The key scraped the lock at 5:47 a.m.

Saan's eyes were already open. They had been open, or half-open, for what felt like hours — long enough for the blue glow of the dead laptop screen to leave a bruise-colored afterimage behind his lids, long enough for his arm to go numb beneath the weight of Tarannum's head. He had been listening to her breathe. That was the truth of it. Not sleeping. Listening. Counting the slow rise and fall against his ribs like a man counting coins he couldn't spend.

Her thigh was hooked over his. Skin against skin, warm and heavy, the soft inside of her knee pressed to his hip. The blanket had migrated somewhere south of them, tangled into a rope at their ankles, and her nightie — the pale peach one, the one that had been twisted up around her ribs since sometime past midnight — lay bunched at her waist like a discarded thought. He could see the curve of her hip in the dim light from the window. The soft shelf of her belly where it met the sheet. A faint crease across her cheek from where she'd slept against his shoulder.

The key scraped again. Metal on metal, the particular grind of the old lock Nazir had been meaning to replace since October and never had.

Saan's whole body went cold from the scalp down.

He had spent three weeks in this house learning its sounds. The water hammer in the pipes when the upstairs neighbor showered. The loose floorboard outside the bathroom. The way the fridge hummed a half-tone lower in the dead of night. He knew the sound of Nazir's key. He knew the sound of Nazir's footsteps in the corridor, the weight of them, the way his uncle cleared his throat before he spoke. He knew all of it, and he knew — with a certainty that dropped through his stomach like a swallowed stone — that Nazir was not supposed to be home until six. Six at the earliest. Sometimes six-thirty. Never a quarter to.

The door swung open. He heard it — the soft give of the hinges, the click of the latch catching the frame. Then the shuffle of shoes on the mat. Then his uncle's voice, low and tired, calling down the hallway.

"Tarannum?"

Beside him, her eyes flew open.

There was no slow surfacing, no groggy confusion. She came awake the way a cat comes awake — all at once, every muscle tightening under her skin, her pupils swallowing the scant light. Her dark eyes found his, and for one suspended second neither of them moved. Her thigh stayed hooked over him. Her hand, which had been resting flat on his chest, curled slowly into a fist against his sternum.

The bedroom door was open. Not wide — a hand's width, a sliver of hallway light laid across the floor like a blade — but open. Saan could see the edge of the corridor. The corner of the shoe rack. The hem of his uncle's winter coat hanging on the hook by the door. And the blanket was at their ankles. And his chest was bare. And she was lying half-naked across him in a bed that smelled — even now, even in the cold air — unmistakably of what they had done.

He felt the sound rising in his throat. Something between a breath and a word. He didn't know which.

Tarannum pressed her finger to his lips.

Her skin was cool. The pad of her index finger settled into the dip above his upper lip with a firmness that was not gentle — a command, not a caress — and her eyes held his, steady, unblinking. Don't. The word was not spoken. It didn't need to be. He could feel it in the pressure of her finger, in the way her thigh tightened over his hip, in the almost imperceptible shake of her head.

Footsteps in the corridor. Slow. Tired. The drag of a man who had been on his feet for twelve hours and was thinking only of tea and a warm bed.

Tarannum moved.

She did it in one motion — no rustle, no catch of the sheet, nothing that would carry. Her leg slid off his, her weight lifted from the mattress so smoothly that the springs barely whispered, and then she was on her feet beside the bed, her nightie falling back down over her hips as she stood. Barefoot on the cold floor. Hair loose and tangled down her back. She crossed the two steps to the door in the time it took Saan to draw a breath, and her palm met the wood and pushed it shut.

The click of the latch was the loudest sound Saan had ever heard.

Through the door, Nazir's footsteps stopped.

Saan lay perfectly still. He could feel his own pulse in his throat, in his wrists, in the soles of his feet. The sheet was cold where her body had been. The room smelled of her — of the two of them — and he was suddenly certain, with a horror that made his scalp prickle, that the smell had leaked into the hallway, that his uncle was standing three feet away breathing it in, that any second now the door would open again and the light would come on and everything would end.

The pause stretched. One second. Two. Three.

"Tarannum?" Nazir said again. Closer now. Right outside.

"Coming."

Her voice came out smooth. Not sleepy — Saan would have expected sleepy, would have expected her to sound like a woman dragged from dreams — but level, almost brisk, the voice of someone who had been awake for hours and was mildly put out by the interruption. He heard her shift her weight, heard the soft pad of her feet on the floorboards, heard her clear her throat.

"I'll put the kettle on. You look frozen."

A beat of silence. Saan stared at the back of the closed door, at the thin line of hallway light under it, at the shadow of his uncle's feet — he could see them, the toes of his shoes, dark against the strip of light. Right there. Six inches of wood between them.

"Early," Nazir said. His voice was hoarse with the cold. "Emergency surgery. Dr. Qureshi called in sick, so they pulled me off nights." A pause. "Did I wake you?"

"I was up. Couldn't sleep."

"The boy?"

Saan's heart stopped.

"Asleep," Tarannum said. Not a flicker. Not a hesitation. "He went in around ten. Long day at the office, poor thing."

"Mm." Nazir's feet shifted. Then — and Saan felt this in his teeth — the shadow under the door did not move toward the kitchen. It stayed. The toes of the shoes turned, slightly, toward the bedroom door. A man pausing. A man considering.

Saan did not breathe.

He was aware, in that stretched and terrible moment, of every detail of his own body. The sweat cooling on his chest. The ache in his shoulder where her weight had pressed all night. The raw patch on his lip where he'd bitten it. The dull, deep soreness at the base of his spine, between his legs, the residue of hours he could still feel in his muscles. He was aware of the blanket at his ankles and the fact that if his uncle opened this door, there would be no story in the world that could cover it. Not the movie. Not the cold. Not anything.

"You want chai or coffee?" Tarannum asked. She had moved — he heard her, the soft creak of the floorboard outside the bathroom, the one he knew. She was walking away from the door. Drawing him with her. "I think we're out of the good leaves. There's the packet your mother sent."

Another pause. Saan counted his heartbeats. Four. Five.

"Chai," Nazir said. And then, at last, the shadow moved. The shoes turned. The footsteps receded down the corridor — one, two, three, four — toward the kitchen, and Saan heard the scrape of a chair and the click of the light switch and the low murmur of his uncle settling into his usual place at the table.

Saan let the breath out of his lungs. It came ragged, hot, and he pressed his palm flat against his chest to feel his heart slamming under it, to feel something solid, to remind himself he was still on the mattress and not floating somewhere above the roof.

The door was still shut. Tarannum had not come back in.

He lay there listening to the sounds of the house reassembling itself around him — the clink of cups, the rush of the tap, the low rise and fall of two voices he had no right to be hearing from this bed. His uncle's voice, tired and ordinary, asking about the milk. Tarannum's voice, light and easy, telling him she'd get it from the fridge. The domestic hum of a marriage, playing out thirty feet away, while Saan lay naked in the spare room with the woman's scent still on his skin.

He turned his head on the pillow. The indent of her head was still there. A long black hair lay curled on the cotton, and he looked at it for a long moment before he reached over and picked it up, held it between his thumb and forefinger, and then — after a hesitation he did not fully understand — tucked it under the pillow, out of sight.

The kettle began to whistle. Nazir said something Saan couldn't make out, and Tarannum laughed — a soft, ordinary laugh, the laugh of a wife at six in the morning — and Saan closed his eyes and listened to it and tried to remember how to be a nephew.

He had a bruise on his shoulder. He noticed it when he shifted, a dull ache at the joint, and when he craned his neck he could see it in the gray light — a small dark mark, the size of a thumbprint, just below the bone. He didn't remember her doing it. He remembered her mouth on his collarbone, her teeth grazing, the low sound she'd made against his skin — but not this. Not the mark. He looked at it for a while, and then he pulled the blanket up over his shoulder and looked at the ceiling instead.

The bedroom door stayed closed. The house went on making its small noises — spoons on ceramic, the hiss of steam, the low back-and-forth of two people who had done this a thousand times. Saan lay still and let it wash over him. He did not know what he was supposed to do now. Get up, he supposed. Walk out. Say good morning to his uncle. Sit at the table and drink the tea she had made and pretend that the woman pouring it had not had her mouth on his cock four hours ago, that the man across from him had not just stood outside the door breathing the smell of his own wife's sweat off the sheets.

He wondered what she was telling him now. He wondered if she'd told him anything at all — if the pause outside the door had been something else, if the man had simply been tired, if Saan was inventing the danger out of his own guilt. But he knew — the way he knew the sound of the key — that it hadn't been nothing. The shadow had stood there. The toes had turned. The pause had lasted four full seconds, and a man who was simply tired did not stop outside a closed door in his own house and stand there listening.

Nazir had heard something. Or sensed something. Or — and this was the thought that made Saan's stomach turn over — had already known something, and come home early to confirm it.

No. No, that was the fear talking. He forced himself to breathe. The man had come home from a shift that had ended early. His wife had made him tea. That was all. That was the whole story, and Saan would get up in a minute and walk out and be part of it, and nothing would be different, and no one would know.

Except that his uncle had paused at the door.

