Page 163 of The Professor's Wife

I watched her. I never stopped.

Sometimes she was curled into me, one cold foot wedged between my legs because she refused to admit she was freezing. Sometimes she had taken most of the blanket and left me with one corner twisted around my ankle. Sometimes she lay at the far edge of the bed, caught inside a dream she wouldn’t remember by breakfast.

I knew the sound of each one.

Her frightened breathing was short and shallow. When she was angry in her sleep, her jaw tightened and her fingers curled into fists against the pillow. When she was grieving, she made almost no sound. Tears simply leaked from the corners of her closed eyes while her body remained still.

Those were the nights I wanted to wake her.

I rarely did.

Touch could bring Daisy back or send her somewhere I couldn’t follow. Sometimes she collapsed against me as thoughshe had been waiting all night for my arms. Other times, she woke fighting before she knew it was me.

I had learned to wait.

I fucking hated waiting.

I wanted inside every part of her.

Not only her body, though the need for that could turn animalistic when she was close enough for me to smell her skin. There were moments I wanted to be buried so deep inside her that there was no clear place where she ended and I began. Sex was too small a word for it. It wasn’t sexual relief I wanted. I wanted the distance gone. I wanted to feel her pulse against mine. Her breath in my mouth. Her body opening around me while everything she carried stopped belonging only to her for a little while.

I wanted under her skin.

In her blood.

Inside every place she disappeared to when her eyes went empty.

I wanted to feel what she felt while she was feeling it. I wanted to know what she remembered before she swallowed it and called herself tired. I wanted to stand in whatever darkness kept taking her and make it fucking move.

But wanting access to Daisy didn’t give me the right to force my way in.

Somebody else had already done that.

I didn’t know who.

The ignorance had started to feel like a living thing inside me.

The day had gone wrong at the diner.

I had watched Daisy watching the couple beside us. The man had ordered for the woman without asking. I hadn’t seen Daisy’s body go rigid like that in public before. She recognized what was happening. She watched another man snapping at hiswife outside a gas station. A woman glancing over her shoulder before answering her husband. A couple arguing beside a pay phone while the woman kept smoothing the front of her dress with shaking hands.

Daisy saw things I didn’t.

Or maybe she saw things I had never been trained to recognize until I followed her gaze and started to understand.

By late afternoon, rain had swallowed the road. It came down hard enough to blur the forest and drown the sound of the tires beneath us. I found a safe place to pull off and parked beside an empty stretch of trees.

Daisy started cleaning.

The van was already clean.

She wiped the counter. Rinsed two cups. Folded the blanket across the bed and then folded it again because the corners hadn’t lined up. She swept crumbs from beneath the table with the little hand brush and emptied them into the bin.

When there was nothing left to clean, she washed her hands.

Then she stood at the sink, staring down at them while the rain hammered the roof.

I watched from the driver’s seat.