Dark of the Day

I put the sheet aside, walked to the closet and grabbed the broom and dustpan. “Here. Make yourself useful.”

He took them without comment. While he cleaned the floor, I set out bowls and cereal boxes on the table, and put the kettle on to boil once more. Then I turned and watched him bend to sweep the last of the clippings into the dustpan.

“You say you know all about me. Everything there is to know?”

He looked up and nodded.

“Then you know there’s nothing romantic about me. I’m not some tragic heroine out of a book or a movie. I don’t paint or sculpt or play the piano like Ali McGraw.”

He nodded again, this time with a dropping of his brow that said he didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about with the Love Story reference, but he was agreeing with me anyway. Whatever. I needed to get this off my chest.

“I became a bookkeeper because I like to deal in numbers—black and white. No shades of gray. No maybes or what ifs.”

He stood and took a step toward me. “Robin—”

I held up my hand. “Something either is or isn’t in my world. It either adds up or it doesn’t.” I turned and looked out the window over the sink. The cold light that precedes the sunrise threw the maple trees into hard, black silhouettes. “And you?” I said. “Don’t add up.”

I heard the broom and dustpan clatter to the floor a bare second before I felt his huge hands descend on my shoulders. “I think we can work around that. Don’t you?”

I felt his voice more than heard it, rumbling up from some place that seemed farther away than his physical presence. I leaned into him, surrounded and overwhelmed by the warm scent radiating from his body. “Do I have a choice?”

“You always have a choice. That’s rule number one.”

We weren’t talking about his helping me through my existential crisis anymore. His scent intensified and gained an edge of something darker. I recognized it as arousal and realized I wanted him as much as he apparently wanted me. But I had to choose.

I turned to face him, and his arms came around me like he’d been waiting to hold me since the moment I opened my front door.

I wanted to say that I couldn’t choose. That it was too hard. That I’d already used up my lifetime quota of difficult choices by the time I was fifteen, and shouldn’t have to make them anymore.

But the kettle broke into its high-pitched squeal, interrupting my brief wallow in self-pity. He glanced in the direction of the stove, and the blue flame extinguished itself. The kettle’s whistle dissolved into long gush of steam that fogged the windows instantly.

“Robin?”

I looked up at him and nodded, afraid to speak. Afraid I might laugh or cry or do something else to ruin it.

When he kissed me, I tried not to think about anything more than how he felt against my mouth and under my hands and pressed up tight against my body. I tried not to think...and it got easier and easier the more he touched me.

By the time we made it to my bedroom, I’d forgotten how to do anything but feel.