Page 13 of Power Play

I pulled up and his truck was in the driveway.

I cut the engine and sat there sizing the truck up. It was dark gray and practical, the bed scratched up from actual use. I’d assumed he’d be at the facility for practice, and I’d planned to let myself in with the door code and meet the house on my own terms, with nobody watching me try to pass for a woman who belonged in his kitchen.

The truck in the driveway meant that wasn’t happening.

I got my bag out of the backseat. The concrete of the front walk pushed heat up into the backs of my legs, and the bag strap slid off my shoulder before I made the step. Then I knocked.

My knuckles hardly registered on a door built that solid. He answered before I finished.

The door swung open and there he was, and the photographs hadn’t prepared me for one inch of it. The smell reached me first, cedar soap with warm skin under it and salt under that. Nothing had warned me about the gray t-shirt, stretched thin at the shoulders and tight across his chest, and it undid my professionalism on the spot.

Those dark eyes came down on me with nothing in them at all, and I had about as long as it took a door to finish opening, and I spent it badly.

“My group’s not on till ten,” he said. “Wanted to show you around first.”

“Perfect. I got here twenty minutes early and sat in the car, which I want you to know about now rather than have you find out later and think I was surveilling the house.” I put my hand out. “Good morning.”

He looked at the hand, then at my face. Then he took my hand, one shake, and let go, and the calculation crossed his face while it happened. A handshake at eight in the morning in his own front hall was a strange object, and he’d decided to accept it anyway. His palm was warm and rough across the base of the fingers.

He moved out of the doorway. I followed him in, eyes on the walls.

It was open through the middle, the kitchen running into the living room, the back windows giving onto the yard, and the block wall closing off the far side with the sun already full on the top course of it. The counters were granite, and I put my fingertips on the edge of one and it was cold. Morning light came through the kitchen window in a wide band and hit the refrigerator dead on, and the refrigerator was covered in Iris’s drawings. It wasn’t a tasteful selection. It was the door, edge to edge.

“She curates it herself,” Eli said. He’d come to stand beside me, close, and the cedar came with him, and I studied the drawings like there’d be a quiz. “I’ve been told the arrangement is intentional.”

His voice was dry. One eye creased at the outside and smoothed out again. Until that second I’d read his face as flat. It wasn’t flat. It was contained, and the second one was a lot more dangerous to stand next to.

He walked me through the kitchen. Orange juice went on the table before Iris sat down, or there were feelings about it. The snack drawer was second from the left. Medications were above the sink. He opened the pantry and pointed at the third shelf from the bottom. The pantry ran warmer than the kitchen and smelled like cardboard and dry cereal.

“Gerald’s emergency backup crackers.”

“Gerald has emergency backup crackers.”

“Gerald has had several crises.” He didn’t smile. He delivered it straight, with complete sincerity, the tone a person used for a fact he’d paid for more than once.

Standing next to him in the pantry doorway put the heat off his arm onto my shoulder without either of us touching. He gave no sign of it at all. He was pointing at crackers.

I followed him to the casita.

The casita entrance was off the side hall, its own door, its own key. He unlocked it and I stepped in and stopped.

It smelled like fresh paint with a cedar note under it. A wide rectangle of morning light lay across the floor from the east window, landing on white bedding that glowed a little in it. The headboard was plain, solid wood, a piece a person had to think about before buying. The room was bright with the morning. The ceiling fan turned on its lowest setting and clicked on every turn up in the housing. My shoes sounded harder in there than they had in the house, bare tile, no rug in the room at all.

I reached out and pressed my palm to the bedding. It was cool and heavy in my hand and it hadn’t been cheap.

I picked up the towels at the foot of the bed. They were the same quality, folded by somebody who didn’t know how to fold towels and had gone ahead and done it anyway. The fold lines from the packaging were still pressed into them.

“Maren helped me figure out what to get,” Eli said. He was propped against the door frame, hands in his pockets, watching to see how it landed.

He’d asked. He’d been in a store, or on a phone, with Maren Callahan, and asked what a person would need to feel at home in a room that wasn’t hers yet. This man, with those shoulders, had asked about thread count.

I put the towels down and got hold of the bedding again, because I couldn’t leave it alone. “This is a real headboard. Do you know what most people put in a guest room? A frame. A metal thing out of a box. Somebody stood in a store for this.”

His jaw moved once, off to the left, and stopped.

“She said you’d want—” He stopped. “If anything’s wrong or you need something different, just say so.”

“Eli.” I turned around. “There is a rectangle of morning light on this bed, and somebody folded these towels badly and did it anyway. I pulled into this state in July, and you are the first person in this state who has done one considerate thing for me. Nothing is wrong.”