Informed Consent - chapter 5 (with images) (Patreon)

Vicky's new place is on the second floor of a building off Colfax with a parking lot in back and a door that sticks when the humidity is up. I stand in the hallway with the Crock-Pot in its sealed box and knock with my elbow because my hands are full.

She opens the door in a dress I haven't seen before. Dark green, short, the kind of thing she'd wear to a dinner she wanted to be a certain kind of dinner. Her hair is down. She's wearing the earrings I got her for her birthday last year.

"You brought it," she says.

"I brought it."

She takes the box from me and sets it on the counter. The apartment is small and smells like new paint and the takeout she had for lunch. The couch is a futon. The mid-century dresser is against the far wall, the lamp with the linen shade unplugged on the floor beside it.

"I'll get you a glass," she says, and opens a cabinet and takes down a wine glass. "Red okay?"

"Yeah."

We stand in the galley kitchen with the Crock-Pot between us on the counter. It's too narrow for both of us. She has to turn sideways to get to the fridge.

"He'll be here in twenty minutes," she says.

"Who?"

"Nico. I told you."

"You said someone was coming. You didn't say his name was Nico."

"You didn't ask."

The wine is the bottle with the kangaroo on the label and it tastes like it.

"His crew did the buildout on my floor," she says. "He's been around. You'll like him. He's nice. He's easy."

I look at her over the top of the glass. She's watching me the way she watches a patient with a fever that won't break, checking for the thing she can't see yet.

"What," she says.

"Nothing."

"Don't do that."

The knock comes and her hand goes to her hair and she smooths it on the way to the door.

Nico Ferrante is early thirties, maybe, with forearms like the men who built the deck at my parents' house and a face that's already smiling. Work shirt, sleeves rolled. He's carrying a six-pack of the beer I used to drink.

"Vic," he says, and kisses her cheek, and she lets him, and then he sees me.

"This is Mara," Vicky says. "I told you about her."

He puts the beer on the counter and comes over and holds out his hand. His grip is warm and dry and he looks at me the way you look at someone you're meeting for the first time, which is to say directly, without the half-second of recalibration I've been getting from everyone else for a month.

"Mara," he says. "Good to meet you."

"You too."

He opens the beer and hands one to Vicky and one to me and leans against the counter with the Crock-Pot next to his elbow and doesn't ask about the box.

"Vicky says you're a nurse," he says.

I keep the answers short. The voice has been landing where I put it for about a week now and I still don't trust it past four or five words, so I give him four or five and stop, and he reads it as reserve and works a little harder.

"Endocrinology, at St. Luke's. Mostly I draw blood."

"Yeah? My sister's a nurse. ER at Denver Health. She's crazy."

"Everyone's crazy in the ER."

"That's what she says." He smiles. There's a gap between his front teeth. "She said you were sick for a while."

"The flu."

"Bad one?"

"Yeah."

He nods. He believes it. There's nothing to not believe.

Vicky gets up and opens the Crock-Pot box and pulls the lid off and looks inside like she's checking for something. The tape is still sealed. She puts the lid back.

"Stay for dinner," she says, not looking at me. "I'm making chili. Nico's staying."

Nico looks at his beer. "I'm easy," he says. "Whatever works."

I should go. The apartment is too small and Vicky is wearing the earrings and the smell of new paint is making my head hurt and none of this is a good idea.

"I'll stay," I say.

The chili takes an hour. Vicky cooks it like she's proving a point, and Nico leans against the counter next to her and they talk about the buildout. I sit on the futon and watch her laugh a beat too long at his jokes and touch his arm when she reaches past him, and I know what it is and I don't say it.

We eat sitting on the floor, my knees up, the bowl on my lap.

She's been watching me all night, and somewhere around the bottom of the bowl she finds the thing she's been checking for, and she looks away first.

He leaves at ten. He shakes my hand at the door and his grip is the same, warm and dry.

"Good to meet you, Mara."

"You too."

The door closes. Vicky stands with her back against it and looks at me.

"What," I say.

"Nothing." She goes to the kitchen and opens the last beer and drinks it standing up. "He liked you."

