Page 62 of Power Play
“It’ll be worse tomorrow.” He turned the mug. “You sleep?”
“Yes.” I studied the coffee. “You?”
“No.”
My head snapped up. He was watching me over the rim of the mug with no expression I could read, and he didn’t fill the silence. Since August I’d learned to read his silences, and this one was Eli waiting.
“Are we going to talk about it?” I said.
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we don’t have to this second.” He set the mug down. “I’m going to say one thing and then I’ll leave it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not sorry.” He said it with no heat at all. “I’ve had eight hours to work out whether I should be and I’m not, and I’m not going to perform it for you over coffee. If you want to walk it back you can walk it back and I’ll never mention it again and nothing changes about your job. You’ll have to be the one who does that. I’m not going to.”
I flushed warm from the collarbones out. It was a lot to happen to a person before breakfast.
He meant it. He wasn’t a man who said a sentence he hadn’t decided in advance to be bound by. He also couldn’t deliver it. Nothing changes about your job. He owned the house. He’d written the document. If it turned bad I wouldn’t lose a job. I’d lose the job and the room I slept in and a little girl who had put me on her refrigerator, all in the same afternoon.
He would be decent about all of it, so decent it would be unbearable, and I would still be the only one packing.
I didn’t say any of it. I let him hand me the one promise he couldn’t keep. I took it, because I wanted it, and because the arithmetic was mine and he had no way to touch it.
“I don’t want to walk it back.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
“That’s the answer I wanted,” he said. “I don’t need more than the answer.”
I put my coffee down before I threw it at him or climbed him, and I hadn’t decided which.
“I have to get Iris at noon,” he said. “After that she’s in the house.”
“I know.”
He came around the island without hurrying and stopped a foot away. I had to tip my head back, and he didn’t touch me anywhere.
“Last night you said I didn’t know something.”
My pulse picked up until it was going in both wrists.
“I did say that.”
“Are you going to tell me what it was?”
“Not yet.”
He nodded once and didn’t push, and picked his keys up off the counter.
“Then I’ll wait,” he said.
He left through the garage. I braced both palms on the counter and said a word out loud that I didn’t use in front of children.
