Write Lena Marsh’s name and wait

He opened it again because the dark made the other choices look like virtues he did not have.

The overhead stayed off. The microwave clock put a green 10:06 on the wall over the stove. Across the airshaft Lena's lamp was still dead, which meant she was either out or already in bed in the back room he could not see. Reed sat with the notebook flat under his palm and felt the warmth of it climb into his wrist like a small animal looking for a pulse.

Daniel Okonkwo had said a sentence into the September air and then laughed at himself and sat back down. That was the whole of the proof. A man on a stoop. A mouth-shape. Reed could still talk himself out of it if he stayed on that side of the page.

The default rule sat under the others in a different ink-weight, or maybe that was only how he read it now.

If the nature of the desire is not specified, the subject will be taken by a hunger for the writer, and will seek the writer out within one day.

He did not write it as a fantasy. He told himself that, and the telling was thin. He wrote it as a measurement. Face in mind. Name on the line. Nothing else. If she came, the book was true in the way that mattered. If she did not, he could close the cover and call Daniel a coincidence and go back to being a man who shelved other people's lives for a living.

He pictured her.

Not the version a lonely person invents. The real one, as far as a person gets to be real through glass. Lena Marsh at the sink with her hair knotted up off her neck. The small dark mole at the corner of her jaw. The way she stood with one hip cocked when she scrolled her phone with a wet hand. The vestibule, the dropped mail, all yours, no smile. A navy cardigan she wore in the mornings even when the street was already warm. A laugh he had heard once through two panes of glass, short, like she had surprised herself.

He wrote.

Lena Marsh

The letters came out smaller than Daniel's. He did not add a single word after. He watched the seconds go by on the microwave and he kept his hands in his lap until the forty had passed and then the six minutes and forty on top of that, so there could be no accident of detail, no hidden sentence his hand might try to smuggle in.

The page looked unfinished. A name sitting by itself like a knocked-over glass.

Reed closed the book.

He waited.

Waiting turned out to be a physical job.

He washed the rice bowl he had already washed. He stood at the airshaft window until his feet went numb and her glass stayed dark. He opened the notebook and closed it without reading. He put it in the drawer under the junk mail and took it out again because leaving it in the dark felt like leaving a stove on.

At 10:41 the lamp across the way clicked on.

Lena came into the kitchen in a gray T-shirt and shorts, hair down, which he almost never saw. It reached a little past her shoulders and had the dent in it from a clip she had taken out. She opened the refrigerator and stood in the light of it without taking anything. Closed it. Opened a cabinet. Closed that too. She put both hands on the edge of the sink and leaned there with her head bowed, the way you lean when a shift has followed you home and sat on your chest.

Reed stepped back from his own glass.

She lifted her head. For a second he thought she was looking at him. Then he understood she was looking at her own reflection in the black of the airshaft, or at nothing. She pulled the window up two inches. Night air moved between the buildings, carrying somebody's late dinner and the wet-stone smell the alley got after a hot day. She stayed like that, forearms on the sill, breathing as if the room behind her had run out.

He could have knocked on his own glass. He could have gone downstairs and stood in the vestibule like a man who had not written her name in a book that rewrote hunger. He did neither. He sat on the floor under the window with his back to the cabinet and listened to his building tick.

11:12. Her lamp still on.

11:38. She left the kitchen. The lamp stayed.

12:04. Water ran over there, then stopped.

Reed's phone lit the ceiling. Claire, one line, no preamble.

you alive or did the books finally eat you

He typed alive and deleted it. Typed long day. Sent that. She sent back a thumbs-up and a photo of a tomato plant on her Collingswood stoop that had gone feral in September. He looked at the photo too long. Then he put the phone face down.

The hunger in the rule was hers, not his. That was what he kept repeating. He had not written what he wanted. He had written a blank and let the book fill it with himself. There was a cowardice in that which felt worse than writing a specific act. Specific was honest about the harm. Blank made the book do the wanting for him and left his hands clean in a way they were not.

He must have slept, because the next thing he had was the knock.

Not the street door. His door. The second-floor one, the cheap wood that rattled in the frame when a truck went by. Three knocks, then a pause, then two more, like someone who had talked themselves into it twice.

The microwave said 1:19.

