The ceiling has a hairline crack I have never noticed before, running from the light fixture to the corner above the window, and now it is the only thing in the room I can look at without consequences.
She is beside me. She is not touching me. The not-touching is a decision; I can feel it the way you feel a draft from a door you did not know was open. Her hand is on her own stomach. Her breathing has not yet returned to whatever it was before. Mine hasn't either. We are two animals in the after, in the small bright hush of the lamp she left on, and neither of us has spoken for what I am beginning to suspect is too long.
Outside, a car. Someone laughing on the street, far off. The radiator does the radiator thing. The apartment is doing its job of containing this, of being a room with us in it, of not requiring anything from us yet.
I turn my head, finally, because someone has to. Her eyes are open. She is looking at the same crack in the ceiling, or near it. She does not look at me when I turn but I can see the small change in her face that means she registered the movement. Her mouth is doing a thing that is not quite a smile and not quite the absence of one.
"Hi," I say. Quietly. As if we are meeting for the first time. As if, in some small way, we are.
"Hi."
That is what we have, for a moment. The two syllables and the crack in the ceiling and the lamp. I am aware of my own shoulder against the sheet, the heat of her hip an inch from mine, the way the room smells different than it did an hour ago, the way I smell different, the way she does. The vocabulary of after.
She turns her head toward me. Her hair is across her eye and she does not move it. I want to move it for her and I do not, because moving it would be a new thing, a beginning, and we are still ending, still in the slow careful exit from what just happened, and I have learned, finally, in the last few years, to let the ending have its full length.
"I didn't think," she says, and stops.
I wait. I have learned to wait, too.
"I didn't think it would be like that," she finishes.
Like what, I almost say. I don't. The asking would be a kind of fishing and I do not want either of us to be the fish.
"No," I say. Which is agreement, and confession, and a small offering, all at once. She hears all three. I can tell because something in her face softens, becomes a place I could put my hand if I were the kind of person who put hands on faces, which, with her, apparently, tonight, I have turned out to be.
She moves the hair out of her own eye, finally. She looks at me properly. The lamp catches the side of her face. I see the small mark on her collarbone I did not know I had made, and I do not know whether to apologize for it or to be quietly, terribly proud of it, and I do neither, because the moment for either has already passed, and that is its own kind of mercy.
"Are you going to stay," I say.
She takes her time with it. She is the kind of person who takes her time with questions, which is one of the things, and I knew this about her, and I asked the question anyway because I wanted to know whether the rules from the hallway, from the kitchen, from the couch, still applied here, in the after, in the lamp.
"Yes," she says.
We do not say anything else for a while. She turns onto her side, finally, toward me, and the foot of cool sheet between us becomes warm. She does not put her arm around me. She puts her hand, palm down, in the small space between us, the way you might lay an object on a table to indicate that it is yours, and available, and not being offered, exactly, but not being withheld.
I put my hand next to hers. I do not touch it. Our knuckles are perhaps a centimeter apart. The radiator ticks. The crack in the ceiling does its slow private work. Somewhere downstairs a door closes. We lie there like that, two hands not touching on a sheet under a lamp, and I think: this is the part no one writes about. This is the part that is, in the end, the part.