"He was being polite."

"He liked you." She says it flat, like a reading off a thermometer. "I could tell."

I pick up my keys. The Crock-Pot sits in its open box on the counter, the inside empty.

"Thanks for bringing it," she says.

"Yeah."

The stairwell is dark and halfway down my left heel slides half out of the boot on a step and my knee buckles and I catch the rail hard enough to sting my whole palm. I stand there with my heart going. Half an inch of empty room behind my heel, and a flight of stairs is all it takes. I go down the rest of them with both hands on the rail like my father does.

The night is cold and clear. I sit in the car for a minute before I start it. The building has eight units and four of the windows are lit and hers is one of them. I don't look up to see which.

The trophy goes back on the shelf between the paint cans, where it lives. I carried it in under my arm and set it on the felt in front of Sully before anybody sat down, and he held it up to the shop light like a fish he was deciding about. R. Kowalski, First Place, 1994.

"Whoever takes the month takes it home," he says, and wipes the base with his sleeve.

Marty got here before me. That has never happened in nine years. He's in the chair next to mine, the one Giorgio takes, and there's a can sweating in front of me that isn't a seltzer.

"It's a cider," he says. "Guy at the store said it's what everybody buys now."

"The guy at the store saw you coming," Sully says.

The can has a sunset on it. I open it and it's sweet enough to hurt a molar, and I drink it anyway, because he bought it.

Kwame cuts the deck and squares it against the felt. The creased nine of hearts bends past his thumbs. "You owe nothing," he says to me. "Sit."

I sit. The good chair, the one that doesn't wobble. It's been mine since the night I walked in with a name for them. Nobody has said so, and nobody sits in it. My shoes don't sit flat anymore. Under the table I push my heel back into the left one and it slips again, more room at the back every week than the week before. Thick socks don't fix it. I've quit fixing it.

"Are we playing," Sully says, "or are we doing footwear."

Nobody was doing footwear.

The first orbit Marty folds out of turn twice. The second orbit he looks at his cards, then at me, then forgets which one he was doing. My hair stays where I tuck it now. When I push it back off my face Marty checks his cards again like they changed on him.

"Two callers," Kwame says, and deals the turn.

Giorgio is quiet, which means he's winning. He catches my eye once and rolls his toward Marty, fond, not worried. I roll mine back. It's the most we've said to each other all night.

Marty is telling an app story. There's always an app story. This one is a woman who asked what he does Fridays, and he said poker, and she said who plays poker anymore, and he said the same five of us, nine years running.

"She goes, all guys?" Marty turns a chip over twice between his fingers. "And I said yeah." He sets the chip down on his cards. "Mostly."

Nobody picks up mostly. Sully stands and says he's calling the food in, and the table is grateful to him for it.

The place on Wadsworth, the one with a name nobody uses. Usual, usual, usual. Sully gets to me and stalls, and Marty says "she gets the burrito" without looking up from his phone, fast, before anybody has to think about it.

The food comes and we eat standing at the tray table by the dartboard, no food on the felt. Marty's has onions. He picks them off with a plastic fork and eats it anyway, and for ten minutes the garage is the garage, cold off the concrete, motor oil and onions.

Then we sit back down and it starts up again, softer. Marty brings me a second cider from the garage fridge without asking. I didn't want the first one. I take the second one.

"You're going to make her diabetic," Giorgio says.

"She's a nurse," Marty says. "She'd know." Then he hears it, the pronoun he didn't used to say in this room, and he looks pleased with himself for about a second before he checks my face. I nod at my cards, and we play on.

I play one real hand all night. Jack-ten, a flop with a nine and a queen in it, and I ride the open end against Kwame because for three Fridays in a row I've folded everything that asked anything of me. The river bricks. Kwame has the straight the other direction, the one I wasn't looking at, and he takes the pot and stacks my chips in towers of twenty, counting twice, exact as ever.

"Better to lose it playing," he says. It's the closest thing to a comment he's made on my game since February.

During a lull I check my phone under the table. Appurva has sent the group chat something about a potluck. Nothing new from Sonia since the day she shut her office door, and the quiet should feel like mercy and it doesn't. I put the phone away and lose eleven dollars total, which feels correct.

