Page 17 of Captive

I don’t know yet what that means. I write it down anyway.

* * *

It’s my third day in the same work pants. My shirt went into the bathroom sink last night with a sliver of camp soap, and it’s still damp on the towel bar this morning. The crew spares he left the first day are gone, stiff with dust and cow and sweat. At the eight o’clock check, there’s a folded shirt on the floor outside my door, soft gray cotton gone thin at the collar.

It isn’t a crew shirt. It’s his. I know because it smells like his truck, like dust and coffee and something clean underneath, and because it hangs to the middle of my thighs when I put it on.

I stand in the bathroom and look at myself in the spotted mirror, wearing a man’s shirt in a room he locked, and I don’t let myself think about what my face is doing.

At ten-forty, the shower goes wrong.

The hot side has been temperamental since the first day. This morning the cold side gives a shudder and a clank and quits altogether, and the water coming out of the head turns scalding in about four seconds. I jump back out of the stall with my arm pink to the elbow and turn the handle off. It won’t go off. It drips and steams and fills the bathroom with fog.

I stand there in his shirt with my wet hair dripping down my back and look at the valve.

I could leave it. Let it run. Call it his problem the next time he knocks.

It’s a waste of water in a place where water has already killed three cows this week. I go to the door and knock on it from my side.

“Cole.”

He’s there in less than ten seconds. He must have been in the radio room. “Sofia.”

“The shower valve’s stuck open. Hot side. The cold’s gone.”

A pause. “The shutoff’s behind the access panel under the sink. You’ll need a flat bar.”

“I don’t have a flat bar. I have a hoof pick and a grudge.”

Another pause. Longer.

“Rule three,” he says.

He’s right. I wrote it. He isn’t allowed in this room, and I don’t want him in this room, and the bathroom is filling with steam behind me, and every one of those facts is true at the same time.

“I’m changing it,” I say. “For this. You can come in as far as the bathroom. You fix the valve. You leave.”

“Say that you’re sure.”

“I’m the one who wrote the rule. I’m the one who changes it. That’s what the rules are for.”

The lock turns. He knocks anyway, twice, on the open door, and says my name again, and waits until I step back.

Then he comes in.

It’s the first time he’s crossed the threshold since the first day. He stops one step inside and his eyes go around the room once, fast, the way they went around the pens. The unmade bed. The treatment sheet with my rules on the floor. The chair. Then they come back to me, and stop, and he looks at his shirt on me for about one second longer than he should.

Then he looks at the floor, and walks to the bathroom, and doesn’t look at me again.

He has to get down on one knee to reach the panel. The bathroom is barely big enough for the stall and the sink and a man his size folded up between them. He works the panel off with a flat bar from his back pocket, and reaches in past the pipes, and the steam settles on his shoulders and darkens his shirt across the back.

I stand in the bathroom doorway with a towel over my shoulder and my arms crossed.

It takes me a while to understand where I’m standing.

The only way out of that bathroom is past me. For three days, he’s been the one in the door. Now he’s on one knee on wet tile with his arm in the wall, and I’m the one standing in the frame, and he hasn’t looked up once.

His forearm flexes as he turns the shutoff. There’s a scar across the back of his wrist I hadn’t seen, pale and old. The water stops. The pipes knock twice and go quiet.