Reed stood up too fast and the blood left his head. He looked at the table. The notebook was there again. He did not remember taking it out of the drawer. He shoved it under a library copy of a transit map nobody had asked him to keep and he went to the door in the shirt he had worn to work and the same jeans.

He did not check the peephole first, which was stupid, and then he did, which was worse.

Lena Marsh in the hall under the yellow bulb. Hair down. The gray shirt clinging a little at her ribs from the walk up the stairs. A pair of sneakers she had stepped into without socks, heels crushed down. No bag. She had her arms folded tight, not shy, holding herself in. The shirt had ridden up on one side. He could see a strip of skin above the waist of her shorts, the kind of pale that did not see much sun, a faint line where a waistband usually sat.

He opened the door because the other option was leaving her out there with whatever he had put in her.

"Hey," she said. Then she laughed once, that same short laugh he had heard through glass, and shook her head. "This is— I know how this looks."

"It's late."

"I know it's late." She glanced down the stairs, then back at his face, and there was a heat in her eyes that did not match the woman from the vestibule. Not drunk. Not soft. Focused, like a headache you could see. "I couldn't stay over there. I tried. I stood in the kitchen like an idiot and I kept thinking about this hallway. About you. Which is a sentence I am hearing myself say and I hate it, just so you know."

Reed's hand stayed on the door. "Lena."

"You know my name."

"Packages. The vestibule."

"Right. The mail." She uncrossed her arms and immediately crossed them again. The motion pulled the gray shirt tight across her chest. She was not wearing a bra under it, or if she was it was thin enough that he could see the dark shape of her nipples where the fabric had gone damp from the heat of the stairwell. She noticed his eyes catch and did not cover herself. She looked almost angry about that, as if her own body had sided with the night against her. "Reed Calder. Your name's on the slot. I have walked past it for eleven months and tonight it felt like the only word in the building. I am not this person. I don't knock on men's doors at one in the morning because I got restless. I work three twelves at Penn Vet and I come home and I heat up whatever and I sleep. That is the whole personality."

Penn Vet. He filed it because he filed everything. Animals. The odd hours. The singing through the window after a bad night, maybe.

"You should go back downstairs," he said.

It came out wrong. Flat. A man closing a counter. She looked at him as if he had moved a chair she was about to sit in.

"I should," she said. "Tell me to again and I will try."

The hall smelled like old carpet and whoever on the first floor had cooked garlic. Behind her the stairwell dropped into shadow. Reed could have said it again. The word was small. He could feel the notebook under the map on the table the way you feel a stove through a wall.

He stood aside.

She came in and stopped three feet into the room the way people stop when they have only ever seen a place from the wrong angle. She took in the table, the dish rack, the window that looked at her window. Her mouth opened and closed.

"You can see me," she said.

"The kitchens face."

"I knew that. I didn't know I knew that." She walked to the glass and looked across at her own lamp still burning, her own sink, the little red kettle she had. The shorts were old running shorts, navy, the elastic softened by years. When she leaned on the sill they rode up the backs of her thighs. She had the kind of legs work made — not gym legs, not delicate — a thickness through the quad and a softness at the inner thigh that touched when she stood with her feet together. A bruise the color of a plum was fading on the outside of her left knee. "That's disgusting. That's— I've been walking around over there in a shirt. You must think—"

"I think you work long days."

She turned. The heat was still in her face, under the embarrassment, running on its own track. She was close enough now that he could see the mole at her jaw and a nick in her left eyebrow that the distance had swallowed. She was shorter than the window had suggested, five-five maybe, built like a person who lifted weight that fought back. Real shoulders. Collarbones that showed when she breathed in. A faint smell of hospital soap and the outside night and, under that, her skin, warm, a little sharp, like she had gotten out of a shower hours ago and then lived in the same shirt.

"I didn't come here to talk about my shifts," she said.

"I know."

"Do you." Not a question. She took one step. Stopped herself. Her hands were shaking and she noticed and laughed at that too. "Okay. I am going to say this badly. Since about eleven o'clock I have wanted to be in this room more than I have wanted food or sleep or a reasonable explanation. I don't even like you. I don't know you. You said thanks too slow one time by the mail and you have a sad plant on the sill I can see from mine. That is the file. And I still came up here like the building tilted."

Reed's throat was dry. "You can sit. Or you can leave. Both are allowed."

"Are they."

She said it looking at his mouth.