"Walk you out?" Giorgio says, reaching for his jacket.

"I got it," Marty says. "I'm parked right there. Need to grab my gym bag anyway."

Marty doesn't own a gym bag. Giorgio looks at him a beat longer than the sentence needs. Then he looks at me, and I give him nothing back, which is a choice, and I feel myself make it.

"Text when you're home," Giorgio says, like it's a thing we've always done.

Outside it's April-cold, the concrete still giving back a little of the day. The garage door comes down behind us in its jerking chain-run, and then it's the two of us in the driveway, Marty's blue sedan behind my car, a week of fast food wrappers on the passenger floorboard showing through the window.

He stands at the back of my car with his hands in his jacket pockets.

"My ex," he says. "The second one. You know what she told me at the end. She said I don't want things. I just want to be next to things." He rocks on his heels. "I've been thinking about that a lot, lately."

"Marty."

"Can I…" he says, and doesn't finish it, and I don't help him finish it. That's on me. I could have said the sentence that lets him off. I let the quiet stand there instead, because I want to see what he does inside it.

What he does is step in and kiss me.

I have to tip my face up. The angle, his mouth coming down at mine from above, and something in me tilts to meet it. His stubble drags my chin. He tastes like the cider, both of us sweet now, and the cold metal of my own car presses through my shirt at the shoulder blades. His hand comes up and finds my waist, the new curve, the place my own hands keep going in grocery lines, and his thumb moves once, up, and brushes the underside of my breast.

The tenderness there goes off all at once. They've been sore for a while now, both of them, a deep bruise-feeling I stopped mentioning to myself, and his thumb is gentle and it doesn't matter. My nipples pull tight against the cup of the bra, the one that was for later, the one that fits me now. The heat gathers low and wide with no direction in it at all, and I lean into his hand before I decide anything, and my mouth opens, and he makes a sound low in his throat.

I don't want Marty. I've never wanted Marty. But his hand is warm and his wanting is pointed at me, at this body, and I've been starving for that without letting myself use the word. I kiss him back. I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart is going hard under my palm and I take the reading without meaning to, fast, a hundred and ten at least.

He pulls back an inch. His breath is quick. His eyes are open and close to mine, close enough that I can watch something move behind them, some figuring, a man checking a sum twice because it won't come out the way it used to.

"Mar…" he says.

He stops.

I picked the name at a register with a stylus in my hand. I picked one that lets everybody keep the first sound of the old one, so they'd never have to start a new word, only finish an old one differently. And now neither of us knows which name he was starting, and I stand there against my cold car with my whole body still running and watch him not choose.

"Sorry," he says. He steps back. Cold air moves in where he was. "Sorry. I don't…"

He looks at his boots. At my shoes. At the strip of dark at the top of the driveway where the streetlamp doesn't reach.

"You're still…" he says, and he doesn't finish that one either.

I could say it for him. It's me, it's the same person, it counts. He might take the out. His hand might come back to my waist, and I'd spend all of it knowing he had to be talked across a gap I dug myself. I don't say it.

"We're good," Marty says, right on schedule, because he's been divorced twice and treats every situation as slightly recoverable. "This doesn't have to be a thing. It isn't a thing. Same time next week."

"Same time," I say.

He waits until I'm in the car with the engine running before he walks to his sedan.

Nine years he's done that. Giorgio does it too, every Friday, stands in the driveway with his hands in his pockets until my headlights come on. I've watched them both do it five hundred times and understood it as nothing, a habit men have, the same as holding a door.

Two blocks down I stop for gas, and the pumps are in the open at the edge of the lot and it's eleven-fifty at night. There's a man at the pump on the other side of the island. He's doing nothing. He's filling a truck and looking at his phone and he hasn't looked at me once.

And I'm standing with my back against my own car with the nozzle in the tank and my keys already in my fist, points out, and I have no memory of deciding to hold them that way.

