The Professor's Captive Wife novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Say It Out Loud

I wiped the flour off my hands onto my apron, one finger at a time.

"Then you'd better say them before she reads them," I said.

He stared at me.

"Now?"

"You agreed to seven. It's six forty-two. Come inside."

He came inside.

He stood in my kitchen in yesterday's coat, between the proofing racks and the walk-in.

He looked more frightened than he had in front of two hundred people.

Faye came down the back stairs in her apron with Tori behind her.

They both stopped on the bottom step.

"Oh, he's early," Faye said. "Good. I want a front-row seat."

"You can't watch this," Eliot said.

"Babe, I can watch anything. It's my kitchen." She sat down on an upturned milk crate. "Tori, get a chair. Get two."

Tori brought one chair and sat on it backwards, exactly the way Faye did.

Eliot looked at me.

I folded my arms.

"The one about my hands," I said.

He closed his eyes for a second.

When he opened them, he didn't look at Faye or Tori.

He looked at my hands.

"I'd know your hands in the dark before I knew your face," he said. "There's a burn on your left wrist from the oven at the club. You touch it when you're lying, and you touch it when you're happy, and I've spent two years trying to learn which is which."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Faye's mouth had fallen slightly open.

I had read that line at two in the morning in our bed, alone, with him one floor down.

Hearing it in his voice was a different thing entirely.

My thumb was on my wrist.

I took it off.

"Next," I said. "The one about the car."

He swallowed.

"There's a man in your house who listens for your car every night and pretends he's reading. He's read the same page of Middlemarch since June."

Tori made a noise into the back of her chair.

"Sorry," she whispered. "Sorry. Go on."

"He's terrible," Faye said to her, not quietly. "He's terrible and I'm going to cry."

"Last one," I said. "Before the regulars."

The bell over the front door jingled.

It was seven.

The first regular, the retired man who did the crossword, came in and stood at the empty counter, looking around for us.

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