His Love Was My Poison novel · Chapter 10 of 48

Chapter 10: One Room

The room had a brown carpet, a painting of a duck and one queen bed with a green quilt.

Micah stood in the doorway dripping and looked at the bed like it had insulted him.

"I'll take the chair," he said.

The chair was a small wooden thing built for a child or a very polite ghost.

"You'll break it."

"Then I'll take the floor."

"Micah, the carpet's crunchy."

"I've slept in worse. I slept in a ditch in Iraq for three nights."

"Was the ditch crunchy?"

He considered.

"A little."

I peeled off my wet jacket and threw it over the radiator.

My shirt was soaked through underneath.

So was his.

He turned around very fast and studied the duck painting.

"That's a mallard," he said. "Probably. I'm not a duck guy."

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the bed.

It had been a long week.

The window rattled with the rain.

Somewhere down the hall, an ice machine dropped a load of ice.

I called the hospital in California, and a nurse told me the general was sleeping and stable and that only family could have more information.

Family.

I hung up and didn't say anything for a while.

Micah sat down on the far edge of the bed, as far from me as a man his size could get.

"You still love him?" he asked quietly.

He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking at his own hands.

"No," I said. "I loved the man I thought I was living with. That man didn't exist."

"But you're scared for him."

"I'd be scared for anybody she was killing."

He nodded slowly.

"Okay."

"Ask me the real question."

He finally looked at me.

"Do you want this?" he said. "Me. Not tonight because there's one bed. Me, on Monday, in the lab, with Posy and the bills and the cold coffee."

"Tell me about the hairpin."

He blinked.

"What?"

"In the lab you said four years. Four years ago was the demo. The sensor board. Tell me."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"It was three in the morning," he said. "Our only board was dead, and the investors were coming at nine, and I was ready to lie down on the floor and let the company die with me. And you just took a pin out of your hair, and your hair fell down, and you bent the pin into a jumper and fixed it with your tongue between your teeth. Then you looked at me and said, 'Don't cry, Callicott, it's just copper.'"

"I remember that."

"I went home and told Posy I was in big trouble."

"What did she say?"

"She was eight. She said, 'Is it the tall lady? Marry her.'"

I laughed, and then I wasn't laughing.

I slid across the quilt until my knee touched his.

"I've wanted you for a long time," I said. "I just didn't trust anything I wanted. Not after him."

"And now?"

"Now I'm cold and wet and in a motel with a duck, and I trust you more than anybody alive."

He reached up and pushed the damp hair off my face with one finger.

His hand was shaking a little.

"Len."

"Yes. That's my answer. Yes. All of it."

He kissed me.

It wasn't careful this time.

It was four years of not saying something, all at once.

I pulled at the wet hem of his flannel shirt, and he dragged it off over his head and threw it at the duck.

His chest was broad and solid and warm, with a dusting of sandy hair, and I put both hands flat on it just to feel him breathe.

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