He's nobody, he's a man buying gas. But my hand moved on its own. Distance, angle, how many steps to the door of the store, whether the attendant can see me from where he's sitting. Every woman I've ever known has been running this program since she was fourteen and running it well, and mine started up two weeks ago and it's bad at it. It's loud. It won't turn off. I got a whole life without it and I never knew that's what I had.

I finish the tank and get in and lock the doors, which is also new.

Nine years Marty's waited until my engine turns over. It never meant anything. It means something now, and he doesn't know that either, and I can't tell him.

I drive two blocks and park under a streetlamp, out of some habit like I'm hiding from somebody, and I sit there with the heater blowing and both hands at my waist.

My body is still going. The heat doesn't care that the man left. It turns over slowly and my breasts ache against the bra and the seam of my jeans sits exactly where it has no business sitting, and I think about finishing it right there in the car like a teenager, and I don't. I let it run its slow circles and die on its own schedule. This body doesn't take orders about wanting. It takes its time and it stops when it stops.

What I wanted wasn't Marty. What I wanted was a man's hand on my waist with no figuring behind it. Somebody to say my whole name and mean it past the first syllable.

Nico's face arrives without being asked. The gap in his teeth. The way he said Mara at Vicky's door, easy, like a name off a form, a name with nothing attached to it. It cost him nothing to say. After tonight I know exactly what that's worth.

My phone lights up. Giorgio: You good.

I type Yeah and send it, and what happened in the driveway goes into the same place as everything else this group has no plumbing for. The car warms around me. After a while I drive home, and I leave the shoes by the door, and the loose heels rock once when I let go of them and then hold still.

Saturday I drive to the shoe warehouse off Wadsworth, the self-serve kind with ladders of boxes, and I stand on the metal measuring slide bolted to the floor for the first time since I was fourteen. The slider stops where it stops. Nine and a half, women's. In March I was an eleven, men's. I take a plain pair of ankle boots off the women's wall, no heel, and in the aisle mirror they look like what they are, which is women's boots on a woman, and nothing in me objects. What I notice instead is the walk up and down the aisle: my heel staying where I put it, the shoe gripping at every step, no half inch of give at the back. I'd forgotten a shoe could do that. I've been walking around in a negotiation for a month. At the register the kid doesn't look up from his phone, and I'm grateful, and then I'm tired of being grateful for it.

The bathroom at the shoe warehouse is at the back past the returns counter and I've been thinking about it since the parking lot.

First Saturday out as Mara and I haven't once done this. I've built the whole thing around not doing it. Coffee before I leave, nothing to drink while I'm out, and home before it's a problem, and I've been calling that planning.

The door says WOMEN in vinyl letters and there's a wheelchair symbol and somebody has put a sticker over part of the W. I stand in front of it for about as long as I stood in the hallway at that bar back in March, and then I push it open with my shoulder, and it's a room. It's four stalls and a bank of sinks and a hand dryer, and it's brighter than the men's rooms I've spent thirty-two years in, and it doesn't smell the same, and there are two other women in it.

One is at the sink with a kid on her hip, running water over the kid's hands and talking to her about the water. She looks at me in the mirror the way you look at anybody who comes through a door and goes back to the kid.

The stall latch is broken on the first one so I take the second. Everything in here is thinner than the men's room, the partitions, the door, the noise. I can hear the woman talking to the kid the whole time. I can hear the other one two stalls down. There's no privacy in this room at all, and everybody in it has agreed to behave as though there is, and nobody ever explained it to me because everybody who uses this room learned it at six years old.

I wash my hands next to the woman with the kid. The kid stares at me, openly. Her mother says say hi and the kid doesn't say hi and her mother says sorry and I say she's fine, and my voice does what it does now, and the woman shakes her hands off and takes the kid out.

I stand at the sink with the water running over my hands after they've gone.

Nobody said anything. Nobody was ever going to say anything. I built that room in my head for a month and it turned out to be four stalls and a hand dryer.

At home I stand Vicky's old shoes on the closet floor under the blue chambray. The door fights me off its track and I let it. The shoes look large down there, laces in the loose knots from the last time I wore them, toes pointing out at the room like they're waiting for someone. I close the door on them as far as the track allows.