Saan sat up. The blanket fell away and the cold air hit his bare skin and he shivered, once, hard. He reached for his shirt where it had been kicked off the edge of the mattress sometime in the night and pulled it over his head. His jeans were on the floor by the bed. His phone was on the nightstand, dead. He looked at the closed door, at the thin strip of hallway light, and he heard his uncle's voice — "Any sugar in this?" — and Tarannum's answer — "Since when do you take sugar?" — and the ordinary rhythm of it made his chest ache in a way he couldn't name.

He stood up. He crossed to the door. And he put his hand on the knob and stood there for a moment, listening, before he turned it and stepped out into the hallway.

"Good morning!"

The words came out of him before the door was even fully open, loud and bright and wrong — too loud for the hour, too bright for a man who had not slept, a voice he barely recognized as his own. His palm was still flat on the knob, the cold brass biting into his skin, and he was stepping through the gap before he had decided anything, before he had checked his hair or his shirt or the fact that his jeans were still unbuttoned at the waist.

The hallway was dim, lit only by the spill from the kitchen at the far end, and cold. Colder than the room he'd left. The floorboards were like ice under his bare feet, and he felt every one of them, every grain and seam, walking him down the corridor toward the light.

Nazir was at the table.

He sat the way he always sat — shoulders squared, back straight, both hands wrapped around a cup — though the cup was too hot to hold yet and he was holding it anyway, letting the heat soak into his palms. His spectacles sat low on his nose. His hair, salt-and-pepper, was flattened on one side where he'd pressed it against something in the car. There was a folded newspaper by his elbow, still rolled, and a pen lying across it, and a small dish of sugar he hadn't touched.

He looked up when Saan came in. Not startled. Just slow, the way a tired man lifts his head.

Tarannum was at the stove with her back to the room.

She had pulled her hair up — actually up, into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, the way she never did when Nazir was on nights — and she was wearing a shawl over her nightie, a thick gray woolen thing that swallowed her shoulders and hung almost to her knees. It was the shawl she wore when the gas bill came and she wanted to be seen being frugal. Saan had never noticed that before, but he noticed it now, the way it covered her, the way it made her a woman in a house at six in the morning and nothing else.

She did not turn around.

"Morning, Saan," she said, and her voice was the voice from the corridor — light, easy, mildly put out — and she said it to the kettle, to the steam, to the wall in front of her.

"Morning." He got the word out and then didn't know what to do with his hands.

He put them in his pockets. Then out. Then he pulled the chair back from the table — the one across from Nazir, the one he always sat in — and sat down, and the chair legs scraped the floor and the sound went through him like a fingernail.

Nazir watched him over the rim of the cup.

There was nothing in the look. That was the thing. Nothing at all. A man looking at his nephew across a breakfast table, the way he had looked at him a hundred mornings in three weeks, and yet Saan felt the look travel over his face like a hand, checking, comparing, filing. He felt it catch on his hair — still mussed, he knew it was still mussed, he could feel the pillow-crease along his jaw. It moved down to his shirt, which was inside out, he realized now, the tag scratching at his collarbone. It stopped at his hands, which he had folded on the table, and he made himself keep them there instead of reaching up to fix the tag.

"You're up early," Nazir said.

"Couldn't sleep." Saan heard himself say it, and it was almost true, and the almost made it worse. "Heard the door."

"Mm." Nazir set the cup down. "Sorry. Woke the whole house, looks like."

"No — no, I was already —" He stopped. Started again. "It's fine. I had an early call anyway." That was a lie, and it came out smooth, and he hated how smooth it came out, how easily he'd learned to do this in one night.

"Work?" Nazir's brows went up a fraction. "On a Thursday? You're not due in till nine."

Saan opened his mouth. Nothing came.

From the stove, without turning, Tarannum said, "He's been getting in early all week. There's a project." And she lifted the kettle and poured, and the water hit the cup in a rising hiss, and she said it so plainly, so offhandedly, that Saan almost believed her himself.

The cup slid across the counter. She still had not turned around. Her hand came back to the shawl and pulled it tighter at her throat, and Saan watched the movement — the knuckles, the small tug — and understood, with a lurch, that she was not avoiding his eyes. She was avoiding the space between them. She was standing in it, holding it open, keeping it clean.

Nazir was looking at her now. "You didn't sleep either."

"Told you. Couldn't."

"You should have woken me when I called." He said it mildly, no edge to it, and reached for the sugar dish after all. "I'd have come in."

At the stove, Tarannum's shoulders moved — a small breath, a shrug. Saan watched the back of her neck, the loose black hair at the nape, and felt his own pulse in his throat. *I'd have come in.* He did not know if the man meant the bedroom or the house. He did not know if the man meant anything at all. But the words sat on the table between them, and nobody picked them up.

"Did you eat?" Nazir asked him, and the subject changed so fast Saan nearly missed the turn.

"Not yet."

"Eat." Nazir gestured at the counter with his cup. "There's bread. Tarannum, give the boy some bread."

"I'm getting to it." Her voice had a small snap in it — the snap of a woman who had been told to do something she was already doing — and it was so ordinary, so married, that Saan felt the floor settle under him a little. *This is a kitchen. This is a Thursday. This is what they do.*

She turned around at last.

She turned with a plate in her hands — two slices of bread, a smear of butter, a boiled egg cut in halves, the yolk still soft — and she set it down in front of Saan, and her eyes met his for exactly one second. No more. One second, over the plate, and in that second he saw everything she was not saying: the shawl, the knot of hair, the brisk hands, the whole performance of her, and underneath it, flat and quiet and steady, *not a flicker.*

Then she looked away and sat down at the end of the table, between them, and pulled her cup toward her, and the three of them were a family at breakfast.

Saan picked up the bread. His hand was steady. He noticed that, distantly, the way you notice your own hand doing something without you — steady, buttering, lifting to his mouth — while somewhere under his ribs a second self was running, sprinting, screaming down a corridor with no doors. He chewed. The bread was warm. He had not realized how hungry he was, and the hunger embarrassed him, and he ate anyway.

Nazir unfolded the newspaper. He did it one-handed, the way he did everything, his thumb keeping the fold while his other hand found the pen. His spectacles had slipped again and he pushed them up with his knuckle, and Saan watched the gesture and thought, *he has done that ten thousand times,* and then thought, *and I have watched him do it for three weeks, and last night I was inside his wife.*

The thought went through him like a splinter, and he kept chewing.

"Qureshi's appendix," Nazir said, to the newspaper. "That's what it was. Gallstones, actually. They called me at four and I'd barely got to sleep." He turned a page. "Fifty-one years old and he still eats like a student."

"Poor man," Tarannum said.

"He'll live. He always lives." Nazir found whatever he was looking for and circled it with the pen, twice, a small tight circle. Then, without lifting his head, he said, "Saan. Your mother called yesterday. Did you ring her back?"

The bread went dry in Saan's mouth.

"Not yet."

"Ring her." The pen moved to the next column. "She worries. She thinks we're not feeding you." He glanced up, and there was something in the glance — warmth, actual warmth, the easy fondness of a man for his sister's boy — and it was worse than any suspicion could have been. "Tell her you had eggs."

"I'll call her tonight."

"Tonight." Nazir nodded and went back to his paper, and that was that, the matter closed, the uncle satisfied, the nephew instructed, the whole small machinery of the household ticking over exactly as it always had.

Saan looked at his plate. He had eaten one slice and half the egg and he could not remember doing either. The other slice sat there, buttered, going cold. He picked it up and bit it anyway, and across the table his uncle read the news and beside him his aunt drank her tea, and neither of them looked at him, and he sat in the middle of them and felt the night on his skin like a coat he could not take off — the smell of her still in his hair, the ache still low in his back, the small dark bruise under his shirt that no one could see.

Tarannum's cup clicked down on the saucer.

She stood, gathered the plate he'd emptied, and carried it to the sink, and as she passed behind his chair her shawl brushed the back of his neck. One touch. The wool, warm from her body, and beneath it the faintest trace of something else — soap, and skin, and underneath that, if he let himself, the smell of the two of them — and then she was past him and the water was running and her hands were in the sink and she was a woman doing the dishes at six-fifteen in the morning.

He did not turn around. He did not dare. He sat with his back to her and his uncle across from him and felt the ghost of the shawl on his neck, and he made himself finish the bread, all of it, down to the crust, because his uncle had told him to eat.

The newspaper rustled. Nazir cleared his throat — the same throat-clearing Saan had heard through the door, the same low weight of it — and folded the paper in half, then in half again, and laid it down beside his cup.

"Well," he said.

Saan looked up.

His uncle was watching him. Not the paper. Him. The tired eyes behind the spectacles had settled, and there was no warmth in them now and no suspicion either — just a long, flat, considering look, the look of a man weighing something he had not yet decided to say.

"You're up early," Nazir said again.

And this time it was not a remark. The tone had gone flat, level, the way it went when he was telling a patient what the scan had shown. He did not blink. He did not reach for the cup. He just sat there with both hands folded on the paper and looked at his nephew across the table, and waited.

Behind Saan, the water stopped running.

The water had stopped, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room. Saan sat with his hands on the table, the ghost of the shawl still warm on the back of his neck, and he could feel the flat weight of his uncle's gaze on him like a hand pressed to his chest. He did not look up. He looked at the plate, at the smear of butter, at the half-eaten egg, and he waited.

Nazir cleared his throat again. Not the same sound — this one was smaller, a dry scrape, the sound of a man who had decided something and was now simply waiting for the right moment to stand.

