Page 12 of Brother in Law with Benefits

I hold my coffee. "You're asking why I left?"

"You don't have to answer."

"You were married to my brother," I say. "That's why I left."

Sophie goes very still. Then, slowly, she turns to face me. "And now I'm not."

The air shifts. Something settles between us with a weight that neither of us is going to pretend isn't there. She's close enough across the small table that I can see the exact shade of her eyes change with the light through the window, and I have the distinct, physical urge to reach across and tuck one of those loose strands of hair behind her ear, and I don't, and it costs me something to not do it.

"Sophie."

"I'm not asking for anything." She's steady. Direct. Her voice doesn't waver but her hand around the coffee cup tightens. "Ijust spent five years married to the wrong Guilligan, and I'm done pretending I don't notice the right one."

I look at her.

She looks back. Doesn't flinch.

"I'm fifteen years older than you," I say, because somebody has to say it out loud, and it might as well be me before some stranger in a waiting room says it worse.

"I can do math."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know what you mean." She turns her cup a quarter turn on the table, precise, the way she does everything. "You think I haven't noticed the gray at your temples? Or the way you look at a room like you're clearing it before you sit down? I noticed all of it, Grant. I noticed it on the porch yesterday before you'd said four words to me. It's not a deterrent. If anything it's the opposite of one, which is probably a whole separate conversation I'm not having in a hospital cafeteria at eight-thirty in the morning."

"I'm here for three months," I say. "Then I'm gone."

"I know."

"You're here. You have a life here. The clinic, my mom. It doesn't make sense."

"A lot of things don't make sense." She holds my eyes when she says it, doesn't look away, and I understand, with total clarity, that we're not really talking about logistics anymore.

This is a bad idea. This entire conversation is a bad idea. We're in a hospital cafeteria while my mother gets chemotherapy and I've been back in this town for thirty-six hours and I am sitting here wanting things I have no right to want this fast.

I say none of that.

"We should get back," Sophie says finally.

"Yeah."

But neither of us moves right away.

The elevator ride back up is six floors and too short. We're the only ones in the car. I can see her reflection in the steel doors and the careful space she's keeping between us, six inches that feel like six miles and also like nothing at all, the way she's looking at the floor numbers instead of at me, which tells me exactly how hard she's working not to look at me.

We're almost to three when it happens.

Her hand brushes mine. Could be the elevator shifting. Except her fingers catch on mine and hold, just for a moment. Just long enough to feel the warmth of her skin, the intention of it, and every rational reason I have for keeping three months of distance between us evaporates for exactly as long as her hand stays where it is.

I don't pull away.

Neither does she.

Her thumb moves once, slow, along the side of mine and I turn my head before I've decided to, and she's already looking at me in the doors' reflection instead of the numbers, which means she's been watching this whole time too.

"Grant."

Just my name. It shouldn't do what it does.