The Stairs

The Stairs
The little red light on the answering machine had been blinking at her for the better part of a long minute, and somewhere in the distance between the foot of the stairs and the side table where the machine sat, the part of her that had been awake for two weeks straight and the part of her that had not, technically, finished what she had started in the bathtub were arguing about which of them was going to press play.
The cat was on the side table.
Beside the machine. Not on it. With the soft polite indifference of a creature whose proximity to anything was, by long professional habit, a coincidence.

Robe gathered at her hip. Dragging behind her bare heel like a small dark river. The cottage, this evening, had committed to a temperature warmer than the temperature outside, and the wooden boards under her feet were doing the soft animal thing wooden boards in old houses occasionally did, which was register her as theirs, and respond accordingly.

A finger moved toward the small black button.
In the half-breath between the start of the gesture and the pad of her fingertip arriving at the plastic, the cat stretched.
It was a stretch the way an avalanche was a small adjustment. Front paws extended past the side table’s edge. Spine arched. The small precise weight of him, briefly redistributed, found the upper corner of the answering machine and tipped it with a soft definitive shove, and the machine, in the long moment before it landed on the rug, ejected its small black cassette like a creature giving up its only secret without a fight.
The thin brown ribbon inside the cassette unspooled.
A loop of it caught, briefly, on the bristle of the rug. Another loop wrapped, gently, around her ankle. The cat watched the unspooling with the soft dignified expression of a creature who had not, by any small careful read of his own face, broken a thing.

Crouching to retrieve it took longer than it should have. The robe slid off one shoulder. Hair, still wet, hung forward and brushed the floorboards. The ribbon, in her hands, was the precise consistency of a tape that had been chewed by something patient. Splicing it was not going to work. Listening to it was not going to work. Whoever had been on the other end of that small red blinking light had, by the small inscrutable arrangement of the universe, been removed from the conversation.

Disappointment did not arrive.

What arrived, instead, in the soft lit hallway of a cottage in a country she had not, until five days ago, ever set foot in, was the small heavy understanding that something had stepped between her and a thing she had been about to learn, and the something had done it on purpose, and the something was, this evening, sitting on the side table grooming the back of one paw with the soft polite focus of a creature pretending he had not just rearranged her week.
Eye contact happened.
The cat did not blink.
She did.

Returning the cassette to the body of the machine took about as long as a kindness should. The little red light blinked once more, looking for the message it had been holding, and gave up. The light went still. The hallway, in the long quiet second after, settled around her like a hand at the small of her back.
The robe trailed behind her up the stairs.
Each step pulled at the fabric with the soft heavy drag of a thing too large for the body inside it. Climbing was the small slow work of a body that had not, technically, recovered from the afternoon, and the hum behind her sternum, far from quieting in the long careful minute of the hallway encounter, had thickened into the soft heavy weight of an instrument that had been tuning itself, all afternoon, for a piece of music she had not yet been told the title of.

The bedroom door swung in.
Rain on the small leaded glass of the window. The soft warm trace of her own afternoon still on the air. Sheets turned down by some small considerate hand the cottage had been operating with all week. The bed, when her body lowered itself onto it, received her with the soft careful welcome of a piece of furniture that had been waiting for her since the year it had been made.
Eyes closed.
In the long quiet first second of the closing, the hum did not go anywhere.
In the second, it lifted.
In the third, it was not a hum anymore. It was a hand.

Warm. Not gentle. The shape of fingers on the small soft place at her hip, where the robe in the cottage was still gathered, where the body in the dream was, by the small instantaneous arithmetic of these things, no longer wearing one. The hand did not introduce itself. The hand did not need to. The hand was the hand the dreams had been delivering her, in increments, for two weeks, and the hand, this evening, had decided that increments were over.
The room arrived around the hand.
Not the bedroom in the cottage. A different room. Stone floors. Tall windows with no glass in them. Curtains lifting on a wind that was not, by any small careful read of its texture, in any country either of them lived in. Beyond the curtains, a sky the colour of the inside of a fig.
The hand turned her, slowly, to face him.

Description had been failing her, in the dreams, for two weeks. Description failed her again. He was not handsome the way men in advertisements were handsome. Description was the wrong axis. He was a presence. He was the precise architecture of a body she had been finding by feel since the first night she had walked out of Jean’s spare bed and into the dream by accident. Silver-grey eyes she had been seeing every night. Mouth she had been finding with hers. Hands she had been letting go places hands that did not exist in any country she lived in were not, technically, supposed to be permitted to go.
He looked at her in the small private way he had been looking at her since the first night. The look that said I have been waiting all day.

The look that said I felt you, this afternoon, in a bath in another country.
The look that said the woman whose hand was on you was, in the small inarguable architecture of these things, mine.
A breath she had not, technically, taken in the cottage came out of the body she was in.
Her hand came up to his jaw without her telling it to.
His hand, on the soft warm place at her hip, tightened.
In the small quiet half-second before the kiss, in the soft lit hallway of the cottage downstairs, the cat — who had been sitting on the side table beside the dark answering machine for the better part of a long minute — turned his head slowly toward the closed bedroom door, the small private edges of his mouth lifting, very softly, in the soft careful satisfaction of a creature whose entire afternoon’s work had just, behind the door, become worth it.
The bond fired.
Behind the bedroom door, the small lit window began, very softly, to glow.
The cat, on the side table, did not move.
He did not, this evening, need to.