Page 96 of Wreckage and Rain

Something crosses her face. Small. Surprise, maybe, that I heard the whole sentence and not the part I wanted.

"Okay," she says.

She gets a blanket and a pillow down from the closet and drops them on the couch with no ceremony. She turns off the lamp. She goes into the bedroom and she does not close the door or leave it open, and the half-inch she leaves it at is the loudest thing in the apartment. I lie down on her couch, in her life, with my sunflowers going dark on the counter and my wife just feet away from me for the first time in months. I can't even bring myself to fall asleep. I don't want to miss a moment of this.

Chapter 28: Recognition

Summer

I haven't sent him home.

The stage took the shaking out of me. What's left is certainty. Not about the future. About right now. The first night I put him on the couch and lay in the next room listening to him not sleep. The second night he came back at nine with takeout and asked if he could come up. I let him. He took the couch again without being told. The third night he didn't ask, and he didn't reach for anything that wasn't his to reach for. Tonight is the fourth.

He's been here since six. He's been working at my kitchen table on his laptop. Some Bennet thing. The deal he's tearing down. He's been on the phone three times with his attorney and twice with Dom. He didn't try to make small talk between calls. He didn't try to make sure I was okay with him being here. He worked, like a person who has something heavy to carry.

I've been writing and we haven't spoken in two hours. He looks like a man who has been bracing himself for a different ending. I've been watching him do it for weeks. I haven't told him to stop, because I don't know yet if he should. When he hangs up the last call he closes the laptop. He puts his hands flat on the table for a beat. He sits there.

Then he looks at me.

"Come here."

It's the first time he's asked me for something all night.

I get up. I cross the room. I stand in front of him in the chair.

He puts his hands on my hips. He puts his forehead against my sternum.

He doesn't move.

I put my hand on the back of his head.

I let him have this.

"Bad day?"

"Long day."

"Tell me."

"Not tonight."

I tip his face up. I look at him. The dark under his eyes that hasn't gone away in four weeks. The line at the corner of his mouth that wasn't there before. The man across from me has aged in front of me and he's tired, but he's still here.

"Come to bed."

He goes still. "Summer."

"To sleep. That's all." I make myself say the rest of it. "I'm not ready for more than that yet. I might not be for a long time. I'm done lying in there listening to you not sleep out here. Come to bed, Colt."

"Okay."

"That's all this is. Just sleeping."

"I hear you."

I take his hand. He follows me. The bedroom is small and dim. He toes his shoes off and lies down on top of the covers in his clothes, because I haven't told him otherwise and he is not going to take one inch I haven't handed him. I turn off the lamp. I lie down next to him, on top of the covers, dressed, a foot of dark between us.

After a while his hand finds mine. He holds my hand in the dark like a man holding the single thing he's been given, and he doesn't push his luck for the rest of it. I let him.