Chapter Fifty-eight

It’s an accident, this meeting on the stairs. She’s heading down to use the bathroom; he’s going up after taking Pax out for his late night walk. He should turn this way and she should turn that. Instead, as she is one step above him, they find themselves face-to-face, body-to-body. He can smell the faint mint of her favorite Lifesaver. She can, no doubt, breathe in the taste of his last cigarette. He touches the inside of her elbow. She touches his cheek. The moment lingers, as if, having made these experimental gestures, neither one has a way of making sense of them. Here is a question being asked, for which there is no answer. He traces his thumb against the soft surface of her skin. She fans her fingers against his stubbled cheek, holds it as if she is puzzled at the contours of his bones. He’s surprised to see that her eyes aren’t simply green, as he thought, but flecked with shards of amber.

At the foot of the stairs, the dog sits, his gaze upon them, but he is silent.

They need to invoke Rick.

“I’m going to make cocoa. Come down.” Her hand is still on his cheek as she says this.

“I will.” His hand is still on her tender skin.

The moment passes and they continue on their separate ways: She goes downstairs, pauses, looks back at him, doesn’t smile. He goes to his room, where he shuts the door and sits on his cot. Is it possible that his fingers burn with the heat of her skin? Keller touches his lips with the hand that touched her so tenderly. He then touches the cheek where her hand had held it, holding him still so that their gazes matched. He doesn’t go downstairs to sit across a kitchen table from her, an unwanted mug of hot chocolate held in a hand already heated by a want that transcends mere lust. By the time she finally comes upstairs, he is asleep.

Pax remains as he is, at the foot of the stairs, alert and panting gently.

*   *   *

His cheek was so different from Rick’s—his day-old beard darker, the angles sharper. His deep brown eyes softened the longer he looked into mine. The brush of his thumb against my most sensitive skin had sent a radiating pulse down into my deepest parts. For months—no, years—I had been untouched. Rather, touched only in dim affection by my husband, who had lost the ability to want me. Touched by Keller only within the confines of this platonic ideal we were living by out of respect and common decency and the love we both held for Rick.

I heated the milk and got out two mugs, but I knew that he wouldn’t come down. I was relieved, to tell the truth. It was as if there was a thin membrane between us, a membrane that separated us from each other and temptation. On those stairs, we had pushed against that membrane. And so it was fragile right now and there was a grave danger that it would burst at the merest provocation.