Page 23

I could say his name. Riwal. Right now, in this doorway, out loud.

I stand in the doorway with the cold coming up through my feet and I look at that mask, and I think about what happens after I say it. He takes it off.

We stand in a corridor in a house four miles from anything, and he is the tall grey creature who lied to me at a table, and I am the woman who chose him in front of two hundred people and has to explain why, and there is nothing left over for either of us to hold.

And I will have had one night. One. In a counting room, with the gulls going, before I knew anything.

I have been given a good thing exactly once and I ran out of the building.

I’m not doing that twice. I want him so badly my hand is on the latch before I have finished the thought, and I am not ashamed of it yet.

“Come in,” I say.

He comes in. I shut the door.

“Rules,” I say, and my voice comes out steady, which surprises me. “No names. Not yours, not mine. Nothing gets said about what happens in daylight. And no questions, not one, not from either side.”

He is very still.

“Those are your rules,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“That was a question.”

I put my hand on his chest, over the coat, and there is no heartbeat under it and I do not care, and I can feel him deciding, and then he breathes out, long and slow, and does not ask anything else.

I blow the candle out.

I take his coat off him in the dark and put it on the chair, because it is a good coat and I am still myself.

He stands and lets me. A man that size and that cold, standing in the middle of a small room with his arms at his sides while somebody who comes up to his collarbone works the buttons on his shirt, patient as a horse, letting me do every part of it.

“Sit down,” I say. “You’re absurd.”

He sits on the edge of the bed and it drops an inch under him.

I get his shirt off. Under my hands he is smooth and cold and hard as a rail in winter, and the long seam is there on his side where it was in Morlac, and I put my palm on it because I want to, and he catches my wrist as fast as he did then.

“A few things,” I say. “I remember.”

He makes a sound in his throat. I get my hand free and put it flat on his mouth.

He goes absolutely rigid.

I do not move it. He could take my hand off his face with about one finger and he does not, and under my palm his mouth is shut and warming from my skin, and I stand there in the dark between his knees and understand what I am doing, and do it anyway.

If he cannot talk, he cannot tell me anything true, and I cannot hear the pitch of it, and I can have this until morning.

I take my hand away and put my mouth where it was.

After that it goes slow. I have never done anything slowly in my life.

I get his boots off, which takes both of us and a certain amount of falling about, and I do not laugh, because laughing has my voice in it.

I get the rest of him off in pieces. Nothing alive is put together like this, long and pale and hard, and I take my time over it with my hands because looking is no use in a dark room.