Page 40 of Rogue
The room looked like the aftermath of a very determined storm.Flat-pack boxes torn open along their seams, the cardboard splayed across the floor in jagged crescents.Wooden panels leaned against the wall in ascending size order -- he’d lined them up by height, the same way he lined up tools on a workbench, everything with its place even in chaos.Hardware bags were spread across the rug, each one opened and its contents dumped into a careful row: screws here, bolts there, the little plastic connectors that came with warnings printed in four languages stacked in a tidy pile by the window.
In the center of it all, Rogue was crouched on his heels.
He had a dowel rod in one hand and the instruction sheet in the other, and the sheet was so crumpled from handling that the diagrams had started to fade along the fold lines.His T-shirt was dark with sweat across the shoulders, the fabric clinging to the muscle underneath in a way that made me want to put my palm there and feel the heat of him through the cotton.His jeans were dusty at the knees.One boot was untied.His hair had fallen across his forehead, and he hadn’t bothered to push it back.
He was muttering.
Low, under his breath, the particular stream of commentary that happened when he was working on something that was fighting him.Not loud enough for me to catch the words from the doorway, just the cadence of it, the rise and fall of a man having a one-sided conversation with an inanimate object that he fully expected to answer.
I leaned against the doorframe.My shoulder found the wood and settled there, and I cradled the coffee mug in both hands and watched him.
He picked up two panels.They were curved, meant for the headboard, and he fitted them together at the joint and held them there with one hand while he reached for a bolt with the other.He held the position for three seconds.Then his brow furrowed, and he turned the panels in his hands, and I watched the realization cross his face -- backward.He’d put them together backward.He let out a low curse, the kind that wasn’t performance, just the honest sound of a man who had been at this for four hours and was running out of patience with whoever had designed the thing.
He flipped them.Reached for the bolt again.Glanced at the instructions, which were now folded into a shape that resembled a paper airplane more than a set of directions, and said to the room at large, “Whoever drew this has never actually built a damn thing in their life.”
The room did not argue.
He picked up the bolt, fitted it into the hole, and started turning it with his fingers.His knuckles were white.The muscle in his forearm shifted under the skin with each rotation, and I watched the movement and thought about the first time I’d seen those hands -- on a motorcycle at a gas station, reaching for me in the dark, and then later on my body in a bedroom where the light had stayed on.
He stopped turning.His hand stopped on the bolt.He didn’t look up.Didn’t turn his head.He merely paused, alert in an instant, and I knew he’d felt me.Not heard me.The cicadas were too loud for that, and I hadn’t made a sound.He’d just known, the way he knew most things about me now.
He turned.His eyes found me in the doorway, and whatever had been on his face -- the frustration, the concentration, the tight line of his mouth -- softened.Not all at once.In increments, the way light changes when a cloud passes, and what was left was something quiet and open that he didn’t try to hide.
He set the instructions down on the floor.Pushed up off his heels in one motion, his knees cracking audibly in the quiet room, and crossed to me in three strides.His hand found my waist -- careful, always careful, his palm warm through the cotton of the tank top -- and he pulled me toward him and then down, settling himself on the edge of the low dresser box behind him and drawing me into his lap in the same motion.
I went.My weight settled against him, the swell of my belly pressing between us, and I felt his chest expand with a breath that was half-sigh, half-relief.One of his arms locked around my lower back, holding me there.He shifted us so we could place our hands over the swell of my stomach.His palm was rough and warm, and his fingers laced through mine, and I could feel the baby move under our joined hands -- a slow shift, a roll.
He kissed me.His kiss was slow and assured, and he tasted like coffee and the particular salt of a man who’d been working in a closed room all morning.He brought his hand up to cup my jaw and brushed the corner of my mouth with his thumb.The kiss lasted long enough that the rest of the world blurred at the edges, becoming nothing more than distant distractions.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.His breath was even.His hand stayed on my jaw, his thumb making small, unconscious strokes along the line of my cheekbone.I closed my eyes and let the weight of his arm around me be what it was -- not protection, not possession, just the fact of him, solid and present and mine in a way that had stopped being a question months ago.
The room smelled like fresh wood and motor oil.The instruction sheet lay crumpled by Rogue’s boot where he’d dropped it.Through the window, the compound was alive -- someone laughing by the fire pit, the distant growl of the engine from the garage, the cicadas going in the trees beyond the fence -- and inside the half-built room, with Rogue’s hand on my belly and my weight settled against his chest, I opened my eyes and looked at his face and felt nothing in my body but the particular, settled quiet of a woman who was exactly where she meant to be.
No fear.
No plan.
No exit strategy ticking in the back of my mind, counting doors, measuring distances.
Just this.
He brushed his thumb across my cheekbone once more, and I turned my face into his palm and breathed him in, and the baby turned under our hands, and the room held us, and the world outside kept its distance the way it had learned to do.
