Page 26 of Dread

I considered the question. “Experience.”

She didn’t ask whose.

For a while, we sat with our coffee and looked out over the property. Not long ago, Katy had been a stranger on the side of a highway. Now her daughter’s rocks lined my windowsill, her coffee sat beside mine, and neither of those things seemed temporary anymore.

Katy set her mug on the rail. Then she turned toward me. This time, she didn’t look away.

Her hand found my jaw. Palm against two days of stubble I hadn’t gotten around to shaving, and she leaned in and kissed me.

I hesitated. Ellie was asleep down the hall. Katy had spent five years protecting the two of them by trusting no one, and I knew better than to treat what was happening between us casually.

But she was here. She’d made the first move. That was enough.

My hand moved to her wrist. Circled the bone, gentler than my grip had any business being given what my hands did most days, and I kissed her back.

It wasn’t what I’d expected, though pretending I hadn’t thought about it at all would have been a lie. Her mouth was warm, certain in a way that surprised me given how careful she’d been with everything else since the highway. I kept my hand where it was. Traced the inside of her wrist once with my thumb, deliberate, because I don’t do anything without meaning it, and felt her breath catch against my mouth in a way that traveled straight through thirty years of practiced control and landed somewhere I hadn’t checked on in longer than I wanted to calculate.

We broke apart. Her eyes stayed closed a beat longer than they needed to. I kept my thumb on her wrist, loose but present, and when she opened her eyes, I looked back at her, not bothering to guess what she saw there, because I already knew what she’d find, and there wasn’t any reason to pretend otherwise.

Neither of us reached for the coffee. The mugs sat on the rail, steaming into the night air, forgotten.

“I didn’t plan that,” she said.

“I know.”

A pause. The kind that holds its breath on purpose.

“I’m not sorry about it,” I said.

The sound she made was almost nothing -- a single exhale, more relief than laughter, and she didn’t try to catch it before it dissolved into the dark between us where it belonged.

We sat with our arms touching, Katy wearing my T-shirt like it had already become hers. The compound lights showed through the trees in the distance.

Ellie was asleep inside. Someone else had the gate. For once, there was nothing that required my attention.

Katy rested her head against my shoulder. I decided that was enough.

I sat on my own porch with a woman’s mouth still warm against mine and a kid’s rock collection three rooms away and understood, with the same flat certainty I brought to every diagnosis I’d ever delivered, that I wasn’t going to be able to go back to the version of this house that existed before either of them walked into it.

I didn’t try to. That was the thing. Thirty years of practicing medicine had taught me the difference between a wound you close and a wound you let heal open, and I’d spent most of my life closing everything fast and clean because open wounds cost more than I’d been willing to pay.

This one, I left open. On purpose. For the first time I could remember.

We stayed on the porch until the coffee went cold, Katy leaning against me as the night wore on. Eventually, she laced her fingers through mine.

I sat there holding her hand and wondered when this had started feeling normal.

Chapter Nine

Katy

I woke before the light. The room held a different kind of quiet without Ellie breathing in the hallway.

Kitty’s place. Ellie’s first sleepover. I’d stood on the porch last night with her overnight bag in my hand, trying not to run through every instruction Kitty had already heard. Medication. Bedtime. Call me if she needs me.

Dread had stood beside me, his hand resting lightly at my back.

Then Kitty opened the door and Ellie disappeared inside without a backward glance.