Sunday I go to the Cherry Creek mall, which is a mistake for a reason I don't think of until I'm inside it.

I'm forty minutes in, two bags, standing at a rack of cardigans I don't need, when I see Denise from courier dispatch coming up the main concourse with a teenager.

The voice on the phone every Tuesday for a year has never had a face to put to it, not from her side. But Denise comes into the clinic twice a month with paperwork and she's stood at my station and watched me label tubes, and she knows Marcus by sight, like anybody you've seen thirty times without needing to.

I turn into the cardigans. I put my whole attention on a sleeve. My heart is going hard enough that I can hear it, and what's running underneath it isn't embarrassment, it's the reconciliation report, the red line, the accession with my initials on it and a body attached to it in a mall. If Denise says something Monday, if she says it to anyone, if she says it to Sonia, who's already looking.

She goes past. She's arguing with the teenager about a phone plan. She doesn't look at the cardigans and she wouldn't have looked at me if she had, because I don't look like him, and I stand there with a sleeve in my hand for a long time after she's gone.

It takes me until the parking garage to understand what I'm actually afraid of.

Being out and seen is the point of it, so it's not that. What I'm afraid of is the two of them touching. Sunday and Monday. The one where I'm Mara in a bookstore in Lakewood and the one where I'm a nurse with four years of clean charts who's going to keep being that for as long as I can hold it, and I've been running them like they're separate systems and they're not separate, they're one person in one city with one face.

I drive home with the bags in the trunk instead of the back seat, and I notice myself doing it at the light on University.

Then it's time to do the laundry. The bag is lighter than the bag of fever sheets was and I still stop twice on the basement stairs. In the basement I pull my work shirt out and the smell that comes up off it is nobody's I know. Not the changing scent from the fever weeks, and not the old smell either, the one that used to live in my collars. Something milder, faintly sweet, like the laundry of a house I've never been inside. I check the detergent bottle. Same detergent. Same machines. It's me that's different in the wash.

The bruise above my elbow is five days old, green at the edges, dark in the middle where the draw chair's arm got me when I swung the tray around on Tuesday. I never used to mark. Twelve years of bumping equipment for a living and my forearms came away clean. Now there's a second one on my hip from the supply cart and I don't remember the cart touching me. The skin thins and the vessels sit closer to the surface. I've read the panels. Reading a panel isn't the same as finding it above your own elbow.

Sunday night I take the notebook out of the nightstand drawer, the drawer that sticks, and measure. Ribs: thirty-one and a half. Fullest: thirty-five and a quarter. Weight the same as Thursday. I write the numbers in their columns and then I sit there with the pen, because the ribs line has stopped. Thirty-one and a half, three entries running, two full weeks. Everything else on the page is still moving, feet, chest, the whole slow tide of it, and this one column has posted its final result. The first finished thing. I thought a finished thing would feel like an ending. It feels like a lab value coming back within range. In the notes column I write: waist done. I close the drawer and it sticks and I leave it stuck.

The other column hasn't stopped. Thirty-five and a quarter, and there's a weight in them now that wasn't in them in April, when they were a soreness and a shape and nothing else. They move on their own. Going down the basement stairs with the laundry I feel them go a beat behind the rest of me and come back, and I put a forearm across them on the second flight without thinking about it, like holding a stack of plates.

It changes how I walk and I can't tell if anybody else can see it. My shoulders have come back. Something in my spine has given up an argument it was having. Bare, going from the shower to the bedroom, the whole front of me is in motion in a way that a body has to be organized around, and I've started doing it, the small constant management, and I didn't decide to start.

Sleeping is the surprise. On my side they lie against each other and the underside sweats, and when I roll they drag and pull at the tissue underneath and wake me up. Wednesday I got up at two and put a bra back on and slept in it, and it worked, and I lay there in the dark in a bra at two in the morning thinking that nobody tells you this part. It isn't in the pamphlet. It isn't in anything.

The text from Nico comes on Thursday. Vicky's making lasagna, her mom's recipe. You in?

I look at the message for a long time. Vicky doesn't make lasagna. In two years she made it once, for my birthday, and it took her three hours and she swore at the oven and it came out with the middle still cold and we ate it anyway.

