Heat

A week in and my body had stopped listening to me.

My mind was holding up its end. Staying on task, keeping things where they belonged, running the household and attending the Monday meetings and walking past him in corridors without making it anything more than two people walking past each other in a corridor. My mind was doing everything right.

My body had other ideas and it was not shy about them.

It started with the way I heard him now. His footsteps were different from everyone else's in that house and I had learned them without trying to, that particular weight and pace, and I would be in the middle of something completely unrelated and something in me would lift and orient before I had made any conscious decision to do it.

Like I had been tuned to a frequency I had not chosen and could not retune.

The Monday meeting had been the real problem.

Forty minutes across a desk from him while he listened to everything I said with his full attention and looked at me with those dark eyes that gave you just enough to make you want more, and something low in me had been warm the entire time in a way that had nothing to do with the room temperature and everything to do with the man three feet away from me.

I was not inexperienced. I want to be clear about that. I had felt attraction before. Had navigated it and managed it and moved past it the way you move past things that are not going to work out.

This did not feel like something I was going to be able to move past.

Because every other time a man had looked at me with want I had not wanted him back and that had given me somewhere to stand. The not wanting back was the solid ground. I had built my entire system for handling this particular problem on that foundation.

Dane Blackwood had taken the foundation out from under me and I was standing in empty air and my body knew it even when my mind was still pretending otherwise.

He said I was good at the work and I said something sensible back and I left and got to the kitchen before my legs fully registered what they were doing. Stood at the counter with both palms flat on the surface and stayed there until my breathing sorted itself out.

Good at this, he had said. Like it was just a fact he was reporting. Like I was someone whose competence was worth noticing and saying out loud.

I had spent so long being noticed for the wrong things that being noticed for the right ones had no defence built around it. It went straight in.

I told my body we were not doing this.

My body said something impolite back.

Thursday night I gave up on sleep around midnight.

It had been building all week, this restlessness, this heat under my skin that had no outlet and would not be reasoned with. Two hours lying in the dark trying to think myself calm and none of it worked and finally I got up and went downstairs because at least the kitchen floor would be cold under my feet and cold was something real to focus on.

I had not thought about what I was wearing. Thin top, loose shorts, the kind of thing you wear when you are alone and not expecting anyone. The kitchen was empty and dark and I filled a glass at the tap and stood at the window and looked out at the trees and felt the cold floor under my bare feet and let out a long slow breath.

Better. Slightly better.

Then footsteps in the corridor.

I turned.

He filled the doorway and he was not in his daytime clothes. Dark shirt loose at the collar, not tucked, sleeves pushed up his forearms. His hair was slightly undone. The iron control that he wore during the day was still there but sitting differently on him, held loosely, like the middle of the night had given him permission to carry it lighter.

He saw me.

His eyes moved over me once and I saw it happen and I saw him get it under control and it took him two full seconds which was one and a half seconds longer than it would have taken him in daylight.

I stood very still.

He came in. Got a glass. Came to stand about five feet away from me at the window and I felt those five feet the way you feel a gap you are aware of crossing even when you are not moving.

"Could not sleep," I said.

"No," he said.

He looked out at the trees. I looked at the trees. We stood there in the dark kitchen and the moonlight came through the window and lay across the floor between us in a wide pale strip.

"Happens often?" I said.

"Enough." He turned his head slightly and looked at me sideways. "You?"

"Most nights since I got here."

He looked back at the window. A moment passed. "I did not look into the arrangement closely enough before I agreed to it," he said. "That was my mistake."

"Would it have changed anything?"

He turned to look at me properly then and the five feet between us felt suddenly like a choice being made rather than a default gap. "Maybe," he said. Just the one word. But the way he said it had more inside it than one word should hold.

I looked at my glass.

"I am alright here," I said.

"Are you."

That flat thing he did. Saying something that looked like a statement but was asking something entirely different underneath.

I kept my eyes on the window. "Better than where I was," I said quietly.

The silence came back but it was different this time. Warmer. Closer. The kind of silence that is not empty but full of something neither person is saying yet.

"The way you were brought here," he said. His voice had dropped slightly. "You deserved better than that."

It landed somewhere that had no wall around it.

I turned to look at him.

He was already looking at me and the five feet between us was just air and moonlight and the sound of the house breathing around us and I understood something in that moment with complete clarity. Not a thought. More like a recognition. The kind that happens in the body before the mind catches up.

He was not indifferent.

He had never been indifferent. Whatever the rumours said and whatever he had built his identity around and however long he had told himself and everyone else that this part of him was missing, standing in this kitchen at this hour with this much honesty between us, he was not indifferent and we both knew it.

He set his glass down.

The controlled version came back, not fully, the moonlight kept some of him, but enough. He straightened. The distance between us was still five feet but it felt like a decision now rather than a measurement.

"Goodnight Amara," he said.

"Goodnight," I said.

He walked out. I listened to his footsteps go up the stairs until I could not hear them any more.

Then I put my glass down on the counter and pressed both hands over my face and stood there in the empty kitchen.

He had looked at me in that doorway like I was something he had not planned for and was not sure what to do with yet. He had stood five feet away from me and the gap had felt like a question rather than a space. He had said maybe with his whole chest and I had felt it move through me like something lit.

I took my hands off my face.

Went back upstairs.

Lay down on top of the covers with the moonlight coming through the window in pieces across the ceiling and the wind moving the trees outside and the whole house quiet around me.

My body and the careful sensible part of me that knew better had a long conversation in the dark.

The careful sensible part did not win as cleanly as it needed to.