimes we don’t.
“Look at all the stars,” she says. She knows the names of the constellations. Aries. Fornax. Perseus. She says that in Chicago she used to wish on airplanes because there were far more of those floating around in the night sky than stars.