Chapter 20: Slow

Nan went to bed at nine, in the room next to mine.

She lay with her glasses on the nightstand and a Paris guidebook open on her chest.

"Go on," she said through the connecting door, when I stood in it. "I'm seventy-one, not blind."

"Nan."

"He carried my suitcase up four flights because the lift was out."

"Nan."

"Go on," she said.

I went up one floor, to the room at the end of the hall, and Eli opened the door before I knocked again.

He had run a bath.

Steam hung in the air, and the tub in the corner of his suite was deep and white, with feet.

"I thought you might want somewhere warm," he said. "You've been cold since the restaurant."

"Is that why?"

"That's why."

I stepped inside.

"Strangers, you said," I told him, because I had been saving it.

"Louisa."

"Rule one. No names, no letters. You've got my name and my letters. So tell me what we are."

He crossed the room slowly and stood in front of me.

"I read you every month for four years," he said.

"I know when you cut your hair and when your grandmother had her fall."

"I know the afternoon you sat in a parked car and cried because you couldn't go in to work."

"I've never once been a stranger to you. I just didn't know your face."

My throat closed.

"That's a better answer than the last one," I said.

"It's all I have."

I took hold of the hem of my shirt and lifted it over my head.

He didn't rush.

He undressed me with his mouth on my shoulder, and my collarbone, and the inside of my wrist.

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