"I need the bathroom," Nazir said, and pushed his chair back. The legs scraped the tile. He stood, and the newspaper stayed folded on the table, and he did not look at Saan as he walked past him, did not look at Tarannum at the sink, just walked down the hallway with the steady unhurried tread of a man who owned every inch of the house, and the bathroom door clicked shut behind him.

The click was ordinary. The click was the same click it had been every morning for three weeks. And yet Saan felt the sound go through him like a wire pulled tight, because the door was closed and the water was running and his uncle was on the other side of it, and Tarannum was still standing at the sink with her hands in the water and her back to him.

The tap was still running. She had not turned it off. She stood there, her shoulders very still under the shawl, and the water ran and ran, and Saan watched the back of her neck, the loose black hair at the nape, and he did not know what to do with his hands.

She turned the tap off.

The kitchen went quiet. The only sound was the drip of the faucet, one drop, then another, and the distant hiss of the bathroom shower — Nazir had turned it on, the water drumming against the tub, and the sound of it filled the hallway like a curtain drawn.

Tarannum turned around.

She turned around and she looked at him, and this time there was no one-second limit, no brisk performance, no shawl pulled tight. She looked at him across the kitchen, across the table, across the space between them, and her eyes were dark and flat and hungry, and she did not say a word.

She walked to the counter.

She walked past the table, past his chair, and she stopped at the counter with her back to him, and she put her hands on the edge of it, and she stood there, bent slightly forward, her hips against the counter, her spine curved, and she did not look back.

Saan's mouth went dry.

The shower was still running. The water drummed against the tub, steady, muffled, a wall of sound between the kitchen and the hallway, and Saan heard himself stand up. He did not remember deciding to. He stood, and the chair scraped the tile, and he walked to her, and the kitchen was small and the distance was short and he was behind her before he had finished thinking about it.

She did not turn. She stood with her hands on the counter, her head bowed, her hair falling forward, and the shawl had slipped from one shoulder, and he could see the strap of her nightie, the thin cotton, the curve of her shoulder, the small dark hollow at the base of her throat.

"Saan."

His name. She said it low, almost a whisper, and it was not a question and it was not a warning. It was an invitation. It was the door left open. It was the same word she had said last night, in the dark, with her mouth against his ear, and he felt the heat of it go through him like a current.

He put his hands on her hips.

She was warm through the cotton of the nightie. He could feel the curve of her, the soft give of her flesh under his palms, and she did not move, did not pull away, just stood there with her hands on the counter and her head bowed, and he heard her breath catch, a small sharp sound, and he slid his hands down the sides of her thighs, gathering the hem of the nightie, pulling it up.

The cotton rode up her legs. Her thighs were bare, warm, and he pushed the fabric higher, over her hips, over the swell of her ass, and she lifted her hips slightly to help him, a small movement, a surrender, and the nightie bunched around her waist and she was bare beneath it.

No underwear. She had not been wearing underwear. The thought went through him like a blade, and he made a sound, a low rough sound, and she heard it and she said his name again, softer, and he pressed himself against her, the heat of her through his pajama pants, and she pushed back against him, a small roll of her hips, and he felt himself harden against the cleft of her ass.

"Saan," she said again, and her voice was shaking now, a thin wire of sound, and she reached back with one hand and found his hip, her fingers digging in, and she pulled him against her, harder, and he groaned.

The shower was still running. The water drummed against the tub, steady, muffled, and the sound of it filled the house, and Saan reached down and pushed his pajama pants down his hips, and his cock sprang free, hard, aching, the head slick with a bead of moisture, and he pressed it against her, between the cheeks of her ass, and she gasped.

"Please," she said. "Saan, please."

He did not make her ask twice.

He reached around her, his hand finding the soft thatch of hair between her legs, and she was already wet — soaked, slick, the heat of her flooding his fingers — and he slid two fingers through the wetness, parting her, finding her clit, and she bucked against his hand with a small choked sound.

"Yes," she breathed. "Yes, yes—"

He pressed his cock against her, the head nudging at her entrance, and she was so wet that he slid in an inch before he was ready, the heat of her clenching around him, and she cried out, a sharp bitten-off sound, and her hands flew to the counter and gripped it.

"Fuck," she whispered. "Fuck, Saan—"

He pushed deeper. The heat of her, the tight wet clench of her, and he felt her body open for him, felt the resistance give, felt her take him, and he buried himself inside her to the hilt, his hips flush against her ass, and they both went still.

The shower was still running.

For a long moment neither of them moved. He was buried inside her, his cock throbbing, her cunt clenching around him, and he could feel her pulse, feel the flutter of her, feel the heat of her body all around him, and she was bent over the counter, her head bowed, her hair hanging forward, her mouth open against her own forearm.

"Saan," she whispered, and her voice was wrecked. "Move. Please move."

He pulled out slowly, almost all the way, and then pushed back in, and she made a sound, a low animal sound, and he did it again, faster, and she pushed back against him, meeting him, and the counter creaked under her hands.

The sound of them — the wet slap of his hips against her ass, the small choked sounds she made, the creak of the counter — filled the kitchen, and the shower drummed on, and Saan felt the heat building in him, felt the tight coil of it, and he reached around her and found her clit with his fingers, rubbing her in tight circles as he fucked her.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, oh—"

Her body clenched around him, a ripple of heat, and she pushed back against him harder, her hips moving in a rhythm of their own, and he felt her start to come, felt the clench of her, the flutter, and she cried out against her own forearm, a muffled sound, her whole body shaking.

"Saan," she gasped. "Saan, I'm—"

He did not stop. He fucked her through it, his fingers still on her clit, and she came with a long shuddering moan, her body clenching around him, and he felt the heat of it, the tight convulsive grip of her, and it pushed him over the edge.

He came inside her with a bitten-off groan, his face pressed to her spine, his hips grinding against her, and he felt himself empty into her, felt the hot pulse of it, felt her body take him, and she made a small sound, a sound of completion, and they both went still.

The shower was still running.

For a long moment neither of them moved. He was still inside her, softening, his forehead pressed to the small of her back, his breath ragged, and she was bent over the counter, her hands still gripping the edge, her body trembling.

She stayed bent over the counter, breathing.

Then she straightened.

She straightened slowly, and he felt himself slip out of her, felt the wet heat of him leaking from her, and she reached down and pulled the nightie down over her hips, and she turned around and faced him.

Her face was flushed. Her eyes were dark, wet, and there was a small smear of his cum on her thigh, and she did not wipe it away. She just looked at him, and he saw everything in her face — the hunger, the fear, the want, the shame — and she pulled the shawl closed over her chest, and she turned toward the sink.

The tap resumed.

The water ran, and she put her hands in it, and she was a woman doing the dishes at six-fifteen in the morning, and behind them, down the hallway, the shower stopped.

The silence after the shower stopped was a different kind of silence. It was the silence of a held breath, of a house waiting to see what would happen next. Saan stood behind her, his pajama pants still bunched around his hips, his cock softening and wet against his thigh, and he watched her hands move in the water, watched the small precise circles she made with the cloth, and he did not know what to say.

She knew he was there. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she did not turn around, the way she kept her eyes on the dishes as if the fate of the world depended on the cleanliness of a single cup. The shawl had slipped again, and he could see the strap of her nightie, the thin cotton, the small dark hollow at the base of her throat, and he wanted to touch her again, wanted to press his mouth to that hollow, wanted to feel her shiver under him one more time.

But the shower had stopped. The water had stopped drumming against the tub, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing in the house, and somewhere down the hallway, behind the closed bathroom door, his uncle was reaching for a towel.

He pulled his pajama pants up. The fabric was damp against his skin, and he felt the wet smear of himself against his thigh, and he tucked himself in and fastened the drawstring with fingers that did not quite obey him. The knot was clumsy. He had to do it twice.

She heard the small sound of the drawstring, the rustle of fabric, and she turned her head slightly, just enough to see him over her shoulder, and her eyes were dark and unreadable, and she said nothing. She just looked at him, and then she turned back to the sink, and she picked up another dish.

The tap ran. The water was cold now, he could see the faint steam gone from it, and she put her hands in it and she washed the dish and she set it in the rack, and she was a woman doing the dishes at six-fifteen in the morning, and the only sign that anything had happened was the small smear of his cum on her thigh, still there, still not wiped away.

The bathroom door clicked open.

The sound was small, ordinary, the same sound it had made every morning for three weeks, and yet Saan felt it go through him like a wire pulled tight. He was standing at the table, his hands on the back of the chair, and he had not made it back to his seat, had not even thought about it, and now the door was open and his uncle was coming down the hallway and he was standing in the middle of the kitchen like a man who had forgotten where he was going.

Nazir came out of the bathroom with his hair damp, combed back from his forehead, his shirt buttoned to the collar. He smelled of soap and toothpaste, the clean sharp smell of a man who had washed his face and brushed his teeth and was ready to begin his day, and he looked at Saan standing there, and his eyebrows drew together in a small puzzled frown.

"You're up early," Nazir said.

The words were the same words he had said yesterday, the same words he had said the day before, the same words he had said every morning for three weeks, and Saan heard himself answer before he had decided what to say.

"Couldn't sleep."

Nazir nodded. He walked to the table and picked up the newspaper, folded it under his arm, and he looked at Saan for a moment longer, his eyes flat behind his spectacles, and then he looked at Tarannum at the sink, and she was a woman doing the dishes, her hands in the water, her back to the room, and the shawl was pulled tight around her shoulders.

