They Sold Me for Five Million, So I Collected It Myself novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: One Bed

Dane gives her the only bed and takes the couch, and at three in the morning he finds her writing proofs and asks nothing, until Roland and Noreen bring campus police to the door.

Dane lived over Pruett's Bakery on Main Street, in a one-bedroom with a slanted ceiling and a window that looked down on the delivery door.

"It smells like bread at four in the morning," he said, unlocking it. "That's the one complaint."

"That's the best complaint I've ever heard."

He set my duffel on the floor.

It held everything I owned: six cardigans, two pairs of jeans, my dining-hall apron, and a laptop with a cracked corner.

Cleo had carried it up three flights, hugged me until my ribs hurt, and gone home to her parents' house in tears.

I stood in the middle of the room.

There was a small kitchen with a two-burner stove, a desk by the window, a shelf of history books.

A sofa with a quilt folded on the arm.

There was one door, and behind it, one bed.

I could see the corner of it from where I stood.

"Okay," Dane said. "I'll take the sofa."

"It's your apartment." I said.

"It's your bed. You're the one who just got sold." Dane said.

"I wasn't sold. I was invoiced." I said.

"Then I'm giving you the room with the better view of the invoice."

I looked at him.

He was fighting a smile, and losing.

"That was funny," I said, surprised.

"I've been saving it since the stage."

He stood by the sofa with his hands in his pockets, tall, a little rumpled, still wearing the purple ring on his smallest knuckle.

Nothing in the room belonged to the Haverlys.

"Why do you live here?" I asked. "You could live in that house on Chestnut Hill. Your name is on a building."

"I like the bread," Dane said.

"That's not an answer."

"Rule two."

I closed my mouth.

He had used my own rule on me within the first hour, and he was right.

I took the bed.

I lay on top of a quilt that smelled of laundry soap, listening to him settle on the sofa on the other side of the wall.

Hours went by.

At two forty I gave up and opened my laptop and stared at it.

The bank balance was there on the screen.

Five million and two hundred and twelve dollars, and a number that size makes no noise.

I closed it.

At three, I took the paper bags from under the sink, flat flour sacks Dane saved for the bakery's delivery guy, and sat at the kitchen table with a pencil.

When my head is too loud, I write.

The problem I was working on had been open for eleven months.

It was the sequel to the Wick proof, the one I had never told anyone about.

It came out of me in small neat lines across the brown paper.

I forgot where I was.

I forgot I was married.

"Hey."

I jumped.

Dane stood in the doorway to the main room with the quilt around his shoulders.

His hair stuck up on one side.

"Sorry," he said. "The stove light. It was on."

"I was working."

"I see that."

He crossed to the kettle without looking at the table.

I noticed that.

He angled his body so that his eyes went to the stove and the cups, and never once to the sacks.

He made tea and put one mug at my elbow, then went to the sofa.

"You don't want to know what it is?" I asked.

"Rule two."

"That's not the past. That's the present."

He stood in the dark with his hand on the sofa back.

"Then I'd like to know it," he said. "When you want me to."

I picked up my mug.

It was exactly the way I liked it, and I had never told him.

I looked at the clock. Three-fifty.

Downstairs the bakery lights came on and the first ovens began to tick.

"It's cold in here," Dane said. "You're in socks."

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

He took the quilt from his shoulders, knelt beside my chair, and tucked it around my legs.

His hands were big and careful.

His thumb pressed once against the bone of my ankle through the cloth.

It stopped there a moment longer than a blanket needed.

A line of heat went up my leg.

I held very still.

He stood so quickly that the chair behind him scraped.

He crossed to the window and put both hands on the sill and looked down at the delivery door.

His shoulders were up around his ears, and the back of his neck was dark red.

I reported it to myself exactly.

His breathing had changed. His ears were red. He had left in a hurry.

It was cold in the room.

That was the explanation.

I explained it away twice and the second time I almost believed it.

"Good night, Tamar," he said to the window.

I should have said it back.

I wanted to say, stay, and I held my pencil so hard it snapped.

"Good night," I said.

I fell asleep at the table in the end, with my cheek on the brown paper and his quilt still around my legs.

At seven, someone started pounding on the door.

It wasn't a knock.

It was three fists and a man's voice.

"Campus police! Open up!"

Through the wood, I heard my aunt's high and tearful voice carry up the stairwell.

"That's her! That's my niece! He's taken her!"

Dane was already at the door when I turned my head.

He looked back at me, and for the first time he looked scared.

"Tamar," he said. "Do you want me to open it?"

"Yes."

I stood up with the quilt around my shoulders and my braid half undone.

"Let them see exactly who they're dealing with."

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