Page 25 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

The light through the yellow curtains is thin and gray, the color of a Sunday, and the whole room is full of it.

She's turned in the night and she's lying on her side facing me with one hand tucked under her cheek and her hair across the pillow in a russet tangle. The quilt's slid to her waist. I'm so aware of the exact weight of the air that I think I could draw the bedroom from memory.

A crease from the pillowcase runs down her cheek. One freckled shoulder rises out of the blankets, her mouth is slightly open, and every few breaths she makes a small noise, not quite a snore, that goes straight through my chest.

Her left hand lies curled on the pillow between us, the fingertips still stained blue, the wrist soft and unguarded. I want to put my mouth against it. I want to lie here until the sun goes down.

Ninety-four, I think, finding the freckle I stopped on, and kiss it so lightly she doesn't stir.

Then, like a cold hand on the back of my neck, I remember the bet.

It's been sitting under everything since Mae's counter. Five hundred dollars and a phone call on a Friday morning, a grin at a window, a stupid, glib thing said to a woman who has spent the last two days making me feel like the first honest man alive.

I lie there with her breath on my collarbone and decide it with the same flat clarity I bring to everything: I'll tell her.

This morning. Before the list, before the board, before anything else. I'll make her tea with the honey on the side and sit across the table and say it plainly, she'll be angry, she'll have every right, and then I'll deal with it.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I don't want to look. I look.

It's an email from the buyer in Maine, sent at 6:12 from what I suspect is a parking lot. Four lines. She's read my message three times, the tournament's over, her boys lost in the semis, she's in a mood to be impressed. She'd like to see yarn. She'll call at four.

I read it twice and put the phone face down. I don't wake Rosey to tell her. I'd rather tell her over eggs.

I ease out from under her arm and she makes a small protesting sound and burrows into the warm place I've left. The stairs creak on the fourth step and I wince, but she doesn't wake.

My shirt is on the banister with two buttons missing and I put it on anyway, unbuttoned at the throat. The kitchen is washed in pale gold, everything in it hers. The mismatched casserole dishes sit in a row on the shelf.

Charlotte's school pictures cover the fridge, a festival schedule beside them, a grocery list in Rosey's firm slanting hand that says honey (the GOOD kind) and tape and call Mom re: Thurs. The spider plant on the windowsill has put out three babies. The faucet doesn't drip.

I stand there listening to it not dripping for a long, ridiculous moment.

Then I get to work. Thirty-six years of restaurants where the menu has no prices have not prepared me for a cast-iron skillet. I find eggs and a box of pancake mix in a cupboard beside a jar of sprinkles, which I decide is Charlotte's.

I find the tea, a dented tin, black, strong, and I make it the way Mae told me, and set a small blue dish on the table with the honey and a wooden dipper beside it. She likes to do it herself.

The first pancake comes out the shape of a continent. The second sticks. The third I flip too early and it folds over like a handshake, and the bacon, which I'd thought was the easy part, has gone black at the edges, and the smoke is climbing toward the ceiling.

I stand at the stove practicing out loud, quietly, to the lopsided pancake.

"There's something I need to tell you about Friday morning, and I'd like you to hear it all the way through."

The pancake is unmoved. It sounds like a deposition.

A stair creaks. The fourth one.

"Something's on fire," says Rosey from the doorway.

I turn around and the spatula goes slack in my hand.

She's in a worn green robe, flannel, soft with a thousand washes, knotted loosely at her waist and gaping where her chest rises. Her bare feet are on the linoleum. Her hair is a wild red cloud and the pillow crease is still on her cheek, and in the thin gold light every line of her is exactly what it is, the full, soft curves of her hips and thighs under the flannel, the swell of her breasts where the robe falls open, the round of her stomach, the pale length of her throat.

She's rubbing her wrist and looking at the stove with a look of such profound skepticism that I almost laugh.

"It's under control."

"It's smoking."

"It's seasoning."