He should have told her. The sentence was right there: I wrote your name in a book I found on Passyunk and it did this to you. He could hear how it would land. Crazy. Dangerous. A story that would send her back down the stairs and onto a phone with the police, or with a friend, or with no one. He could also hear how it would land if she believed him. That version was worse.

"I didn't ask you to come," he said, which was technically true and morally garbage.

"I know you didn't." She rubbed her sternum with two fingers, hard, as if there was a stitch there. The gray shirt dragged across her breasts when she did it. They were medium, heavier than the shirt suggested, the left a little fuller than the right, nipples already tight enough that the cotton caught on them. "That's the part that is making me angry. I came anyway. I stood on the landing for five minutes talking myself out of the knock. Then I knocked. I am not a sleepwalker. I am not drunk. I had half a beer at seven and then water. So if you have some idea that I am confused, I am not. I am extremely here. I just don't know why here is you."

The radiator ticked. Somebody two floors up flushed a toilet. Philadelphia going on being Philadelphia while a rule finished its work in a second-floor kitchen.

Lena's eyes dropped to his hands, then to the table, then back. She moved again. This time she did not stop at a polite distance. She put her palm on his chest, flat, over the sternum, and the heat of her hand went through the work shirt like she had been standing on the other side of that cloth for months.

Reed was not built like a story. Five-eleven in shoes he was not wearing. Narrow through the hips. Shoulders that had gotten some shape from boxes and nothing else. Dark hair on his forearms and a thinner trail below his navel he never thought about. His cock had already taken a side in this and was a thick line down the left leg of his jeans, obvious, humiliating. She felt the thud of his heart and then her eyes dropped and she saw the rest of it and her breath went out through her teeth.

"This is the stupidest thing I have done in a year," she said. "Maybe two."

"Lena."

"If you don't want me in this apartment you need to take my wrist off you and tell me to go. Out loud. I will hear it. I think I will hear it."

He put his hand over hers.

He did not take it off.

That was the second writing, the one that did not need a pen.

She kissed him like she had already argued the whole thing out in the stairwell and lost.

Her mouth was warm. Uncareful. She had a small chip in one of her bottom teeth he had never been close enough to know about, and he felt it against his lip when she opened up. She kissed the way she had leaned on her own sink, with her whole weight, and Reed's back found the edge of the table and the transit map slid and he thought of the black cover under it and then her tongue was in his mouth and he stopped thinking in lines.

Her fingers went into his hair and pulled with no technique. She was a little too tall at this angle and she went up on the balls of her feet, sneakers folding, and the whole front of her came against him. Breasts first, soft and distinct through the two layers of cotton, then her stomach, then the hard ridge of him trapped in denim pressed into the seam of her shorts. She made a sound into his mouth when she felt that, not pretty, a punched-out mm that she seemed to resent.

He tasted toothpaste and the ghost of the beer. She bit his lower lip, not hard, testing, and when he didn't pull away she did it again and soothed it with her tongue. One of her thighs slid between his. The skin above her knee was damp. The bruise there was rough under his palm when his hand found it without asking.

"Okay," she said against his mouth. "Okay. Christ."

They moved because the table was cutting him in half. The apartment was too small for a graceful version of this. His hip clipped the chair. Her sneaker caught the edge of the rug. She laughed that short laugh and then the laugh died because his mouth had found the place under her jaw, the mole, the tendon, and she tipped her head to give it to him like the argument was already over.

"The shirt," she said.

He got his hands under the hem. Her waist was warm and slightly tacky with the walk up the stairs. He felt the dip of her navel, the soft give above the waistband, a faint raised line of old stretch or an old scratch, he couldn't tell. He lifted the gray cotton and she raised her arms and the shirt came off inside out and dropped on the linoleum.

No bra. He had been right.

Her breasts sat with real weight, pale where a tank top usually covered them, a faint tan line at the tops from some weekend that had not included him. The left one hung a little lower. Both nipples were a dark rose-brown, already drawn tight, the areolas wide and a little pebbled. A few dark hairs around the left nipple. She stood there with her arms half-up from the shirt and let him look, breathing through her mouth, the heat in her face gone down her throat and across her chest in a blotchy flush that stopped at her collarbones and then started again under her breasts.

"You can touch them," she said. "That is why they are out."

