Page 144 of The Lies We Play

“I’m here for a few more things,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I have, by my count, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, two sweaters—three if I’m taking back the one I’m currently wearing, which I'm not—a copy of The Subtle Knife, one earring whose pair I haven’t been able to find, a pen that I think is mine but might be yours, and a pair of socks I forgot I owned until I found them in your laundry.”

“You went through my laundry?”

“I separated my socks from yours. I didn't go through it.”

“Semantics.”

“Accurate semantics.”

She begins, with the efficiency of a girl who has done this list mentally on the walk from the elevator to retrieve her things. The hairbrush from the bathroom. The toothbrush from the cup by the sink. The two sweaters from the chair in the corner where my own things have been migrating for a month. The Subtle Knife copy on the side table with a bookmark still in it where she left it at three a.m. on a Tuesday in December. The earring—aha—from the top of my dresser, where I had not noticed it.

The pen, which is, in fact, mine.

She puts all of it in the tote bag.

I watch her move through my room like she belongs to it.

That is the problem.

She does.

Not in a cute way. Not in a temporary-girl-leaves-things way. It’s deeper than that. She knows which drawer sticks. She knows where I keep the spare phone charger. She knows that I stack books by the bed and never finish three at a time, even though I insist I’m “actively reading” all of them. She knows that my laundry basket is where socks go to create an identity crisis.

And I know her.

I know the way she touches the spine of a book before picking it up. I know the pause she takes before opening a drawer that isn’t hers, even when it contains her things. I know the exact expression she makes when she is pretending not to be emotional because she has decided emotion is an administrative burden she can't currently process.

She comes back to the bedroom doorway.

“That’s it,” she says.

“Okay.”

She doesn’t move.

I don’t either.

I am holding a pair of black socks in one hand, and a pair of black and white socks in the other, and the question of which pair to put in the duffel has become, in the last twenty seconds, the least interesting question in the room.

She walks the four steps from the doorway to where I’m standing.

She takes the socks out of my hands.

Both pairs.

She puts them on the bed.

Then she puts her hand on the front of my shirt—flat, palm down, over the place where my ribs end and my stomach begins—and the touch is the touch of a woman who has been waiting to put her hand on a man’s body without ceremony for longer than she has admitted to herself.

“Creed.”

“Yeah.”

“We have time.”