"I'll be at the hospital," Nazir said. "There's a surgery at nine. I may be late."

He said it to the room, to no one in particular, and he walked to the door and put his hand on the handle, and Saan felt the breath he had been holding leave him in a long slow rush, and then Nazir stopped.

He stopped with his hand on the door handle, and he turned his head, just slightly, and he looked at Tarannum.

"The dishes can wait," he said. "You should rest."

Tarannum did not turn around. She kept her hands in the water, her shoulders very still, and she said, "I'm almost done."

Nazir nodded. He looked at her for a moment longer, and then he looked at Saan, and his eyes were unreadable behind his spectacles, and he said, "Take care of the house while I'm gone."

It was not a question. It was an instruction, the same instruction he gave every morning, and Saan nodded and said, "Yes, Uncle," and the word felt strange in his mouth, heavy, and Nazir opened the door and stepped out into the cold November morning and closed it behind him.

The click of the door was final. The house went quiet, the only sound the drip of the faucet and the distant sound of a car engine starting, and Saan stood in the middle of the kitchen and did not know what to do with his hands.

Tarannum turned off the tap.

She turned it off and she dried her hands on a towel, slowly, deliberately, and then she turned around and looked at him, and her eyes were dark and flat and hungry, and she did not say a word.

She walked to him.

She walked across the kitchen, past the table, past the chair, and she stopped in front of him, close enough that he could smell the soap on her skin, the faint musk of her, and she looked up at him and she said, "He's gone."

Saan did not answer. He could not. She was standing close enough that he could see the small pulse at the base of her throat, the way her chest rose and fell under the shawl, and she reached up and took his hand and pressed it to her chest, over the thin cotton of the nightie, and he could feel the heat of her, the soft give of her breast under his palm, and she said, "He's gone, Saan. He won't be back until tonight."

Her hand was warm on his. She held it there, pressed to her chest, and he could feel her heartbeat under his palm, fast and steady, and she looked at him and her eyes were wet and dark and she said, "I don't want to wait until tonight."

The words went through him like a current. He looked at her, at the loose black hair, the flushed skin, the small dark hollow at the base of her throat, and he felt the heat building in him again, the tight coil of it, and he pulled his hand free and reached for the shawl.

She did not stop him.

He pulled the shawl open, and it fell from her shoulders, and she stood in front of him in the thin cotton nightie, the straps slipping from her shoulders, the fabric clinging to the curve of her breasts, and she was bare beneath it, he could see the dark outline of her nipples through the cotton, and she did not move, did not cover herself, just stood there and let him look at her.

"Saan," she said, and her voice was low, almost a whisper. "Look at me."

He looked at her. He looked at her face, at the dark eyes, the parted lips, the flush on her cheeks, and she reached up and took his hand again and pressed it to her breast, and she said, "I want you to touch me. I want you to touch me like you did last night. I want you to make me forget."

He did not ask what she wanted to forget. He did not want to know. He slid his hand under the strap of her nightie, pushed it down her shoulder, and the cotton slipped, and her breast was bare, warm and heavy in his palm, and she made a small sound, a sound of relief, and she pressed herself into his hand.

"Yes," she breathed. "Yes, Saan—"

He bent and took her nipple in his mouth, and she gasped, her hands flying to his shoulders, her fingers digging in, and he sucked her, laved her with his tongue, and she arched into him, her head thrown back, her hair hanging down her spine, and she made a sound, a low animal sound, and he felt himself harden against his pajama pants.

"Saan," she said, and her voice was shaking. "Saan, please—"

He did not make her ask twice.

He lifted her onto the counter, her legs wrapping around his waist, the nightie bunched around her hips, and she was already wet, soaked, the heat of her flooding against him, and he pushed his pajama pants down and his cock sprang free, hard, aching, and she reached down and took him in her hand, her fingers wrapping around him, and she guided him to her entrance.

"Look at me," she said. "Look at me when you do it."

He looked at her. He looked into her dark eyes, and she held his gaze, and he pushed into her, the heat of her clenching around him, and she cried out, a sharp bitten-off sound, and her legs tightened around his waist, pulling him deeper, and he buried himself inside her to the hilt.

"Fuck," she whispered. "Fuck, Saan—"

He was inside her, buried to the hilt, and for a moment the world narrowed to the heat of her clenching around him, the small choked sounds she made against his mouth, the way her legs tightened around his waist pulling him deeper. Her eyes were open, dark and wet, holding his gaze the way she had asked him to, and he saw something in them he had not seen before — not hunger, not fear, but a kind of desperate relief, as if she had been holding her breath for years and was only now allowed to exhale.

He moved. A slow withdrawal, almost all the way out, and then a push back in, and she made a sound against his mouth, a small broken sound, and her fingers dug into his shoulders. He did it again, faster, and she matched him, her hips rolling against his, and the counter creaked under her, the only sound in the kitchen besides the wet slap of their bodies and the drum of the shower down the hall.

"Saan," she breathed against his mouth. "Saan, don't stop. Don't stop—"

He didn't. He fucked her harder, his hands gripping her hips, pulling her onto him with each thrust, and she took him, all of him, her head falling back, her hair brushing the cabinet behind her. The nightie was bunched around her waist, the shawl forgotten on the floor, and she was bare to him, her breasts moving with each thrust, her nipples dark and hard.

He reached between them and found her clit, wet and swollen, and she cried out, a sharp bitten-off sound, her whole body jerking. He rubbed her in tight circles as he fucked her, and she came apart in his arms, her cunt clenching around him in waves, her mouth open against his shoulder, her breath hot and ragged.

"Yes," she gasped. "Yes, yes, yes—"

Her cunt gripped him through it, milking him in slow pulses, and Saan couldn't breathe, couldn't think, could only feel the way she came apart around his cock with her teeth in his shoulder and her heels dug into the small of his back. He held himself still inside her, buried to the root, and let her ride it out against him, her forehead dropping to his jaw, her breath coming in wet broken pieces across his throat.

"God," she whispered. "God, Saan."

He was still hard inside her. Still aching. He hadn't come. He'd been too busy watching her, feeling her, holding her up against the cabinet so she wouldn't slide off the counter, and now she was limp against him, her arms slack around his neck, and his body was screaming at him for the release he'd denied it.

She felt it. She must have felt it, because she lifted her head and looked at him, her eyes half-lidded, her lips swollen from his mouth, and something shifted in her face — the hunger coming back, banked but not gone.

"You didn't," she said.

"No."

She pushed at his chest, gently, and he pulled out of her — the wet drag of it, the sudden cold where her heat had been — and she slid off the counter and stood in front of him on bare feet, the nightie still bunched at her hips, and the shawl — the shawl was on the floor, forgotten, and the cold from the window was finding the sweat on his back.

"Bedroom," she said.

Not a question. She took his hand and led him down the hallway, and the hallway was the hallway he walked every morning, the same tiles, the same framed photograph of a mountain he'd never asked about, and now her fingers were laced through his and she was pulling him past the bathroom, past his own door, into the room at the end of the hall.

Their room. His uncle's room.

He stopped in the doorway. She felt the stop and turned, and her eyes were patient, almost amused, and she said, "He won't be back until tonight."

"I know."

"Then come in."

He came in. The room smelled of her — the same faint musk, the same soap, and something underneath it, the smell of the bed itself, the sheets, the pillow, the two bodies that slept in it every night. The curtains were drawn against the grey November light, and the room was dim and warm, and she walked to the bed and pulled the nightie over her head and dropped it on the floor.

She stood there naked in the middle of her husband's bedroom, and she was — he could finally see all of her, and it was — he could finally see all of her, and his mouth went dry. The full weight of her breasts, the softness of her belly, the dark triangle of hair at the top of her thighs, the small silver scar near her hip that he'd never seen and would never ask about. She was thirty-nine years old and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever stood in front of, and she knew it, and she was watching him know it.

"Your clothes," she said. "Take them off."

He pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it. He pushed the pajama pants down his legs and stepped out of them, and his cock was still slick with her, still hard, and she looked at it — looked at him — and her tongue touched her lower lip.

"Come here."

He crossed the room. She reached for him and pulled him onto the bed with her, and they fell into the sheets together, and the sheets smelled of her, of both of them, of the two bodies that slept here every night, and he was in his uncle's bed with his uncle's wife, and he could not make himself care. She pulled him down on top of her and kissed him — slow, deep, her tongue in his mouth, her hands in his hair — and he kissed her back and felt her legs open under him, her hips tilting up, her wet cunt pressing against his thigh.

"I want you in my mouth," she said against his lips. "Before. I want to taste you."

She pushed him onto his back. She moved down the bed, and her breasts brushed his chest, his stomach, and then she was between his legs, her hair falling over his thighs, and she took his cock in her hand and looked up at him along the length of his own body.

"Watch," she said.

He watched. She licked him first — one long slow stroke of her tongue from the base to the head, and he felt every inch of it, the wet drag of her, the heat of her breath. She did it again, and again, and then she took the head into her mouth and sucked him, her lips tight, her tongue flat against the underside, and Saan's hands fisted in the sheets and his hips jerked up off the mattress.