He cupped the right one. It filled his hand and spilled a little at the sides. The skin was finer than her arms. When his thumb crossed the nipple she hissed and her back arched a degree, enough to push more of her into his palm. He bent and put his mouth on her. She was clean and faintly salty and the nipple tightened further against his tongue. He sucked and she grabbed the back of his head and held him there, not gentle, her other hand braced on the table.

"Teeth," she said. "No. Yes. Light. Like that. Fuck."

He gave her the edge of his teeth the way she asked and she made that punched-out sound again and rolled her hips against his thigh. He could feel how wet the shorts had gone, a heat through the thin nylon that had nothing to do with the weather in the brick. He switched to the left breast and she was more sensitive there, or the book had made her more sensitive, he could not know which, and her knee came up along the outside of his leg and stayed there.

"Bed," she said. "I am not doing this on a table that faces my own sink."

His bedroom was a mattress on a low frame, sheets he had not changed with any ceremony, a stack of books used as a nightstand, a lamp with a crooked shade. She looked at it for half a second, some last administrative part of her still on shift, and then she pushed him toward it by the belt.

They got tangled getting the rest of the clothes off. His work shirt had too many buttons. She lost patience and pulled it open, one button popping and rolling under the dresser, and put her mouth on his chest as if she had a grudge against it. He was pale under the shirt. A little hair between his pecs, darker toward his stomach. She dragged her tongue down the center line and bit the skin above his navel, not enough to mark, enough to make his hips jerk.

His jeans. Her hands at the button, the zipper loud in the small room. She got them down his thighs and his cock tented the worn gray boxers, a wet spot already dark at the head. She looked at it the way she had looked at his mouth in the kitchen, like she was angry it was there and angrier that she wanted it.

"Off," she said.

He stepped out of the jeans. She hooked the waistband of the boxers and pulled. His cock slapped up against his stomach, flushed darker than the rest of him, the head wet, the vein along the underside standing. Not a fantasy measurement. Thick enough that her fingers would not meet if she tried. Maybe a little over six inches, maybe not, he had never been a man who measured. The head was broader than the shaft. His balls were already drawn tight.

Lena wrapped her hand around him and just held on, feeling the heat, the pulse. Her palm was dry at first and then not, because he leaked against her wrist. She stroked once, slow, thumb smearing the wet over the head, and Reed's whole body went still the way a person goes still on a roof edge.

"You're bigger than I thought you'd be," she said. "I don't know why I thought about it at all."

"Lena."

"I know my name." She squeezed, not cruel, just present. "Say something else."

"Your shorts."

She let go of him long enough to shove the navy shorts and the underwear under them down together. The underwear was plain black cotton, cut like briefs, darkened between the legs. She kicked them off with the remaining sneaker. The other sneaker was still on. She swore, laughed, hopped, and it hit the chair.

She stood there a second in nothing.

Dark hair between her legs, not trimmed for anyone, a neat thicket that followed the line of her and then stopped. The lips under it were already swollen, flushed a deeper color than her nipples, slick enough that when she shifted her stance the inner surfaces shone. Her clit was visible without being touched, a small distinct swell at the top. The appendectomy scar sat pale and old in the hollow to the right of her navel, a tidy line about three inches. Another scar, smaller, on her hip, like something had caught her on a crate. Her ass was the part the window had never given him honestly — heavier than her waist suggested, a real handful, a faint crease under each cheek, a mole on the left one that matched the one on her jaw.

Reed's hands hovered and then did not. He put them on her hips and felt the heat coming off her skin in waves. She watched his face while he touched her, checking whether he would flinch.

He did not flinch. He felt sick and hard and awake in a way the library never asked him to be. The two things sat in him together and refused to take turns.

"You're shaking," she said.

"So are you."

"Mine makes sense. I walked across an alley at one a.m. Yours I have not decided about."

She kissed him again to stop her own sentence and they went down onto the mattress in a heap that made the springs complain in a language every neighbor on the block would have recognized if the hour had been kinder. She ended up on her back first, one knee up, and Reed's mouth went down her throat, her chest, the underside of the left breast where the skin was thinner, the scar by her navel. She grabbed his hair when he kissed lower.

"You don't have to—"

"I want to."

That, at least, was not the book's sentence. That one was his, and he heard the difference.

