In Summertime Saga

Her room was different.

She'd taken my hand after the first time and led me down the hallway in the dark, barefoot, the robe over her shoulders but not closed, and opened the door to the master bedroom. The room was bigger than mine. A queen bed with a blue comforter and four pillows and the curtains were heavier and the streetlight didn't come through the same way. The air smelled different too. Her moisturizer, her shampoo, the faint stale sweetness of a room that stayed closed during the day.

She got into bed on the left side. Her side. I got in on the right.

Frank's side.

She pulled the sheet up to her chest. Held it there with both hands, tucked under her chin. Covering up.

We lay there. Side by side. Both on our backs. The ceiling in her room had a different texture than mine, a stippled pattern that caught shadows. A clock on the nightstand ticked, one of those old ones with hands and a face that glowed faintly green.

"I should feel guilty," she said.

I turned my head. She was looking at the ceiling.

"Do you?"

"No." She said it fast. Then slower: "No. And that's what scares me."

Her knuckles were white on the sheet in the dim light, the fabric pulled taut across her collarbones.

"I keep waiting for it to hit. The guilt. Like it's supposed to come after and I'm supposed to feel terrible and I keep checking and it's not there." She turned her head. Looked at me. "Is that awful?"

"No."

"I was with Frank for years. I loved him. I love him." Present tense. She caught it. Corrected. "Loved. I loved him. He died and I've been living in this house with his things and his coffee mug and his side of the bed and I haven't-" She stopped. Swallowed.

"What?"

"I haven't changed these sheets." She smoothed the fabric with her palm. "Since he died. I wash them. But they're the same sheets. I sleep on my side. His side was empty." She looked at me. "Now you're on his side."

The pillow under my head smelled like laundry detergent and nothing else. No trace of Frank. That had been washed away months ago. The pillow was just a pillow, but it was his pillow and I was lying on it with my skin still damp from his partner and the room knew it.

"Frank was a good man," she said. Her voice was steady now, the kind of steady that costs effort. "He was kind. He tried. He loved Jenny. He loved me." She paused. "And he died because he tried to protect us from people he should have run from."

I didn't say anything. She needed to talk, not be answered.

"He was the first man I ever lived with. I was nineteen when we met. He was twenty-three and he worked at the bank and he was funny. Not funny like you. Funny in a quiet way, where you'd miss the joke if you weren't paying attention." She reached over and touched the pillow next to my head. Frank's pillow. Her fingers traced the edge of the pillowcase.

"He used to read in bed. Every night. He'd have his glasses on and a book and he'd read three pages and fall asleep with the book on his chest and I'd take it off and put it on the nightstand and turn off the lamp. Every night for twelve years."

The clock ticked. A car passed outside, headlights sweeping across the ceiling.

"Is this wrong?" she asked.

She was looking at me. Her grey eyes in the dim room, her hair messy on the pillow, the sheet clutched to her chest. She wanted me to say no. She needed me to say it and she needed it to be true.

I could lie. I was good at lying. In my past life I'd told women what they needed to hear automatically, without cost, because the truth was usually harder and less useful and I didn't stick around long enough for the lie to matter.

But she'd made me breakfast every morning since I woke up in this body. She'd called me sweetie through a mortgage and a funeral and Russians at her door. She'd cried into my chest with her bruised wrist against my ribs. She was the first person in this world who cared about me and didn't want anything for it.

"It's not wrong," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because wrong doesn't feel like this."

Her eyes searched my face. Looking for the lie. Looking for the performed reassurance, the easy answer from a teenager who didn't know what wrong felt like.

She didn't find it. Because I wasn't performing. I'd died on a bedroom floor because I was wrong about everything. Debbie in this bed wasn't wrong.

"Arthur." She said my name the same as she'd said it in the shower. The same as twenty minutes ago in my bed. Not sweetie. Me.

She let go of the sheet.

It dropped to her waist. Her chest was bare and the dim light from the clock face caught the curve of her breast and the rise and fall of her breathing and she was done covering up.

She reached for me.

The second time was different. Slower. She was on top, her hands on my chest, her hair falling around both of us, and she set the pace. Slow enough that her face was right there, inches from mine, every movement a decision. She wasn't hiding. She wasn't holding the sheet. She was watching me watch her and this time she knew what she wanted.

She came with her hands flat on my chest and her back straight and her head tipped back and the sound was quiet and hers. I'd hear it again.

Afterward she didn't pull the sheet up.

She lay next to me with the covers at her waist and her arm across my stomach and the ceiling with its stippled pattern above us and the clock ticking and the house quiet.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"Late."

"Jenny."

"Jenny sleeps through earthquakes."

She almost laughed. A small sound, mostly air. Her fingers traced circles on my stomach, idle, going nowhere.

"You can't stay in here," she said. "In the morning. If Jenny-"

"I know."

"You'll go back to your room before she wakes up."

"Yeah."

"And we'll... I'll make breakfast. And it'll be normal."

"Okay."

She was quiet for a while. Her breathing slowed. The circles on my stomach got wider, then smaller, then stopped. Her hand went still and heavy.

She was almost asleep.

"Debbie."

"Mm."

"Thank you."

Her eyes opened. Half-open, sleepy, confused. "For what?"

I didn't answer. She was already drifting back. Her hand was warm and heavy on my stomach and her breathing was evening out and she was falling asleep in her own bed on her own side with me on Frank's side and the sheet was at her waist and her body was bare and she wasn't covering up.

The clock said 4:17. I watched the second hand go around twice. Then I closed my eyes.

I'd be in my own room by six. We'd pretend at breakfast. She'd call me sweetie and make eggs and Jenny wouldn't know.

For now, the room was dark and the bed was warm and Debbie's hand was on my stomach and the pillow smelled like laundry detergent and the woman next to me was breathing deep and even.

I fell asleep on Frank's side of the bed.