She took him deeper. She worked him down her throat, slow, deliberate, her hand wrapped around the base of him and her mouth moving in a rhythm that had nothing to do with hurry, and he felt the head of his cock press the back of her throat and she swallowed around him, and he groaned, a sound he didn't recognize, and his hand found the back of her head.

She pulled off him with a wet sound, her lips shining, and looked up at him.

"Not yet," she said. "Not like this."

She crawled up his body and straddled him. She reached down between them and took him in her hand, and she held him at her entrance, and she looked at him — that same look, dark and wet and hungry — and she lowered herself onto him.

She took him slow. She sank down on him inch by inch, and he watched his cock disappear into her, watched her lips stretch around him, watched her face as he filled her — her mouth open, her eyes closing, her breath coming in a long shuddering exhale. When he was all the way inside her she sat still for a moment, her palms flat on his chest, her thighs spread wide across his hips, and she just breathed.

"You feel—" she said, and stopped. She opened her eyes and looked down at him and said, "You have no idea."

She started to move. Slow at first, a long rolling grind of her hips, and he felt her cunt grip him with every stroke, felt the wet heat of her sliding up and down his cock, and he gripped her hips and helped her, lifted her off him and let her sink back onto him, and she took him all the way down and ground herself against him with a small breathless sound.

"Faster," he said. His voice came out ragged. "Faster, please—"

She rode him faster. She planted her hands on his chest and worked herself on him, her hips snapping, her breasts moving with every stroke, and the bed creaked under them and the headboard knocked the wall and neither of them cared. He reached up and caught one of her nipples between his fingers and she gasped and rode him harder, and he watched her face, watched the flush spread down her throat, watched her eyes go unfocused, and he felt the pressure building low in his spine, tight and hot, and he knew he was close.

"Tarannum," he said.

She heard her own name and something broke in her face. She leaned down over him, her hair falling around them both, and she kissed him, and she kept riding him, and she said against his mouth, "Say it again."

"Tarannum."

"Again."

"Tarannum—"

She came. She came with her mouth open against his and her whole body shaking, her cunt clenching around him in hard waves, and she bit his lower lip and he felt the sting and the copper taste and the way she gripped him, and he couldn't hold it anymore.

"Where—" he said.

"Inside me."

He came inside her. He came with his hands buried in her hair and his hips bucking up into her, and he felt every pulse of his own release inside her, felt her cunt take it, and she held herself down on him, grinding, her breath hot and broken against his throat, and she did not let him go.

They stayed like that a long time. Her on top of him, still joined, both of them breathing like they had run somewhere. The headboard had left a mark on the wall — a small grey scuff — and Saan stared at it over her shoulder and tried to get his breath back.

She lifted her head. Her hair was stuck to her cheek. She looked at him and her eyes were softer now, the hunger banked, and she touched his lip where she'd bitten it.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean—"

"It's fine."

She looked at the blood on her fingertip and then she put the fingertip in her mouth and sucked the blood off it, and she did it slowly, watching him, and Saan felt his cock twitch inside her and she felt it and she smiled — a real smile, the first real one he'd seen all morning.

"Again?" she said.

"I need a minute."

"I don't."

She lifted off him and the wet sound of it filled the room, and she moved down the bed and settled between his legs again, and she took his softening cock in her mouth and cleaned him — her own taste, his come, all of it, her tongue working him slow and thorough — and by the time she was done he was hard again, and she looked up at him and said, "Now."

He took her from behind. She knelt on the bed with her hands braced against the headboard and her back arched and her ass tilted up at him, and he knelt behind her and pushed into her in one long stroke, and she groaned and pushed back against him, and he fucked her hard, his hands on her hips, the slap of their skin loud in the quiet room. He watched his cock slide in and out of her, watched the wet shine of her, watched his own come from the first time still leaking out around him, and something about that — about being inside her where he'd already been, about the mess of it, about being in his uncle's bed with his uncle's wife and his own come dripping down her thighs — undid him.

"Harder," she said. "Saan, harder—"

He gave it to her. He fucked her until his thighs burned and the headboard knocked the wall and she was making sounds that weren't words, and he reached around her and found her clit with two fingers and worked it fast and hard, and she came again, her whole body locking, her cunt clamping down on him so tight he saw white, and he came with her, emptying into her a second time, and this time he did not pull out. He held himself inside her and let it finish, and she stayed on her knees under him, breathing hard, her forehead against the headboard.

Then the room was quiet. Only their breath. And under their breath, from somewhere out in the house, a sound.

Saan went still.

He went still with his hands on her hips and his cock still inside her, and he listened, and the sound came again — the low mechanical whirr of the refrigerator kicking on, and nothing else. The house was empty. The house was theirs.

But he had heard it. And now he could not unhear it, the possibility of it, and he pulled out of her slowly and sat back on his heels and looked at the door.

Tarannum turned. She looked at his face and then at the door and then back at him, and she reached out and touched his knee.

She said, "It's the fridge."

"I know."

"Saan."

He looked at her. She was kneeling on her husband's bed with her hair a wreck and her thighs wet and her lips still swollen, and she was calm — calm in a way that frightened him a little, calm in a way that suggested she had thought about this longer than he had, that she had already made her peace with the door and the sound and the risk, and that the only thing she was worried about right now was him.

"We have until six," she said. "Six in the evening. That's ten hours."

"And then?"

"And then we clean up and I cook dinner and you sit at the table and we're the same as we always were." She paused. "He won't know."

"He looked at you this morning."

Something moved behind her eyes. She didn't answer right away. She got off the bed and walked to the dresser and picked up a hair tie and pulled her hair back, and she did it with her back to him, and when she spoke her voice was even.

"He always looks at me like that," she said. "He's looked at me like that for years."

She turned around. Her hair was up now, pinned, and she looked — different. She looked like the woman from the mornings, the one at the sink with her back to the room, and the change was so fast and so complete that Saan felt a small cold thing turn over in his stomach.

"Get dressed," she said. "I'll change the sheets."

He got up. His clothes were in the hallway, in the kitchen, scattered from the counter to the bedroom door, and he walked out to gather them naked, and the cold of the hallway was sharp against his back and he could smell her on his own skin and he could smell the kitchen, the soap, the dishwater, the ordinary smell of the house he had been living in for three weeks.

He picked up his pajama pants off the kitchen floor. He picked up his shirt from beside the counter. And he stood there in the kitchen, holding his clothes, and looked at the chair he had been standing behind when the door opened, and the newspaper was still on the table where Nazir had left it, folded, the corner of it sticking up.

Behind him, in the bedroom, he heard the sound of the sheets being pulled off the bed.

He stood in the kitchen with his clothes in his hands and the newspaper on the table and the sound of the sheets being stripped coming from the bedroom, and he did not put the clothes on. He set them down on the counter, one piece at a time, the way you set down something you have decided not to carry.

The floor was cold. He had known that already — he had walked it barefoot for three weeks, every morning, to the kettle — but he felt it now, the tile under his soles, the particular cold of a November floor at six in the morning.

She came out of the bedroom with the bundled sheets against her chest and stopped in the doorway when she saw him. Her hair was up. Her nightie was back on — the grey one, the thin one — and she had not put anything under it.

"You didn't get dressed," she said.

"No."

She looked at the clothes on the counter. Then at him. She was holding the sheets like a shield and both of them knew it was not one.

"Saan."

He crossed the kitchen. He took the bundle out of her arms and put it down on the counter beside his shirt, and the sheets slid and the smell of them came up — her, and him, and the two of them together — and he put his hands on her waist and lifted her.

She made a small sound. Not surprise. The sound of something arriving that she had been waiting for, and she grabbed his shoulders and her legs came around him and he set her down on the edge of the counter, and the cold tile of it made her hiss against his mouth.

"It's cold—"

"I know."

He pushed the nightie up her thighs. She was still wet — he could feel it on his fingers before he was even inside her, slick and warm and his own come still in her from the bed — and she reached down between them and took his cock in her hand and guided him, and he pushed into her standing there against the counter with her legs around his waist.

She was tight. Tighter than she had been in the bed, or maybe it was the angle, or maybe it was that she had her teeth in his shoulder and her fingers digging into the back of his neck and every muscle in her was locked, and he had to work to get all the way in. He worked. She took it. She took it with her head tipped back against the cupboard door and her mouth open and no sound coming out at all, and he felt her cunt give around him, gripping, wet, and then he was seated to the root inside her and she let out the breath she had been holding in one long shudder.

"There," she said. "There, there, there—"

He fucked her on the counter. Short strokes at first, because that was all the angle allowed, and she hooked her heels into the small of his back and pulled him in harder, and the cupboard doors knocked behind her with every thrust and the sound of it filled the kitchen — the knock, the wet, her breathing. The kettle was still on the stove from the night before. The tap dripped. He could see the newspaper over her shoulder, folded, the corner sticking up, and he fucked his uncle's wife on his uncle's kitchen counter and watched the newspaper move with each thrust. He could see the refrigerator, the magnets, the photo of Nazir in his white coat at some hospital function, and he did not look away from it. He wanted to look at it. Something in him wanted to look at it.

She came first. She came with her hands braced on the counter behind her and her chin down and her eyes open, watching him, watching his face the whole time, and he felt it — the flutter, then the clamp, then the long hard pull of her cunt around his cock, and the wet rush of it down onto his balls.