He settled between her thighs. The smell of her was stronger here, salt and skin and the cotton she had been wearing. He opened her with his thumbs. She was soaked in a way that did not look like a decision. Slick on her inner thighs. Slick in the dark hair. When he dragged his tongue from the perineum up through her folds she made a broken noise and her hips lifted off the sheet. He did it again, slower, and found her clit with the flat of his tongue and stayed there.

She was loud when she forgot to be quiet and then she remembered the people downstairs and bit her own wrist. He licked her in a steady, unfancy rhythm, two fingers easing into her while he did it. She was hot inside, tight around the first finger, then the second, the kind of grip that had nothing to do with performance. His fingers came out shining. He put them back. He crooked them and she swore into her wrist and her other hand slammed flat on the mattress.

"There. Right— don't get clever, just stay."

He stayed. Her thighs closed on his ears. The bruise on her knee was against his shoulder. He could hear his own pulse. He could hear her trying not to say his name and then saying it anyway, Reed, like the slot on the mailbox, like she hated the taste of it. When she came the first time it was a long clench around his fingers and a sound she failed to swallow, her back a bow, her breasts shaking, a wet pulse against his tongue that went on longer than he expected. He kept his mouth on her through it until her hand in his hair turned from holding to pushing.

"Stop. Stop. Sensitive. Fuck. Come up here."

He wiped his mouth on the inside of his own wrist and crawled up her body. His cock dragged along her thigh and left a wet stripe. She reached between them and put him against her, rubbing the head through the mess she had made, notching him at her entrance and then not taking him yet, just holding him there so he could feel the heat of the open place he was about to go.

"Look at me," she said.

He did. Her pupils were blown. There was a crease between her eyebrows like she was working a problem. A smear of her own wetness on her stomach from his chin.

"If this is a mistake I am going to be so angry at both of us," she said.

Then she pulled him in.

She was tight at the head. He felt her stretch around him in a slow burn, inch by inch, her mouth open on a silent curse. He gave her time because time was the one decent thing he had left. When he was halfway she hooked her heels behind his thighs and pulled and he slid the rest of the way in one wet push that punched the air out of both of them.

"Full," she said, like a report. "Okay. Okay. Move."

He moved.

The first strokes were careful and then they were not, because she lifted to meet him and her nails went into the meat of his shoulder and the bed started its small rhythmic knock against the wall. He could feel every ridge of her. The slick sound of it filled the room. Her breasts shifted with each thrust, the left nipple brushing his chest, the mole on her jaw shiny with sweat. He got a hand under her ass and changed the angle and she made a noise that was almost a laugh and almost a sob.

"That's— keep that. God. Your neighbor is going to file a complaint."

"You are my neighbor."

"Shut up. No. Don't shut up."

He told her she was going to wake the people downstairs. He told her the plant on his sill was a pothos and it was not sad, it was just dramatic. He told her his sister lived in Collingswood and sent him pictures of tomatoes. None of it was dirty. It seemed to be what she needed, a voice attached to the body she could not explain wanting.

She came again with him still talking, a sudden clamp so hard it almost pushed him out, her mouth open against his neck, a broken-off sound, her cunt fluttering along the length of him in little aftershocks that made his hips stutter. He held still through it and felt her drip down onto his balls.

"Don't stop," she said, wrecked. "I didn't come here to stop."

He rolled them. The move was clumsy. She ended up astride him, hair in her face, palms on his chest, his cock still buried in her. From this angle he could see everything the window had never shown. The way her stomach folded softly when she sat down on him. The dark wet hair where they were joined. The stretch of her around the base of him, shiny, a little obscene. Her tits hanging forward, nipples tight, the left one swinging when she started to ride.

She rode him like she was trying to grind the wanting out of herself. Not graceful. A grind forward so her clit dragged his pubic bone, then a lift that almost lost him, then down again with her mouth in a flat line of concentration. Sweat ran between her breasts and into the hollow of her navel. He held her hips and let her use him. When she got close a third time she grabbed his wrist and put his hand on her breast and squeezed his fingers around it harder than he would have dared, and she came with her head thrown back and her throat exposed and a raw sound that the pillow only half-caught.

She did not get off him.

She leaned down, still clenching, and kissed him sloppy, and said, "You haven't."

"I know."

"Then do it. I want to feel it. I want—" She cut herself off, shook her head, and the hunger that was not entirely hers burned through the look she gave him. "Just do it. Inside. I have an IUD. Don't make me ask in a nicer sentence."

