Chapter 65 SHE SAYS IT

Chapter 65 SHE SAYS IT

POV: Reese Calloway

The coffee finished and I poured two cups and carried them to the living room.

Cole was sitting up on the couch with his phone in his hand, scrolling something, his hair still from sleeping and the blanket pushed to the side. He looked up when I came in and took the cup I held out and wrapped both hands around it and looked at his phone again.

Completely ordinary.

I sat in the chair across from him and put my own cup on the armrest and looked at the wall. The prints were catching the early light the way they caught it every morning at this hour, the trumpet player's frame lit from the left, the muralist's scaffold running diagonal across her print.

Cole was looking at his phone.

I looked at my coffee cup.

"I need to say something," I said.

He put the phone down on the cushion beside him. Didn't make anything of putting it down, just set it there and gave me his full attention the way he always gave things his full attention when he decided they had it.

I looked at the wall for one more second.

Then I looked at him.

"I love you," I said. "I said it to the kitchen first because I was testing if I could. But I can. And I wanted you to hear it properly."

Cole looked at me from the couch.

He picked up his coffee and set it down on the floor beside him very carefully, the specific deliberate care of someone making sure the cup was stable before they stood up. Then he stood up.

Three steps across the room and he was in front of the chair and he put both hands on either side of my face and looked at me directly.

"I know," he said. "I heard you tell the kitchen."

I stared at him.

My hands were on the armrests of the chair and the morning light was coming through the east window and Cole's hands were on my face and he had just said he heard me.

"You heard me," I said.

"I was awake when you got up." He didn't move his hands. "I was going to let it go. But you said you wanted me to hear it properly."

I looked at him standing in front of the chair with his hands on my face and the blanket still on the couch behind him where he'd pushed it off and the two coffee cups going cold, mine on the armrest and his on the floor.

Then I laughed.

Not the polite kind. The real kind, the kind that came up from somewhere before I could decide whether to let it, the kind that came out when something was so precisely true and so completely him that there was no other available response.

Cole's mouth moved.

I laughed and he stood there with his hands on my face looking at me with the almost-smile that wasn't quite a smile, the one I'd been photographing for six weeks before I had a name for what it was.

I reached up and put my hands over his.

He kissed me.

I kissed him back with my hands over his hands and the morning light coming through the east window and the apartment full of my photographs and his jacket on the back of the chair behind me where he'd left it the night before, and the coffee going cold on the armrest and the floor, and none of it mattering at all.

When we pulled back he was still close and his hands were still on my face and I looked at him in the morning light without any glass between us and nothing I was calculating or framing or managing.

Just looking.

He dropped his hands and sat on the arm of the chair and reached for his coffee from the floor and I reached for mine from the armrest and we sat there in the morning quiet of the apartment while the city outside the window started its day.

I looked at the prints on the wall.

He looked at them too.

The trumpet player in the corner, the muralist on the scaffold, the ceramicist's hands in the north light, the muralist's city spreading out below her. Eight weeks of work pinned to the wall under the documentary prints, all of it mine and visible and not put away.

"Your coffee is cold," Cole said.

"So is yours," I said.

He stood up and took both cups to the kitchen and I heard the microwave start and I sat in the chair and looked at the wall and the morning light moved across the prints the way it moved every morning, the same slow shift that I'd started watching for when I woke up early enough to catch it.

Cole came back with both cups and handed me mine and sat on the couch and picked up his phone.

I picked up my phone from the side table where I'd left it the night before.

It rang in my hand.

Unknown number. I looked at the screen and put it down on the armrest and went back to my coffee.

It rang again.

The second ring was still going when I reached for it out of pure reflex, the production habit that had been built across six weeks of always answering because something was always happening that required answering. I looked at the screen before I could stop myself.

Victor Hollis.

I stared at the name on the screen.

The ringing stopped. One missed call, his name sitting there on the screen.

I put the phone face down on the table beside the chair and looked at Cole on the couch.

He was already looking at me. His phone was down and his coffee was in his hand and his eyes were on the face-down phone on the table and then on me.

He raised one eyebrow.

"Don't answer it," he said.

"I wasn't going to," I said.

The phone was face down on the table between us and the apartment was quiet and the morning light was still coming through the east window and both our coffees were warm and Cole was on the couch looking at me with the eyebrow still raised.

We both looked at the face-down phone.

Neither of us moved toward it.

But the name on the screen was still there underneath and we both knew it and the morning that had been one thing thirty seconds ago was sitting in a slightly different position now, with Hollis's name in it and the face-down phone between us and whatever the call meant still unanswered on the other end of it.