Page 42 of Open Road

I stop in front of her, close but not pressed. Enough space that she has room to decide what she wants to do with it.

“Roam—”

“You’re wearing a good color,” I say.

She blinks. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t that.

“Devil picked it.”

“Devil picked right.”

Her hands move, not away from me, a small adjustment, smoothing the fabric at her hip in the unconscious gesture of someone who isn’t sure where to put what they’re feeling.

“I don’t really wear things like this.” Her voice is quiet. Not the careful quiet but the honest one. “Haven’t for a long time.”

“I know.”

“It feels—” She stops, then tries again. “It feels like a lot.”

“The dress?”

A beat. “Being looked at.”

Four years of a man who looked at her and found the deficit. Looked at her body the way a property assessor looks at a building, cataloging the ways it had declined from some imagined original value. I know the shape of what Craig did without knowing every detail, the way you know the shape of a fire from the damage it leaves behind.

My hand comes up. Slow, the way it was the other night, nothing that can’t be read in advance, nothing she can’t account for. I move the back of my fingers to her face, the line of her jaw, and I watch her eyes. They stay on mine with no flinch or recalibration.

“You want to know what I see?” I say.

She’s very still. “Yeah,” she says, barely a sound.

So I tell her.

Not with speeches. I’m not built for speeches, and she’d hear the construction of one before I got three words in. The way her coloring takes that dress, the warmth it brings into her face, and the burgundy against her skin makes everything richer, as if the color was waiting for her specifically to justify its existence. My hand rests against her jaw while my eyes follow the shape of her down through the dress, the way the wrap sits softly against her waist, the way she takes up space in a room and doesn’t even know it.

It’s the way she took up space on the back of my bike twelve minutes after I met her, barely touching, making herself as small as possible, and how the bike knew she was there the whole time, knew it in the way weight distributes and the handling changed. I adjusted without thought because the adjustment was the only right response to what was behind me.

My thumb slowly moves along her jaw. “Craig’s voice in your head,” I say. “While you were at the mirror.”

Not a question.

Her breath shifts. “How’d you—”

“Your face.”

She looks at me for a long moment. The window light is getting low and amber, the last of the afternoon doing what afternoon does at the end of itself, and in it, her eyes are dark and very clear.

“It went quiet,” she says. “In the fitting room. For the first time in—” She stops. “A long time.”

“Good.”

“It won’t stay quiet.”

“No,” I say. “Not yet.” My hand is still at her jaw. “But it’ll get quieter.”

She breathes.

My other hand comes to her waist. The wrap fabric, the curve of her beneath it, warm, real, and present. Not pulling her in but holding and giving her something to calibrate against, the way you give a person a fixed point when the ground has been unreliable for long enough that they’ve stopped trusting their own feet.