Page 100 of Power Play

He must have been sitting up in the kitchen, because he had my door open before the word had finished.

“Don’t come in here.”

“Too late.”

“Eli, I’m serious⁠—”

“Arms down.”

He got it off me fast and without fumbling, had a clean one over my head before I’d finished being horrified, and his eyes didn’t leave the wall. On Tuesday he’d taken my shirt off so slowly I swore at him, and he’d looked at everything. For the few seconds I was bare to the waist and shaking, he kept his eyes on a framed print of a saguaro like it owed him money. Not looking was hard on him, and I knew exactly why. He was careful with me because he wanted me, and he didn’t touch me because I had a fever of a hundred and three. Nobody had ever tended to me like that.

Monday morning he had a flight out for a road trip through Chicago, Nashville, and Dallas.

I woke to a man packing a bag very quietly in a sleeping house, and by the time I got into the hall he was on the phone. “Then find out,” he said, and then, “Because I’m not getting on it.”

I rounded the doorway. “Hang up the phone, Eli.”

He said a few more words to whoever it was, and hung up.

“You are not missing a road trip.”

“Watch me.”

“I have a fever. People have them and then they don’t. Maren is forty minutes away and has already offered twice. I am not going to die in your casita while you’re in Nashville.”

“That’s not why I’d stay.”

That stopped me. “I know,” I said, eventually.

“Do you?”

“Go and play hockey.”

He looked at me until I nearly gave in, then let himself be argued down. I’d never seen anyone talk him out of anything before.

“Maren comes today,” he said. “Not tomorrow. Today. And you answer your phone. Say it.”

“I will answer my phone.”

He crossed the kitchen, put his hand on the back of my neck and his mouth to my forehead, and held it there. It wasn’t what a man did to the woman on his payroll, and he did it anyway.

Then he picked up his bag and left for the road trip. I put my palm on the counter where his coffee cup had been. The granite was still warm in a ring. I was thirty-six years old and in love with my employer and I’d let a man carry me to bed. I sat down before my legs did it for me.

The road trip went by from the end of his couch, under the gray blanket. One evening Iris called him at her bedtime and turned the phone around, and there he was in a hotel room halfway across the country, with Gerald propped beside me under a dish towel folded into a nurse’s hat.

“She has a hundred,” Iris said. “And one.”

“She’s accurate,” I said. “It’s a problem.”

“Did you eat?” Eli asked.

I tipped the mug toward the lens. It was broth, with little stars in it.

“She has to finish it,” Iris said.

“I’m drinking it slowly, like a person.”

I was at the counter folding and refolding a dish towel, Iris at Wren’s until noon and the refrigerator the loudest sound in the house, when Eli pushed in from the garage and dropped his keys in the dish without a glance and looked at me instead, and went on looking. There hadn’t been an hour alone with him since he got home Friday. The sun had come around to lay a hot white stripe across the counter, and both my hands were in it.