some level I had already recognized who was in my bedroom.
"Jack?"
"Lily," he said, and slid under the covers with me. "I took an earlier flight."
My heart slowed down a little, to a rhythm that had more to do with another kind of excitement.
The smell of him, his skin and hair and deodorant and cologne and clothes, the combination of scents that said Jack filled my senses. I'd planned on making him wait to come down to Shakespeare, wait until I'd talked to him, told him I'd been unfaithful to him - sort of - so he could decide without seeing me whether or not to leave me for good. But in the private dark of my room, and because Jack was as necessary to me as water, I reached behind his head, my fingers clumsy with sleep, and worked the elastic band off his ponytail. I ran my fingers through his hair, dark and thick, separating it.
"Jack," I said, my voice sad to my own ears, "I have some things to tell you."
"Not now, okay?" he murmured in my ear. "Let me just... just let me... okay?"
His hands moved purposefully. I will say this for us; we put each other under a spell in bed together. Our troubled pasts and our uncertain future had no place in that bed.
Later, in the darkness, my fingers traced the muscles and skin and bones I knew so well. Jack is strong and scarred, like me, but his is visible all the time, a single thin puckered line running from the hairline by his right eye down to his jaw. Jack used to be a policeman; he used to be married; and he used to smoke and drink too much, too often.
I started to ask him how his case, the one that had taken him to California, was going; I thought of asking him how his friends Roy Costimiglia and Elizabeth Fry (also Little Rock private detectives) were doing. But all that really mattered was that Jack was here now.
I drifted off to sleep, Jack's breathing even and deep by my side. At eight, I woke up to the smell of coffee perking in the kitchen. Across the hall I could see the bathroom door opening, and Jack stepped out in his blue jeans and nothing else. His hair was wet and dragging over his shoulder. He'd just shaved.
I watched him, not thinking of anything, just feeling: glad to see him here in my house, comfortable with the warmth in my heart. His eyes met mine, and he smiled.
"I love you," I said, without ever meaning to, as if the sound of the words was as natural as breathing. It was something I'd held inside myself like a secret code, refusing to reveal it to anyone, even Jack, who'd devised it.
"We love each other," he said, not smiling now, but this look was better than a smile. "We have to be together more."
This was going to be the kind of conversation we needed to be dressed to have. Jack looked so clean and buff that I felt sleazy and crumpled in contrast.
"Let me get a shower. We'll talk," I said.
He nodded, and padded down the hall to the kitchen. "You want some pancakes?" he called, as though the earth had not just shifted to another axis entirely.
"I guess," I said doubtfully.
"Cut loose," he advised me as I stepped into the bathroom. "It's not every day we work up enough guts to talk about how we feel."
I smiled to myself in the bathroom mirror. It was still cloudy from Jack's shower. In it I saw a softer, gentler version of Lily; and since I'd hung it at just the right height, I couldn't see most of the scars. I avoided noticing them from long habit, avoided looking at them and thinking of what my body would look like without them. I did not remember exactly what my torso had been like with no white ridges, or my breasts without circles incised around them. As I did from time to time, I caught myself regretting I didn't have something more beautiful to offer Jack, and as I did every time, I reminded myself that he seemed to find me beautiful enough.
We eyed each other cautiously as we sat down to eat. Jack had opened the kitchen window, and the cool morning air came in with a gust of smells that meant spring. I heard a car start up and glanced at the clock. Carlton was going