Page 21 of Captive

She’s tucked it into her work pants and rolled the sleeves twice, and her hair is loose and drying in waves down her back. She walks past me into the kitchen and looks at everything. The two plates. The locked back door. The key ring on my belt. The chair I pulled out for her, which she doesn’t take. She takes the one across from it instead, the one with its back to the wall and a clear view of both doors.

I sit in the one she left me.

We eat. She eats like a person who has decided to, fast and without pleasure, and then slower, when the food turns out to be good. I watch her hands. I can’t help it. They’re small and square and chapped across the knuckles, with the healing scrape from the hoof pick, and there’s a blue mark on the back of the left one where she wrote a time this afternoon and never washed it off.

“You watch my hands,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they know what they’re doing.”

She puts her fork down.

The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums. Outside, 14C shifts in her straw and blows once through her nose.

“My question,” Sofia says.

“Go ahead.”

“The first morning. The red cow hit the gate and you pulled me against the truck.” She keeps her voice even, the way she reads a result. “You held on a second longer than you had to. What did you want?”

I could lie. It would be easy. She’s given me a way out by asking in the past tense.

I signed my name under rule five.

“You,” I say. “Right then. Against the truck, with a rifle in the brush and your cow walking loose and your keys in Hector’s hand. I wanted you so bad it felt like getting kicked.”

She doesn’t look away.

“And now?”

“That’s a second question.”

“Rule five says one per check. This isn’t a check.”

She has me there. She knows she does.

“Now,” I say, “I want it every hour I’m in this building. I hear you through the wall. I hear the bed when you turn over. I hear the shower. I stood in that bathroom this morning and you were wearing my shirt and I didn’t let myself look, and I want you to know I thought about it all afternoon.”

She doesn’t answer right away.

She sits across from me with both hands flat on the table. Color has come up in her face. Her breathing has changed. I watch it change.

“And you don’t do anything about it,” she says.

“No.”

“Because of what I said the first day.”

“Because of what you said the first day.”

She holds my eyes. Then she picks up her fork again, and eats one more bite, and sets it down.

“I noticed,” she says. “At the truck. I noticed, and I was furious that I noticed, and I noticed anyway. You should know that.”

“Why should I know that?”