I type back: What time.

Seven. She said bring wine if you want, don't if you don't.

I bring wine. The drive takes fifteen minutes. I park in the back lot behind a pickup with contractor plates. On the stairs my heels stay where I put them. The new boots grip. The building smells like new paint and the takeout somebody had for lunch and the faint chemical sweetness of the glue on the baseboards. The door on the second floor is propped open with a yellow rubber wedge.

Nico is at the counter with a cutting board, dicing an onion with a knife that's too small for the job. His sleeves are rolled. His forearms are dusted with flour. He looks up and smiles and the gap in his teeth shows.

"Mara. Good. You can grate the cheese."

He looks at me and sees a woman coming through the door with a bottle of wine, and nothing in his face stops to check. I keep waiting for it. The half-second audit, the eyes going to the jaw, the hands, the throat, the small recheck after I speak. My whole body has learned to brace for it. Shoulders up. Voice down into the register I use on anxious patients.

Nico doesn't examine. The smile finishes and he goes back to the onion and I'm left standing in the doorway holding a bottle with my shoulders somewhere up around my ears, braced for an impact that isn't coming. My face is hot. I roll my shoulders down and let my voice sit where it actually lives now.

Vicky is on the futon with her phone, legs tucked under her, wine glass on the coffee table. Jeans, a tank top, no earrings. The green dress from last time is gone. She says hey without getting up.

"Wine's open," she says. "Red."

I pour a glass and stand in the kitchen doorway. Nico's knife work is bad, too much wrist, the onion pieces coming out uneven.

"You cook?" I say.

"I assemble. She cooks. I grate cheese and open cans."

"Where's the grater?"

He points with the knife. I find it in a drawer with a potato peeler and a garlic press still in its plastic wrap. The cheese is a block of mozzarella, the good kind. I grate it into a bowl and the curls build up pale and my hands smell like milk and onion.

Vicky watches from the futon. She hasn't moved.

"You two look like a cooking show," she says.

"A bad one," Nico says.

"The worst one." She drinks her wine. "Mara can't cook either."

"I can cook."

"You burn rice."

"Once."

"Twice. You burned rice twice."

Nico looks at me and grins. "She's got a file on you."

"She's got a file on everyone."

I layer the noodles while Nico pours sauce. The Crock-Pot is on the counter, still in its box. The lasagna pan is the glass one from my old apartment, the one I bought at the grocery store because it was cheap. I bought the pan. Now it's hers and I'm layering noodles into it in her kitchen.

Nico reaches past me for the bowl of cheese and his hand covers mine on the grater. It's an accident, the ordinary kitchen kind, and it lasts one second longer than an accident. His hand is warm. The flour on his forearm comes off on my skin.

"Sorry," he says, and doesn't move the hand.

"You're fine."

I look at him. He's already looking at me. The gap in his teeth, the flour, the whole easy open face of him, and the pull is immediate and uncomplicated, the first straightforward version of it I've felt pointed at me in months. Not Marty in a driveway. This. A man looking at me like there's nothing to figure out.

Behind us, on the futon, Vicky's glass clicks against the table.

"You're going to burn the sauce," she says.

Nico steps back to the stove. I finish the cheese. My hands are steady. I check them anyway.

The oven takes forty minutes. We sit on the futon, three of us, Nico in the middle, the same arrangement as last time, except it's not the same. His thigh is an inch from mine and I can feel the heat of it through my jeans.

Somewhere in the last twenty minutes I've gotten wet. I notice it the way you notice a held note under a song. There's nothing to see, nothing to arrange, no evidence to manage with a hand in a pocket or a jacket on a lap. In the old body arousal was an event. It had a shape and a demand and a tell. This body runs it under the evening like a second conversation nobody else can hear. Vicky is six feet away reading me like a monitor and the one thing she can't see is the thing happening.

"So," Vicky says. "How long have you two been texting?"

I haven't been texting him. I look at her.

"She gave me your number," Nico says. "For the lasagna. I texted you about the lasagna."

"Right."

"See?" Vicky says, to nobody. "You're already finishing each other's sentences."

