Page 36 of Her Rival

She told me she'd stopped.

She didn't tell me why she'd stopped. The why was in the room with us. The why was a man in middle Tennessee with a Bic pen, and we both knew it, and she didn't say it and I didn't ask.

I told her about Mary Beth teaching me to cook. About the way our father had taken cooking away from our mother in some essentially permanent fashion that bled out into all the smaller things, until my sister became the keeper of food in the house, which also made her the keeper of small kindnesses, which also made her the only person in that family I still spoke to. I told her about salt and water and oil and the small mechanical things you can control when nothing else in your life is yours.

I didn't tell her about the money. I didn't tell her about the company. I didn't tell her that the kitchen we were sitting in had cost more than the entire town we'd grown up in. The line was holding. The line was just holding through other doors than it usually held through.

We ate. We drank one glass of wine each, and I poured her a second she didn't finish, and at some point past ten she looked at the clock and made a small noise that was almost the laugh from Tuesday and almost not.

"I should get going."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stay this long."

"Don't apologize, Hartley. You're not under arrest. You're allowed to eat."

She got up. Gathered her notebook, her recorder, her bag. Slung the laptop bag over her shoulder, and I watched the strap settle across her chest, and I made myself look at the floor instead of the strap.

I walked her to the door.

This was the part I'd been keeping the line for. The moment, every previous session, when I'd stopped six feet behind her in the entryway and let her see herself out, because keeping six feet of space between her body and mine in my own house was a discipline I'd built over four sessions and gotten extremely good at.

I did not stop six feet behind her on Thursday.

I don't know why. I've turned it over a thousand times. The honest version is the wine had something to do with it, and the laugh at the noodle had something to do with it, and the story about her grandmother had something to do with it, and the fact that she'd used the word Iris in my kitchen and hadn't flinched while she did it had something to do with it, and all of those things had stacked themselves on top of each other while I wasn't watching. By the time we got to the door my body had already decided I was walking her all the way there.

She turned at the door.

Her hand on the doorknob.

I was standing closer to her than I'd stood at any point in seven sessions. Closer than I'd stood to her at the championship eight months ago, before I knew she was there. Closer than I'd stood to her since the night of the homecoming dance, when I'd stood across a high school gym and watched her hold my eyes for one full second from another man's arm. I was a foot away. I could smell her hair.

She didn't let go of the doorknob.

She didn't turn it.

She looked up at me with the soft animal look people get when they've stopped controlling their own face because the controlling has cost them more than they can keep paying, and I looked down at her with what I knew, with absolute clarity, was the same look. Because I'd had no control over my own face for about thirty seconds, and I'd stopped trying somewhere between the noodle and the kitchen and Iris.

"Jett," she said.

"Yeah."

"I have to go."

"I know."

"I have to."

"I know, Hartley."

The space between her mouth and mine was about the distance between I know and I don't. About the distance between nine years of welding shut and the small unwelding I'd been doing all night without quite admitting it. About the distance between the kid in the suit and the man I'd built to make sure the kid never had to feel anything again.

I leaned in about half of it.

She didn't move.

I leaned the rest.