Chapter 5 Carry Her

I wasn't supposed to fall asleep.

That's the thing, I had a perfectly good bed, a great bed, honestly, the most expensive mattress I'd ever slept on in my life.

Eleven steps down the hall, I had no reason to be on the living room floor at 11:45 on a Thursday night except that Lily had wanted one more game, and somewhere between building a blanket fort and losing three rounds of Snap to a four-year-old, I had apparently just... stopped.

I don't even remember it happening. One minute I was shuffling cards. The next I was gone.

I came back slowly.

Not all the way at first, just enough to be aware of warmth, and the faint sound of the city outside the windows, and the fact that I was moving.

Which was wrong, because I hadn't been moving. I'd been on the floor.

I was not on the floor anymore.

My brain arrived at this information and then just sat with it for a moment, slow and unhelpful, while the rest of me caught up.

I was being carried, that was the only word for it. One arm under my knees, one behind my back, and I was against someone's chest and we were moving down the hallway and I was wrapped in the particular warmth of another person's body heat and it was..

I opened my eyes.

The hallway ceiling moved above me, slow and steady.

I turned my head just slightly, and found his jaw about six inches from my face.

The way it was set, looking straight ahead, like this was completely normal, like he carried people down hallways every day and it required no more thought than making coffee.

I should have said something immediately, I know that.

Any normal person would have said oh, sorry, I can walk, put me down, something like that.

Instead I just looked at him. For a moment that was probably too long to be accidental. The angle I was at, I could see the tiredness around his eyes, the slight looseness of him that only came out this late at night when he thought no one was watching. His hair wasn't quite right. His collar was open.

He looked different when he didn't know he was being seen.

I must have moved, or made a sound, or something, because he glanced down.

Our eyes met.

He didn't stop walking.

"I can..." I started.

"Go back to sleep," he said. Low and quiet, like we were in a library. Like this was a reasonable thing to say to someone he was currently carrying down a hallway.

"I'm awake," I said.

"I know."

He kept walking.

I don't know what made me not argue. Maybe I was still half asleep. Maybe I'd simply run out of the kind of sense that would have told me to insist on being put down.

Either way I didn't say anything else, and he didn't say anything else, and we went the rest of the way down the hall in silence with me in his arms and my heart doing something I was going to have to think very hard about later.

He turned into my room. Crossed to the bed. And then he crouched smoothly, without any apparent difficulty, which was irritating, and set me down on the mattress like I was something that could break.

He straightened up, Reached across me to pull the blanket from the other side of the bed and laid it over me with a kind of careful efficiency that suggested he was trying very hard to make this feel like it was just logistics.

It did not feel like just logistics.

He stepped back.

I looked up at him from the pillow. He was looking somewhere around the middle distance, not at me, not away, just at the space beside my head, and I could see him deciding something.

I don't know what, I couldn't read him well enough yet. I'm not sure anyone could.

"The cards are still on the floor," I said.

Because I had to say something, and that was the thing my brain produced.

"I'll get them."

"You don't have to..."

"Go to sleep, Maya."

My name, not Miss Reyes. He'd been calling me Miss Reyes since I got here, formal, deliberate, the right amount of distance.

And now at 11:50 on a Thursday night in my dark room with him standing at the foot of my bed, it was just Maya. Quiet and matter-of-fact, like it had always been that.

I didn't say anything.

He left. I heard him in the living room, the soft sound of cards being gathered, the rustle of the blanket fort Lily and I had constructed being gently dismantled. He wasn't loud about it.

He moved through the space like he was trying not to disturb anything.

I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and pressed one hand flat against my sternum like that was going to do anything useful.

It didn't.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about living in someone else's space, you learn them whether you mean to or not.

You learn the sounds of their morning, You learn how they take their coffee and what time they usually give up on sleep and which lights they leave on when they're working late. You learn them in all the small ways that add up to something bigger before you've noticed it's happening.

I've been here for two weeks.

Two weeks, and I already knew that he woke up at 5:43 almost every morning. Not by an alarm, just him, like his body had decided sleep was something that happened to other people.

I knew he stood at the kitchen window for a few minutes before he did anything else, looking at the city.

I knew he kept the volume on his phone lower than anyone I'd ever met, like he didn't want to disturb something.

I knew he always checked on Lily before he left for work, even when he was running late, I'd heard his footsteps stop outside her door, pause, and then move on.

Every single morning.

I knew all of that. And he didn't know I knew, because we were both very careful about pretending we weren't paying attention to each other.

That's the thing I lay there thinking about at midnight with the blanket he'd pulled over me still warm from his hands.

We were both paying attention.

The question I wasn't ready to answer was what exactly we thought we were going to do about it.

He was already at the counter when I came out in the morning, Coffee on, Jacket on. Phone in hand.

I went to the cabinet, the correct one, I knew where it was now, and got a mug.

Neither of us said anything.

The coffee machine finished and I poured and we stood on opposite ends of the kitchen island and I could feel him not looking at me the same way I was not looking at him, which is to say: with a great deal of effort.

"The fort's been put away," he said finally.

"I saw, Thank you."

"The cards are on the counter."

I looked, They were neatly stacked.

"Thank you," I said again.

Silence.

"You shouldn't sleep on the floor," he said, looking into his phone.

"I didn't mean to."

"I know." A pause.

"There's a pullout in the second guest room if Lily wants late nights. It's more comfortable."

"Okay." I looked at my coffee.

"I'll remember that."

He picked up his travel mug. Straightened his jacket. And then he walked to the elevator and I watched him from the corner of my eye and he did not look at me once, and I did not look at him once, and the elevator doors closed and he was gone.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment.

Then I put both hands around my mug and looked at the sunflower magnet and the laminated rules card pinned beneath it and thought: Maya. You are in so much trouble.

I took a long sip of coffee.

I went to wake up Lily.

I did not think about the way my name had sounded in his voice in the dark.

I thought about it the entire day.