Page 76 of Power Play

The sheets had dried stiff in the sun. I brought them in off the line and made the beds, his last, and folded the laundry, and squared the edge of every stack with the flat of my hand.

He got home with plenty of the day left.

The truck rolled up the drive and stopped. The engine had a note at idle, low and a little uneven, and Iris heard it before I did. Her feet hit the floor in her room and then the length of the hall at a dead run, and I waited alone in the kitchen.

The door opened, and he grunted and laughed in the same breath as he caught her, and I would know that noise anywhere on this earth.

Then he came into the kitchen with her hanging off him, and the ceiling got lower. He was six-foot-three and two hundred and twenty-five pounds and he moved through his own house quieter than I did. He brought the rink in with him, cold rubber and refrigerated air with cedar underneath it, and the smell reached me a half step before he did. His hair was wet at the back from the showers and a red line sat across his forehead where the helmet pad had been.

His mouth had been on me.

I had a dish towel in my hands, wet through and twisted into a rope. I took hold of the counter edge and got one ordinary breath into me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.” My voice came out completely normal.

Iris was hanging off his forearm with both hands and both feet clear of the floor, swinging. “Gerald is still on strike,” she said, grinning up at him.

“He hasn’t blinked,” I said.

“He’s very committed,” Iris said.

“He’s got principles,” Eli said.

“You said you have plenty.”

“I do.”

“Gerald says tell him one.”

Eli set her on her feet and crouched down to her level with his forearms on his knees, and considered it. Both knees cracked on the way down.

“I don’t let dragons negotiate on an empty stomach.”

Iris narrowed her eyes at him, took that back down the hall to Gerald, and explained it to him in a low, serious voice, and I had to put my eyes on the drying rack.

Then it was the two of us. His eyes followed mine to the rack, where his container from the road trip stood upside down and clean.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I didn’t. I washed a container. It took nine seconds. If you thank me for a container I’m going to start invoicing you, and you can’t afford my rate.”

His jaw worked, and then it stopped. “Noted,” he said.

He aimed his eyes past me out the window at the empty line with the pegs still clipped along it in a row. “You did the beds.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I know what day it is.” He was still looking out the window. “Mine too?”

“Yours too.”

That morning I’d stood in his bedroom with his pillowcase in my hands and put my face in it and breathed. It was the act of an absolute lunatic, and I was taking it to my grave.

He dropped the keys in the dish without turning his head, and walked down the hall to change. A door shut and the water started, and I pressed both palms to the counter with my pulse beating up under my jaw. The granite was cool under them, which was more than I was managing.

I was tired. My jaw ached at the hinge from keeping my face straight since breakfast. Wanting a person I’d decided not to have wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t tragic. It was a tax on every hour, paid over and over to keep my face doing the right thing in a kitchen, and I’d been paying it since the day he showed me the pantry, and I’d run out.