"Don't stop," she said. "Don't you dare stop—"

He didn't. He fucked her through it and past it, and she was making the sound — the low broken sound he had heard in the bedroom, the sound that did not sound like a person, and he was close, so close, and he felt the pull of her cunt around him, felt her squeeze, and he felt her fingers in his hair.

And then he stopped.

He pulled out of her. The wet sound of it, and she made a sound of protest and reached for him, and he caught her wrists and held them and looked at her.

"Not here," he said.

Her chest was flushed pink up to her knees and she was still open, and she was looking at him with her mouth open and her hair coming loose from the tie and she did not understand.

He took her by the waist and lifted her off the counter and set her on the floor. Her feet found the tile and she swayed, and he turned her — one hand on her hip, one on the back of her neck — and bent her forward over the floor.

She went down on her hands and knees on the cold tile. The nightie was around her waist. Her back was long and pale in the grey morning light and her hair was falling out of the tie and she looked back over her shoulder at him and he could see the whole of her — the curve of her ass, the wet shine of her thighs, the place where his come had run down and dried, the way her cunt was still open from him.

"Saan," she said.

He knelt behind her. He put one hand on the small of her back and pressed her down and pushed into her from behind, and this time it was one long stroke and she took him all the way to the root and her forehead went down onto the tile and she made a sound into the floor.

He fucked her on the kitchen floor. Hard. The tile was unforgiving under her knees and her hands slipped and she caught herself on the leg of the table and gripped it, and the table moved, and the newspaper slid and fell, and neither of them stopped. He had his hands on her hips and his thumbs in the small of her back and he pulled her back onto his cock with every stroke, and she pushed back to meet him, and the slap of their skin was the loudest thing in the house.

He could see her fingers on the table leg. He could see her knuckles go white. He could see the drip of her come and his come running down the inside of her thigh and pooling on the tile under her, and he could smell it — the two of them, the sex, the salt of it, mixed with the soap and the cold of the kitchen — and he leaned down over her back and put his mouth on her shoulder blade and bit down.

She cried out against the floorboards. Her cunt clenched around him so hard he saw white, and she pushed back and held herself there, grinding on him, and she said his name into the floor, and she said, "Please. Please, Saan, please—"

"Please what."

"Come in me. Come in me, please—"

He did. He drove into her three more times, hard, and on the third he held and emptied into her, and he felt every pulse of it, felt his cock jerk and spill inside her, felt her cunt take it and milk it, and she was still coming around him, still clenching, still saying something into the floor that he could not understand and did not need to.

He stayed inside her. Both of them breathing hard on the cold kitchen floor with the table leg in her hand and the newspaper on the tile beside her, and he looked down at the back of her head, at the hair coming out of the tie, at the two of them kneeling on the floor of the house where he lived, and he did not move.

Then he pulled out. The wet sound of it was loud in the quiet room, and she made a small sound and her hips dropped and she stayed on her knees with her forehead on the tile and her chest heaving, and the kitchen was silent except for the drip of the tap.

He pulled out slowly. Not because he wanted to — because his knees had gone and his thighs were shaking and he had to put a hand down on the tile to keep from going over onto her, and the tile was cold and wet where they had made it wet, and his palm slid a little.

She rolled onto her back. It took her a while. She got one shoulder down and then the other and then her head, and her hair came out of the tie entirely and spread out on the floor, black on the grey tile, and her chest was going up and down like she had run somewhere.

The nightie was still bunched at her waist. Her knees were apart and her thighs were shining and there was a long wet thread of it running from her down onto the floor, and she did not close her legs. She did not seem to know her legs were open.

Saan stayed on his knees beside her and looked at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster over the stove that he had never noticed in three weeks. It ran from the corner of the exhaust hood toward the window and stopped halfway, the way cracks do.

"The tap," she said.

"What?"

"It's been dripping since Tuesday. Nazir said he'd fix it." She said the name the way you say a name from a different part of your life. Flat. Without looking at him. "He didn't fix it."

Saan got up. His legs were not his yet. He crossed the kitchen and turned the tap until it stopped, and the silence that came after was bigger than the sound had been, and he stood there with his hand on the tap and his back to her, and he could feel her looking at the back of him.

"Saan."

"Yeah."

"Come here."

He came back and sat down on the floor next to her, his back against the cupboard door, and she turned her head on the tile to look at him. Her face was flushed and her mouth was swollen and there was a red mark on her shoulder blade where his teeth had been, and she was smiling. Small. Tired. The smile of someone who has just put down something heavy.

"You bit me," she said.

"I know."

"I felt it go through me." She reached up and put her hand on his knee. Her hand was still trembling. "I felt it here." She put her other hand flat on her own chest, above her breast, and held it there, and did not say anything else about it.

He looked at the kitchen. The newspaper was on the floor where it had fallen, open at the sports page. The kettle was cold on the stove. The photo of Nazir in his white coat was still on the fridge, and the magnets around it — a takeaway menu, a hospital ID badge from some other year, a small square magnet with a picture of a beach — and Saan looked at all of it and felt nothing he could name, and that was the strange part. He had expected to feel something. Guilt, maybe. Instead he felt the cold tile under him and her hand on his knee and the ache in his thighs, and that was all.

She sat up. Slowly, with her hand braced on the floor, and the nightie fell back down over her thighs and she pulled it straight, and she looked at the state of herself and laughed — one short breath of a laugh, no more than that.

"I need to shower," she said.

"Yeah."

"I need to shower and change the sheets and put the sheets in the machine before the neighbours are up, because the machine makes a noise like a plane taking off and Mrs. Qureshi next door will hear it and she will ask me about it, she always asks me about it."

She said it fast, all in one breath, and then stopped. And then she stopped looking at him.

"Saan. What time is it?"

He reached up to the counter without getting up and turned his phone over. "Quarter to seven."

She looked at the window. The grey outside had a little more light in it now. Somewhere down the street a scooter went past and did not come back.

"He comes home at six," she said. "He should be home. He should have been home forty-five minutes ago."

Neither of them said anything. The tap did not drip. The fridge hummed. Saan heard, for the first time in three weeks, the sound the fridge made — a low cycling hum, on and off, and he heard it go off and the kitchen got quieter and he heard his own breathing in it.

She got up. She got up off the floor with one hand on the table leg — the same leg she had been holding — and she stood there for a second with her weight on it, and then she walked out of the kitchen without looking back at him, and he heard the bathroom door close, and then the water start, and the water was loud and it went on being loud.

He stayed on the floor. He picked up the newspaper and folded it and put it back on the table, and he picked up her nightie's fallen tie from beside the fridge where it had gone, and he put it in his pocket without deciding to. Then he got up and gathered his clothes off the counter and put them on — the shirt, the trousers, one sock, the other — and he stood in the kitchen in his own clothes with the smell of her still on his hands, and he looked at the bathroom door with the light under the door and the water running and the woman on the other side of it, and he did not know what he was going to do.

He took his phone off the counter. The screen lit his face — 6:47, three missed calls from Ammi, all of them from yesterday, all of them before the movie. He hadn't heard it ring. He hadn't heard anything.

The bathroom water ran on. He looked at the door, at the strip of light under it, and then he put his thumb on her name and walked out of the kitchen and down the corridor to his own room, and shut the door behind him with his heel.

His room smelled of him. The bed was unmade from last night, the blanket dragged half onto the floor, and the laptop sat open on the pillow with the screen gone black. He stood at the window with his back to all of it and pressed call.

It rang twice.

"Saan?" His mother's voice came through tinny and close, the way it always did, as if she were standing in the next room. "Beta, I called you three times yesterday. Three times. I thought something happened."

"Nothing happened." He kept his voice flat and easy. He had not known he could do that. "Sorry, Ammi. I was working late."

"Working late," she said, and he could hear her settling into the chair by the phone, the little creak of it, the sound of home. "You are working too much. Nazir bhai told me you are working too much. He called me on Sunday."

Saan looked at the window. The glass was cold against his forehead and the street below was grey and wet and a man was walking a bicycle through the puddles with his shoulders up around his ears.

"He did?"

"He said you come home tired and you eat and you go to your room. He said you don't talk much." A pause. "Are you eating?"

"I'm eating."

"What did you eat last night?"

He opened his mouth. The kitchen came back to him all at once — the counter, the cold tile, the wet sound, the crack in the plaster over the stove. He heard the tap that had been dripping since Tuesday. He heard the table move.

"Dal," he said. "And rice. Tarannum Aunty made it."

"Good. Good, she is a good cook, that one." His mother's voice softened the way it did when she spoke about the house, about Nazir, about the life her brother had made for himself in the city. "You are lucky, beta. Some boys go to those dormitories and they eat from hotels and they get sick. You have a home there."

"I know."

"Do you?"

He said nothing. Down the corridor, faint, the water stopped.

"Saan."

"I'm here."

"You sound strange."

"I'm tired."

"Then sleep. Don't stay up on that computer." She said it the way she had said it when he was fifteen, and for one second he was fifteen, and the whole of the last three weeks was a thing that had not happened yet.

Then he heard the bathroom door open. The sound carried down the corridor — the small click of the latch, then the pad of bare feet on the floor, and then the bedroom door, and then nothing.

He turned his face to the wall.

"Ammi."

"Hm?"

"How is Baba."

"He is the same. His knee. He asks about you." Another creak, the chair taking her weight as she leaned back. "He says, when is Saan coming home. I said, when the company lets him. That is what I said."

"I'll come when I can."

