The Quilt

The Quilt
Whatever the dream had been about to give her, the dream took back.

Curtains lifting on a wind that was not in any country dissolved before the kiss could land. Stone floor under her bare feet went out the way a candle goes out under a thumb. Fig-coloured sky folded itself, briefly, into the soft pewter of a thing being put away by hands older than the thing. Whoever was running the room — and a room had been being run, she understood now, by a force that had not, until this moment, been required to introduce itself — had decided that the body in Jean’s spare bed in the cottage in the foothills was not, this evening, going to be permitted what the body was asking for.

Disappointment did not come up in her like a wave.
Disappointment came up like a held breath leaving a closed throat.
Awake again on Jean’s old quilt, in a robe three sizes too large, with rain on the leaded glass and the smell of woodsmoke threading through from the kitchen below, what registered first was the absence in her left hand, where a body that was not in this country had, four breaths ago, been pressing her into him by the small soft hollow of her hip.
That hand, on the quilt now, was shaking.
Not violently. Not theatrically. The way the rim of a glass shakes when a long low note is being held by someone in the next room.

On the small pine table beside the bed — where Jean kept a tin of biscuits, a cut-glass tumbler of water, and the brass candleholder Doug had brought home from a trip to the western isles — the book had moved.
Not far. A finger’s width to the left, toward her. A finger’s width was, by any honest accounting of what books on bedside tables did when no one was touching them, a great deal.

Lifting it onto her lap took both hands. Heavier than it had been on Tuesday. Heavier, possibly, because the book itself had decided, in the small careful arrangement of these things, to be heavier, and not because anything inside it had changed. The cover, when she opened it, fell open of its own weight to a page she had never seen. Paper as thick as the felt under a card table. Script in the soft strange angles of a hand that had been writing this language since long before any country she had ever lived in had been named.
Sunday, over rum at the kitchen table, Jean had warned her she would not yet be able to read this script.
Tonight she could read it.

Word by word the page composed itself under the slow drag of her finger. Not a spell. Not, by the small clean reading her body was giving the page, anything she had a category for. Instructions. Specifically, instructions for two bodies. More specifically, instructions for what one body was permitted to do to another body in the soft red room beyond a velvet curtain in a building she had not, in waking life, set foot inside.
The first sentence brought a low, soft sound up out of the place at the base of her throat where she had been keeping the afternoon locked.

That sound, in the cottage bedroom, was the loudest sound the cottage bedroom had heard since the bath.
By the third sentence, eyes closed of their own accord.
Behind the closed eyes — instantly, with the soft economical efficiency of a dream that had been waiting at the door — the room came back. Not the room with the fig-coloured sky. A different one. Velvet, dark. Polished floor. A fireplace lit and quietly furious at the corner of her vision. A long low couch in something old and soft and private.
Standing at the window, with his back to her in a shirt unbuttoned to the third button and his sleeves shoved up past one elbow, was the man.
When he turned, he turned the way men turned in the small careful instant they registered, in the air of a room, a body they had been waiting on.

The look in those silver-grey eyes was not, this morning, the look that had been in them last night. Last night had been want with grace. Tonight was want with the grace burned off.
Crossing the polished floor barefoot took the small slow length of the song the fire was making in the grate. His hand, when she reached him at the window, did not lift to take hers. The hand stayed at his side, palm up, in the soft low gesture of a man who had decided, in the architecture of his own patience, that this evening, the body in the doorway was going to come to him. By choice. Without rescue. The way a body chose to be claimed when the body had, by every careful private arrangement of the universe, already chosen.
Lips at her ear. A name said in the precise low register a man reserved for the woman his life had been waiting on.
Her own.

Heat went up through her the way heat went up through a thin glass that had been left empty too long.
Mouth lowering, slowly, from the place under her ear toward the small soft place under her jaw the afternoon had left raw.

Behind her closed eyes in the cottage, on her lap, the book turned its own page.
The new page held the same opening sentence as the page beneath it, with one word changed.
The word was not.

In the dream, at the window, in the precise instant the kiss was about to land, the wind coming through the empty window stopped. Not the way wind stopped in waking life. The way a room stopped when something older than the room walked into it.
His head lifted.
Hers did not need to.
A single sentence came down out of his mouth, low, in a voice she had been hearing for two weeks every time the lamp went out in this cottage.
Not yet.

Behind her closed eyes the words on the page resolved into the same two.
Whatever was running the room — whatever had pulled her out of last night’s dream a breath before the kiss, whatever had, in the long careful design of these things, decided the bond was not, on this side of the meeting in their actual bodies, going to be permitted to complete itself — held the line a second time.
His hand came up to her jaw. The grip was not gentle. The grip was the grip of a man being denied alongside her, and the denial was the architecture of every kiss the dream had been promising her for two weeks, contained in the careful precision of his mouth not arriving on hers.
When the dream let her go, it let her go with that hand still on her jaw.

She woke in the cottage bedroom with her own hand at her own throat, in the precise spot the kiss had been about to land, and the small brass candleholder on the bedside table — the one Doug had brought home from the western isles — was, by some small careful arrangement of the air, no longer lit. Wick a curl of black thread. Holder cold to the touch.

Down the hall, on the side table beside the dark answering machine, the cat lifted his head with the soft polite acknowledgement of a creature who had felt the room close, and he turned his face, with the small careful satisfaction of a being whose job was to keep this line alive long enough to be lit, toward the bedroom door.
Tomorrow’s page, on her lap, was already half written.

Tomorrow, whatever was running the room would not be in any position to hold the line a second time.
She slept.
In the hallway, the cat did not.