"Vicky."

"I'm making an observation." She refills her glass. Second glass. "You should see the two of you. He's a good guy, Mara. I vetted him. His crew did the buildout on my floor and he was the only one who didn't leave trash everywhere." She drinks. "I notice things about people. It's my whole job."

"You're a recovery nurse," I say. "You notice when people wake up."

She looks at me over the rim of the glass. "That's right," she says. "That's exactly my job."

Nico shifts on the futon, easy, like the room hasn't changed temperature. He tells a story about the buildout, the drywall guy who showed up drunk, and I laugh in the right places, and Vicky laughs a half-beat late every time, and each time she does, her eyes go from his face to mine and back.

The lasagna comes out. It's good, the middle hot all the way through. We eat on the coffee table. Nico sits cross-legged and eats fast and gets sauce on his thumb and wipes it on his jeans, and watching his hands I think about those hands and then I stop thinking about those hands, because there's a list of things I haven't told him and the list lives in my bloodstream.

"More?" Vicky says, holding the pan out to Nico before he's finished his first bowl.

"I'm good."

"You barely ate."

"I ate a whole bowl."

She sets the pan down on the table hard enough that the lid rattles. "Nobody wants seconds of my lasagna. Noted."

"I want seconds," I say.

I don't. I take them anyway. It's the only move I have, and it's the wrong one, because her face does something when I say it, a small closing.

After dinner Nico washes and I dry. He hands me the wet bowls one at a time and each time our fingers touch under the rim of the bowl and neither of us adjusts the system to prevent it. Behind us the futon creaks as Vicky gets up. She goes down the hallway. The bathroom fan goes on.

"Your friend's mad at me," Nico says, low.

"She's not mad at you."

He hands me the pan. "At you, then."

I dry the pan. The glass is still hot and the towel heats through against my palm.

"She's not mad either," I say. "She's doing something. It's different."

"What is she doing?"

I put the pan in the cabinet, the cabinet where it lives now. "It's hers to explain."

The bathroom fan goes off. Vicky comes back down the hallway with her face washed and her wine refilled, and she stands at the end of the galley with the glass in her hand and looks at us standing too close together in a kitchen too small for two.

"God," she says. "Get a room."

She says it like a joke. She says it in the register of a joke, with the smile attached, and neither of us laughs, and the smile stays on her face a second past its natural life.

"I should go," I say.

"You just got here."

"It's ten."

"It's nine-forty."

I put the dish towel on the counter, folded, the way she taught me to fold them, in thirds. Her eyes go to the towel and then to me.

"I'll walk you out," Nico says.

"You don't have to…"

"I'm parked behind you anyway."

Vicky doesn't say goodbye. She takes her glass to the futon and sits down with her phone and the room goes out of her face.

The stairwell is cold. The wedge is out of the door now and the door sticks and Nico puts his shoulder into it and it gives. The lot behind the building is lit by one pole light, half the spaces empty, the asphalt still dark from an afternoon rain. My car is three spaces down. His truck is blocked by it, contractor plates, a ladder rack with one ladder.

We stop at my driver's side door and neither of us says the thing about the truck being blocked by my car, how he can't leave until I do.

"So," he says.

"So."

He puts his hands in his jacket pockets. The pole light buzzes and throws his shadow long across the wet asphalt. Up on the second floor, in a window I won't look at directly, there's a light on that I know is the kitchen light.

"I had a good time tonight," he says. "That's a stupid thing to say. You made the cheese."

"It was good cheese."

"It was a good lasagna." He shifts his weight. The gravel pops under his boot. "Mara. I'm going to ask you something and you can tell me to get lost."

"Okay."

"Can I cook you a meal? Just you. No lasagna committee."

The pole light buzzes. I've been waiting for this question for a week, since the Crock-Pot, and I've been not answering the question behind the question, the one about what I'd be agreeing to, what I'd be agreeing to eventually, the thing in my blood that has his name on it now if I let it.

"Yeah," I say. "Dinner."

"Sunday?"

"Sunday."

