Chapter 10: Out of Character

The room was so quiet it rang.

After a whole day of the roar — the crowd, the foam clamped over my ears, my own blood going — the hotel room’s silence came at me like a sound of its own: the AC ticking, the ice machine down the hall, Reese moving somewhere behind me. We’d gotten the suit off back at the con, in the emptied green room with Jo not-looking and not-asking, folded the shell down into its bag and driven across town barely talking, and now it was slumped in the corner by the TV. This morning it had owned this room — every surface covered in its parts, the staging bay for the whole operation. Now it was a bag of foam leaned against the wall with the head tipped sideways on top, switched off, done.

And I could see her.

Out of the suit, it kept catching me. All day she’d been a voice at my ear and a body I read in the dark, and now she was just Reese, across a hotel room, in a clean t-shirt with her con makeup half scrubbed off and her hair wrecked, sitting on the end of the bed looking at her own hands. I could look at her as long as I wanted. Eighteen years of rationing it down to the second, and there was suddenly no reason left not to, and I didn’t know what to do with that any more than she did.

We hadn’t touched since the green room, and neither of us was saying so. All day we’d been welded into one body, no gap possible — and now there was a whole room of carpet between us and nothing in the world making us cross it, no belt, no chain, no head about to pitch us over. The not-touching was louder than any of it had been.

She felt it too. I watched her reach for something to do with her hands — the remote, her phone, the strap of the bag — the way she’d reached for a joke all day, the performer hunting a bit with no crowd left to work.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t do the thing.”

“What thing.” Not looking up.

“Where you make it a joke so we don’t have to—”

“I don’t know what we do now, Theo.” It came out fast and flat and scared, the realest thing she’d said all day. “In there I always knew. There was a next step, a next problem, a thing to fix. Out here—” She looked at the suit in the corner instead of at me. “Out here it’s just us and I don’t know the steps.”

I crossed the room.

All day I’d been the one who got moved — by the chain, by the crowd, by her hand in the dark — and crossing that carpet was the first thing I’d done since dawn because I chose it, eyes open, with nothing making me. I sat down next to her and she went still the way she’d gone still in the garage the first night, braced for it.

“We did this once,” I said. “Almost.”

Her breath changed. The knowing went across her face before I finished the word.

“The lake. Two summers ago.” I didn’t say the rest; there wasn’t a rest that needed saying. We’d both been on that dock. We both knew how close, and we both knew she was the one who’d stood up and walked down to the water and left me sitting there with my heart going, and we’d never put a single word on it in two years, right up until now.

“I stopped it,” she said, to her hands.

“You stopped it.”

“ ... You going to tell me I shouldn’t have?”

“No.” I brought my hand up to her jaw, the way I had in the garage, the way I’d stopped myself from doing a thousand times over eighteen years. This time I didn’t stop. “I’m going to do the thing you stopped.”

And I kissed her.

It should have been nothing. We’d done everything — I’d been inside her twice that day, come in her in front of four hundred people — a kiss should have been the last small formality left. Her whole body went rigid against me for a second, the old flinch, the lake, the dock, two years of stopping — and then it let go. She turned into me and her hand fisted in my shirt and she kissed me back like it was the one thing she’d been starving for the whole time, clumsy and soft and brand new, the first time I’d ever done it, after everything, with my eyes open and the whole of her face right there to watch while I did.