"In December? For the wedding? Your cousin's wedding is on the nineteenth, I told you, you have to come, everyone will ask—"

"I'll try."

He heard her sigh, the long one, the one that meant she had decided not to push. He knew that sigh the way he knew his own hands. He had heard it his whole life, from the other side of a door, from the other end of a phone line, from the back of a car on the way to a station. It was the sound of her letting him go.

"You know," she said, "Nazir bhai was so happy when you came. He told me, the boy will live with us, I will look after him like my own. He said that. He is a good man, your uncle."

"Yes."

"And Tarannum — she was happy too. He said she was happy. She has no children, you know, it is hard for a woman alone in the house all day."

Saan closed his eyes. The window was cold on his forehead and his own hand was cold on the phone and somewhere in the house a woman was standing in a towel or not in a towel, and his mother was talking about her like she was a photograph on a wall.

"She is good to me," he said. His voice did not move. He was proud of it and sick of it at the same time.

"Of course she is. She is your Aunty."

The word went through him and he let it. He stood there in his own room with his mother's voice in his ear and let the word sit in him, and he did not know what he was going to do with it, and he did not put it down.

"Ammi, I should go. I have to leave for work."

"Already? It is early."

"The office moved the timing. Seven-thirty now."

"They are making you work too much."

"It's fine."

"Eat something before you go. Even a banana. Do you have bananas?"

"We have bananas."

"Good." A pause, and then, softer: "Saan. Look at me."

He almost turned. He almost turned to look at a phone.

"I'm looking," he said.

"You are a good boy. You were always a good boy. Don't let the city make you different."

He stood at the window with the wet street below him and the man with the bicycle gone around the corner and the grey light coming up flat off the rooftops, and he felt his own face do nothing at all.

"I won't," he said.

"Good, beta." And then, warm, easy, certain: "Nazir bhai takes care of you."

"Yes, Ammi." He watched his own thumb on the edge of the phone. "He does."

"Okay. Okay. Call me Sunday."

"I'll call."

"Bye, beta."

"Bye, Ammi."

He took the phone from his ear and looked at the screen — call ended, 6:52 — and he stood there for a while longer with his forehead against the cold glass, and then he put the phone in his pocket, and his fingers found the nightie's tie in there, the small knot of black cloth, and he closed his hand around it and did not take it out.

When he came back down the corridor the bedroom door was shut. He stood outside it. He could hear her moving in there — the wardrobe, the hanger, the small sounds of a woman getting dressed — and he lifted his hand toward the wood and did not knock, and after a moment he let the hand drop and went into the kitchen instead.

The kitchen was the same kitchen. The newspaper was on the table where he had put it, folded, the sports page inside. The kettle was cold. The tap was dry. He stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the tile and there was nothing on it now, nothing to see, she had wiped it or the light had changed or both, and the fridge hummed and went quiet and hummed again.

He filled the kettle and set it on the stove and turned the gas on, and the blue flame came up under it and he watched it, and his hands were steady, and that was the thing. That was the thing he could not get past. His hands were steady and his voice had been smooth and his mother had said good boy and he had said yes, Ammi, and somewhere behind him in this house a woman he had had on the floor an hour ago was pulling a sweater over her head.

The kettle began to tick.

He made tea. Two cups, because his hands did it before he decided. He put one on the counter and stood over the other one and did not drink it, and the steam came off it and made a small wet ring on the laminate, and he looked at that ring and thought about nothing.

Then the bedroom door opened.

She came down the corridor in a grey sweater and black trousers, her hair still wet and pushed back behind her ears, no bindi, no earrings, her face washed clean and a little pale, and she looked like any woman on any morning in any house on this street. She stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at the two cups.

"You made tea," she said.

"Yeah."

She came in and picked up the cup and held it in both hands and stood across the counter from him, and neither of them sat down. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside, a car went past and its tyres made the long wet sound cars make on a road after rain.

"I called my mother," he said.

She looked up from the cup.

"She asked if I was eating."

Tarannum held the cup against her chest and looked at him over the rim, and her eyes were doing something he could not read — not fear, not guilt, something quieter and worse than either.

"What did you tell her."

"That I was eating."

"And?"

"And that you made dal."

She breathed out through her nose. Almost a laugh. She set the cup down on the counter and turned it a quarter-turn with her fingers, and the little wet ring she made was next to his.

"Saan," she said. "Sit down."

He sat down at the table. She sat down across from him, and the folded newspaper was between them, and she put her hand flat on it and looked at the back of her own hand for a second before she looked at him.

"He should have been home at six," she said. "He is never late. In eleven years he is never late."

"Maybe the ward."

"Maybe the ward." She said it the way you say a thing you do not believe. "Or maybe he stopped for petrol. Or maybe there was an emergency and he is still there and he will come home at nine and eat his breakfast and go to sleep and never know." She turned the cup again. "Or maybe he came home at six and stood in the corridor."

Saan looked at her. The grey light from the window lay along the table between them and her hand on the newspaper and the two cups and the small wet rings, and the house around them was so quiet he could hear the fridge cycle off and the silence come in.

"Why do you say that," he said.

"Because I heard the door." She did not look away from him. "At six. I heard the front door, Saan. I was on the floor in here and I heard it."

He sat very still.

"It could have been the neighbours," he said.

"It could have been." She picked up the cup and drank, and her throat moved, and she set it down again. "But I heard a key."

She said it and the room went small. Saan sat with his hands flat on the table and looked at her across the folded newspaper, and the two wet rings from the cups sat between them like something neither of them had meant to make.

"A key," he said.

"A key." She did not move her hand off the paper. "I was on the floor in here with my forehead on the tile and I heard the front door open and close. And then nothing. No footsteps. No bag on the hook. Nothing." Her voice stayed level, and the levelness was the worst part of it. "So either he came in and stood in his own hallway and listened to me come on the kitchen floor, or I am a woman who has started hearing things."

Saan looked at the door at the end of the corridor. It was shut. It had been shut since six. He had walked past it twice and not knocked and not opened it, and now he could not remember why.

"Check the shoe rack," he said.

"I already checked the shoe rack."

"Check it again."

She looked at him for a second longer than she needed to, and then she got up, and he heard her bare feet go down the corridor, and he sat alone at the table with the cold tea and the crack in the plaster over the stove and the fridge humming, and he listened to her stand in the front hall for a long time.

She came back with her arms crossed over the grey sweater.

"His shoes are there," she said. "The brown ones. But the brown ones are always there. He has the black ones on his feet." She sat down again. "I don't know what I heard."

"You heard something."

"I hear something every night, Saan. That is what a house does."

He reached across the table and took her hand. It was the first time either of them had touched since the floor, and her fingers were cold from the tap, and she let him, and then she closed her hand around his and held on harder than the moment called for.

"Ten hours," he said.

"Nine and a half."

"That's still a lot of hours."

She looked up at him. Something in her face had gone very still and very awake, and he understood, the way he had understood her hand on the knob last night, that she had already decided and was only waiting for him to catch up.

"Then let's not waste them sitting at a table," she said.

He stood up so fast the chair went back and hit the counter, and she made a sound — half laugh, half breath — and he took her by the wrist and pulled her up and she came, and he walked her backwards down the corridor with his hands on her waist, and her feet were bare and his were bare and the floor was cold and neither of them said anything at all.

The bedroom door was open. He walked her through it and kicked it shut behind them with his heel, and the click of it this time was not terror, it was a lock.

She got the grey sweater off over her head before he had finished turning around. Underneath it she was bare — no nightie, no bra, just her, the full weight of her breasts and the soft line of her belly and the dark hair at the top of her thighs still wet from the shower, and she stood in front of him with her arms at her sides and let him look, the way she had in this room an hour ago, and this time she did not say your clothes, take them off. This time she just watched him do it.

His shirt went first. He pulled it over his head and dropped it, and she stepped in and put both hands flat on his chest, and her palms were warm from the shower and her thumbs found the small dark bruise below his collarbone and pressed it, hard enough to hurt, and he hissed through his teeth and she smiled.

"I did that," she said.

"You did."

"Good." She pushed him back onto the bed and he went down on his elbows and she climbed over him, straddling his hips, and the wet heat of her settled onto the front of his trousers and he felt it through the cloth, the slick of her, and she ground down against him once, slow, and he grabbed her hips and she caught his wrists and pinned them to the mattress on either side of his head.

"Stay," she said.

He stayed.

She kept one hand flat on his chest and reached back with the other and undid his trousers and worked them down his hips, and his cock came free hard and already wet at the tip, and she wrapped her hand around it and held it and did not move, just held it, the way you hold something you have been thinking about for weeks. Then she stroked him — once, root to head, slow, her thumb dragging over the slit — and Saan's whole body arched off the mattress and she pushed him back down.

"Where do you want me," she said.

"Your mouth."

She did not make him ask again. She slid down his body, her breasts dragging over his stomach, and she settled between his legs and took him in her hand and put her mouth on the head of his cock, and she did not tease him the way she had in this bed an hour ago — she took him straight down, all the way, her throat opening around him, and Saan fisted both hands in the sheets and made a sound he could not have repeated.

She came up slow, her lips dragging, and then went down again. Her hair was wet and it stuck to his thighs and she used her hand on the part of him that would not fit and her mouth on the rest, and the wet sound of it filled the room — the suck, the pull, the small catch of her breath through her nose every time she took him deeper. He looked down the length of his own body and watched his cock slide in and out of her mouth and watched her eyes come up to meet his over it, and she held his gaze while she did it, deliberate, filthy, and something in his chest turned over hard.

