Page 95 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“I know.”

He turns it over and reads his own handwriting, all four lines plus the check mark. Then he puts it in his back pocket like a receipt.

He sits with his forearms on the table and his hands loose.

He hasn’t interrupted me once. Not a breath. Not a movement. I’ve been in rooms with two hundred people while they were told what they owed. Nobody has ever let me get to the end. “Okay,” he says. “My turn. Three conditions. They’re not negotiable. You say yes out loud to each one, or I get the bus back.”

“All right.”

“One. No money moves without telling me first. Not a dollar. Not into my account, not out of yours, not for Fin, not for a bill you happen to see, not a bus fare. If you want to give me money, you say the number out loud to my face. I get to say no.”

“Yes.”

“Say the whole thing.”

“No money moves without telling you first,” I say. “Yes.”

“Two. You don’t make decisions for me. Not one. Not small ones, either. What I can take is mine to decide. When I’m ready to hear it is my timing, not yours. Something isn’t easier for me to hear next week than today just because you think it is.” He’s not raising his voice. “I had one person in my life decide what I could carry. He was nineteen. He was frightened. It took me until this spring to work out it was done to me, not for me. I’m not doing that again with you.”

“No decisions made for you,” I say. “Yes.”

“Three.” He stops. This is the one he has to get his breath for. “No protection I haven’t asked for. If somebody’s coming, you tell me and we leave together, or I go on my own. You never stand in a door for me again.”

“Kieran.”

“Say it.”

“It’s the only one of the three I have to think about.”

“I know it is,” he says. “That’s why it’s third.”

I sit and look at my own hands on my table, at the knuckle on the right that’s been crooked since I was nineteen. I think about a doorway thirty-two inches wide on a county road in April. It’s the one act of my life I would repeat exactly as it happened.

“No protection you haven’t asked for,” I say. “Yes.”

“Out loud, all of it.”

“I heard you.” I put both hands flat. “Yes. I’m saying yes to it. When I want to do it anyway, I’ll tell you. You’ll tell me no and I’ll do what you said.”

He looks at me for a long stretch. Then he nods once. His shoulders finally come down from the set they’ve held since I saw him.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s the business.”

Then he gets up, comes round the table, and stands in front of my chair. He puts one hand on the side of my face, on the left side, over the flat place under the eye where the bone sits wrong.

“Get up,” he says. He undresses me.

That hasn’t happened. In five months in two apartments, I’ve taken his clothes off perhaps twenty times. Mine have never come off past a belt and shirtfront. He undresses me in the middle of the room with the light on, slowly. Each piece goes on the chair instead of the floor.

At the shirt, he stops.

There’s not much to see. The ribs healed in May. The bone under the left eye sits wrong. The rest is a thirty-eight-year-old body that hasn’t belonged to an athlete since nineteen: thicker around the middle now, gray coming in on the chest. I’ve spent most of my adult life making sure nobody had enough time or light to look closely. Kieran does both. He doesn’t look away from any part of me.

He puts his palm flat on the right side, over where the ribs broke.

“Here?”

“Yes.”