He flipped her onto her stomach. She went easy, one knee drawing up, cheek on his pillow. He saw the mole on her left ass cheek, the two dimples at the base of her spine, the wet shine down the insides of her thighs. He lined up and pushed back into her from behind and the sound she made was punched-out again, lower, and he fucked her like that with one hand braced by her shoulder and the other on the back of her neck, not pressing, just there. The view of himself disappearing into her was a fact he would not be able to unsay later. Her cunt took him easier now, sloppy, flushed dark, the lips clinging when he pulled back.

"Reed—"

His name again. The slot. The book.

He came with his mouth on her shoulder and his hips tight to her ass, a long stupid pulse he could feel in his teeth, filling her in hot spurts she answered with a shiver and a squeeze as if her body had been told to keep it. He kept thrusting through it, shorter, sloppy, until there was nothing left and he was just shaking against her back.

They stayed stacked like that for a minute, breathing in the same small weather. His cock softened inside her and slipped out on a wet sound, a line of come following it down her thigh onto the sheet. She reached back blindly and touched the mess with two fingers, not erotic, checking, and then she laughed that short laugh once into the pillow.

"What the hell."

Not to him. To the room. To herself.

She lifted her head. The heat was still there, but a light had come on behind it, the same light he had seen when she stood in her fridge and took nothing.

"I should go," she said.

"You don't have to."

"That is not the same as I should stay." She climbed off the bed carefully, as if his body had become furniture that might scratch. Come ran down the inside of her left thigh to her knee. She looked at it, made a face, and used his discarded work shirt to wipe herself with a practicality that was somehow worse than tenderness. She found the gray shirt, the shorts, the black cotton underwear. One sneaker by the bed, one under the chair. She dressed with her back partly to him, not modest, just done. The underwear went on over skin that was still slick. The shorts followed. At the door of the bedroom she stopped with the gray shirt in her hands and her breasts still bare, nipples no longer tight, just the real soft shape of them, and she looked at him sitting on the edge of the mattress with the sheet around his waist and her bite already coloring on his shoulder.

"I am going to wake up tomorrow and try to make this into something that fits," she said. "A dry spell. A dumb night. Proximity. You have a nice mouth. That kind of inventory. If you see me at the mail I am going to nod like a person who did not just—" She gestured at the bed, at him, at the airshaft, at the shine still on her thigh that the shirt had missed. "Don't come over. Don't text. I don't even know if you have my number, don't get it. I need this to stay on this side of the building until I decide what it is."

"All right."

She pulled the shirt on. It stuck to her back. She looked at him a beat longer. Whatever the book had put in her was still moving, he could see it, a tide that had not receded all the way. She almost stepped back toward the bed. Her eyes dropped to his mouth, to his chest, to the wet spot on the sheet. Then she went through the kitchen, past the table, past the map and the thing under the map, and the door closed with the rattle it always made.

Her footsteps on the stairs. The vestibule. Across the alley, after a minute, her lamp went out.

Reed sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at his hands again. Same scar. Same dust in the creases that was not dust anymore. He could smell her on his mouth and on his stomach. He could still feel the shape of her name in his writing hand. The sheet under him was a wreck. A dark map of both of them.

He got up. He pulled the transit map aside.

The notebook was warm enough that he almost dropped it.

On the page, under Lena Marsh, there was nothing else. No act. No hour. No instruction about memory. The book had used the default and then it had used him, and Lena Marsh was across the airshaft telling herself a story that would almost fit if she did not pick at the edges.

Reed turned to the inside cover and read the rules again as if they might have grown a mercy clause.

They had not.

In the other place, on a ridge with no weather, Vesh leaned forward a little, interested now, which was not the same thing as kind.

Reed stood in his kitchen until the green clock said 2:07. He did not write another name. He did not throw the book out the window. He put it in the drawer and then he took a shower that did not do what showers are for. The water hit the bite on his shoulder and the scratch on his back and ran down his cock, which was sore in a dull, ordinary way that felt like the only honest thing in the room. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet with a towel around his neck and listened to a city that did not know it had a new kind of weather.

When he came back to the table there was a single apple sitting in the center of it that had not been there when Lena left.

Green. Ordinary. A supermarket sticker still on the skin.

Reed did not eat it.

He sat down, and he looked at the drawer, and he waited to see which part of the night was going to stand up and give its name.