He smiles and the gap shows and then he does the thing I've been hoping for and dreading in equal measure, which is that he steps in, one step, into the space between me and the car door, and he's close enough that I can smell the sauce and the flour on him and under it something clean, soap, the same soap smell all day on a man's skin.

"Can I kiss you," he says.

"Yeah."

His mouth comes down at mine and his hand finds my jaw, not my waist, my jaw, his thumb resting just under my ear, and the kiss is slow and unhurried, nothing to prove in it. His lips are chapped. His stubble drags my cheek. The cold of the car is at my back and the heat of him is at my front and my body makes its own decision, which is to press forward into the heat, and my hands come up and rest on his chest and under my palms his heart is going fast, faster than mine.

The heat pools low, in the wide new architecture of me, and there's an ache in my breasts where the bra holds them, and my mouth opens and his tongue touches mine and the slickness starts between my legs with nothing touching me there at all. A kiss used to be a prelude. The arousal waited downstream for hands, for friction, for the body to be given a job. Now the mouth is wired straight in. And under the pooling heat there's something with no analog in anything I used to have, an ache at the entrance of me, located, a want with an address. Empty and aware of it. Weeks of nothing and my body answers him like it was built for this. It was. I built it for this.

I'm the one who ends it.

I turn my face an inch and his mouth catches my cheek and we stand there, breathing, his forehead against mine.

"I should go," I say.

"Yeah." He doesn't move. "That was…"

"Sunday," I say. "Dinner. I want dinner."

He steps back. The cold moves in where he was. He waits while I get in the car and start it, and he stands in the pole light with his hands in his pockets until I pull out, and in the mirror I watch him get smaller, and then I turn onto Colfax and he's gone.

The drive home is twelve minutes and I don't remember any of it.

My apartment is dark and empty and the lamp with the paper shade throws its low yellow light over the space where the couch used to be. I hang my jacket on the hook. I put my keys in the bowl. I go to the bedroom and the bed is unmade from this morning and the sheets are twisted and the room smells like my sleep and nothing else.

I take my clothes off at the side of the bed. The jeans, the new shirt, the bra, the one that was for later, that fits me now. In the mirror in the bedroom, my body in the low light. The breasts, dark nipples, the waist that keeps narrowing, the hips that hold my hands now when I stand and think. Four weeks ago this was someone else's idea of a body. Now it's the only one I've got.

I lie down on the sheets and they're cool against my back and my skin is hot, flushed down my chest, and when I close my eyes it's his hand on my jaw, his thumb under my ear, his heart under my palms going fast.

I slide my hand down my stomach. The slickness is already there, waiting, and my fingers move through it and find the place at the top and the sensation goes up my spine in one clean line. I keep the pressure light, through the hood, the pressure that builds instead of spikes. Slow isn't a preference anymore. Every attempt to rush it just resets the clock.

I think about him. His forearms dusted with flour. His hand covering mine on the grater and staying. The gap in his teeth. His mouth, chapped and slow. I imagine his weight, the breadth of him over me, and my hips lift off the mattress into my own hand, and the pressure of my palm is his palm, and the heat starts gathering.

One finger inside, then two. The ache from the car, the one with the address, quiets under my fingers. The stretch answers and my thumb keeps its slow circles and my breathing goes ragged in the empty room. I could fill it better. I lie there knowing what would fill it better, and the knowing feeds the heat. His voice. Mara. He says it like a name off a form, like it costs nothing, and my hips push up and the orgasm arrives in waves, rolling, one and then another, my thighs shaking, my heels digging into the sheets, his name in my mouth and nobody to hear it.

It eases by degrees. My hand slows. The wet heat of my own body cools against my fingers.

I lie there and the ceiling is the same ceiling and the bed is the same too-big bed and my heart is going hard and steady. On the nightstand my phone is dark. I don't pick it up. There is nothing on it I want to read.

I get up and wash my hands in the bathroom sink and the water runs warm and I catch myself in the mirror above it. Flushed chest, dark nipples, the soft jaw, the whole new geography of me. I put my hand flat on my sternum and feel my own heart, fast, mine.

Sunday, I think. Dinner. And I go to bed in the middle of the bed, and I don't sleep for a long time.