"Tarannum."

She pulled off him with a wet sound and her lips were shining and she said, "Not yet. I want you to last."

"I won't last."

"You will." She took him back in her mouth and down her throat and stayed there, and his hands went to her hair and he held her head and she let him, and he was so close he could feel it climbing in the base of his spine, and then she pulled off and sat up and wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and said, "See."

He was breathing like he had run up stairs. She crawled up him and straddled his hips again and reached down between them and took his cock in her hand and held the head of it against her cunt, and she was so wet that it slid along her folds without going in, and she worked it up and down over her clit, and her mouth opened and her eyes went half shut, and she did it again, and again, and Saan felt the heat of her sliding over the head of him and he could not think about anything else in the world.

"Put it in," he said.

"Say please."

"Please."

She sank down onto him. All the way, one long stroke, and she did not stop until her ass was flat on his hips and he was buried in her to the root, and she sat there with her hands on his chest and her head back and her mouth open and let out a long shaking breath. Her cunt gripped him in slow pulses, tight and hot and wet, and he felt every one of them travel up the length of his cock like a hand closing and opening.

"God," she said. "God, you fill me."

She started to move. But not the way she had before — this was slower, meaner, a long roll of her hips that took him all the way out to the head and then slammed back down, and every time she came down she ground herself against the base of him, and every time she came up she squeezed him, and she watched his face while she did it, and she smiled when his eyes rolled.

"Look at me," she said. "You wanted my mouth. Now look at me."

He looked at her. She was riding him slow and hard in her husband's bed, her hair wet down her back, her breasts moving with every stroke, and there was a small dark mark on her shoulder blade where his teeth had been in the kitchen, and he could see it every time she turned, and it made him harder inside her, and she felt it and laughed — a real laugh, low and breathless.

"You like that," she said. "You like seeing what you did to me."

"Yes."

"So do I." She leaned down over him and kissed him, deep, her tongue in his mouth, and she kept riding him the whole time, and he could taste himself on her and she knew it and did it anyway. "I want more of them."

He flipped her. He did it without deciding to — one hand on her hip and his weight turning over, and she went down onto her back with a small yelp and her legs came up around his waist and he drove back into her before she had finished the sound, and she cried out and grabbed the headboard.

He fucked her hard. No slow roll now — long, deep, driving strokes that moved her up the bed an inch at a time until her head was against the headboard and she had to brace her hands on it, and the whole bed was knocking the wall and the sound of their skin was loud and wet and neither of them cared who heard it. He got one hand under her ass and lifted her into it and fucked her at an angle that made her gasp on every stroke, and she clawed at his back and dug her heels into his spine and said, "There, there, don't stop, don't you stop—"

He didn't stop. He put his mouth on her throat and sucked a mark into it, right where the sweater collar would sit, and she moaned and her cunt clamped down around him so hard he had to stop moving for a second and breathe against her neck.

"Saan."

"Yeah."

"Turn over."

He pulled out and rolled onto his back and she moved fast — off the bed, around it, and she came back with something in her hand. His belt. His own belt, off the trousers on the floor, doubled in her fist, and she climbed back onto the bed over him and looked down at him with her eyes very dark and very steady, and she said, "Give me your hands."

He gave her his hands.

She wound the belt around his wrists — not tight, not loose, a loop and a twist, and she pulled it up over his head and hooked it around one of the headboard spindles and let it take his arms up, and he lay there with his arms above his head and his cock standing up off his stomach and his breath coming fast, and she sat back on her heels and looked at him the way a woman looks at something she has been wanting for a long time.

"Is that all right," she said.

"Yes."

"Say it."

"It's all right."

She moved down his body and took his cock in her mouth again, and this time she did not stop when he got close. She took him deep and held him and worked him with her hand and her mouth together, and he pulled against the belt and felt the leather bite his wrists and the headboard creak, and he said her name and she hummed around him and it went through him like a wire, and he said, "I'm going to—"

She pulled off him and sat up and swung one leg over him and took him in her hand and guided him into her from the top, and she came down on him in one stroke and rode him hard and fast with her hands braced on his chest and her eyes on his face, and she said, "Come in me. Come in me, Saan, I want to feel it."

He came. He came with his arms stretched over his head and the belt creaking against the wood and his hips bucking up into her, and he felt every pulse of it leave him and go into her, and she kept riding him through all of it, grinding down, taking it, her mouth open and her breath coming in small broken pieces.

When he was done she stayed on him. She stayed with him still inside her and her hands on his chest and her breath slowing, and then she reached up and unhooked the belt from the headboard and unwound it from his wrists and dropped it on the floor, and she bent down and kissed the red marks on both his wrists, one and then the other, slowly, with her mouth open.

"Was that too much," she said.

"No."

"Good." She lay down on his chest and put her ear over his heart and did not move, and he put his arms around her — his wrists aching, the marks already coming up — and he looked at the ceiling of his uncle's bedroom and listened to the house, and the house was quiet, and the fridge hummed, and somewhere far off down the street a dog was barking at nothing.

She lifted her head after a while and looked at him.

"Again," she said.

"You're going to kill me."

"Probably." She kissed him and got up off the bed and walked to the wardrobe and pulled open the door. "But not before six." She looked back at him over her shoulder — naked, marked, hair wet down her back, entirely unashamed — and she reached into the wardrobe and took something off a hanger and turned around with it in her hands.

It was one of Nazir's shirts. White, hospital-issue, the kind with the pocket on the chest and the little embroidered crest. She held it up against herself and looked at Saan across the room.

"Put this on," she said.

His hands were still trembling when he took the shirt from her.

The fabric was cool against his skin, starched the way Nazir liked his things starched, and Saan could smell the faint chemical tang of hospital detergent in it. The sleeves were too long. He rolled them once, twice, and the cuffs still hung past his wrists, so he pushed them up again and gave up and let the cloth fall over his knuckles.

Tarannum watched him from the foot of the bed. She had not put anything on — she stood there naked with her hair drying in dark ropes over her shoulders, and the mark he had sucked into her throat was already going purple, and she looked at him the way she had looked at him all night, like she was reading something in him that he could not see himself.

"It fits," she said.

"It's too big."

"It fits." She came to him and tugged the hem down over his stomach and smoothed the front of it with her palms, and her hands stayed there for a moment, warm through the cotton. "You look like him from the back."

The words landed somewhere in his chest. He did not know what to do with them, so he said nothing, and she did not seem to need him to. She stepped past him and out of the bedroom and her bare feet made soft sounds on the corridor floor, and he followed her because there was nothing else to do.

The house was dark. The clock in the hall said half past three. The city outside was quiet under the cold, and the streetlight through the front window put a long yellow stripe across the tiles, and Saan could see his own reflection in the glass of the framed picture on the wall — a man in a white shirt that was not his, his hair messed, a bruise coming up under his collarbone where her mouth had been.

Tarannum stopped at the end of the corridor. She did not turn on a light. She stood in the dark and watched him, and he understood that she wanted him to do this, to walk through the house in her husband's shirt and look at the front door, and he did not know if it was a game or a test or something else.

The shoe rack was by the door. Nazir's shoes were there — the black leather ones he wore to the hospital, and the brown sandals he changed into on Sundays, and a pair of old slippers that had been there since before Saan arrived. Saan looked at them and counted them and looked again, and he could not have said what he was looking for. A wet footprint on the mat. The umbrella stand moved. The chain.

The chain.

He reached the front door and put his hand on the lock and checked it — locked, solid, the deadbolt turned — and then he looked up at the chain, and the chain was hanging loose.

He went still.

His hand stayed on the metal. The links were cold, and they swayed slightly from the motion of the door, and he could hear Tarannum breathing behind him in the dark, and he could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, and he could not remember — he could not remember if he had latched it last night, and he could not remember if Tarannum had latched it, and he did not know if it had been hanging loose all evening or if someone had lifted it and set it down.

He turned the deadbolt again. It was locked. The door was locked. But the chain —

He reached up and took the chain in his fingers. The metal was cold, colder than the air around it, and he lifted it and looked at the groove where it should have sat in its housing. There was no dust in the groove. He ran his thumb along the inside of the links and felt the faint oil slick of someone's hand, recent enough that the cold had not yet dried it away.

Behind him, Tarannum's breathing had gone quiet. He could feel her watching him in the dark, could feel the weight of her attention like a hand on his back, and he did not turn around because he was afraid of what he would see on her face.

"Was it latched?" she said. Her voice was low, careful, the voice of a woman who had learned to be careful.

"I don't remember." The words came out of him flat, honest. "I don't remember if I latched it. I don't remember if you latched it. I don't remember anything from last night except—" He stopped. The rest of the sentence hung between them, heavy and obvious, and he let it die there.

She did not move. He heard her shift her weight from one foot to the other, the soft sound of bare skin on cold tile, and then she said, "I latched it. When I came in from the kitchen, I latched it. I always latch it."

He turned to look at her. She stood at the end of the corridor in the dark, naked, her hair still damp, the bruise on her throat dark against her skin, and her face was unreadable in the low light. But her hands were at her sides and her fingers were curled into fists, and he had never seen her do that before.

"Then someone opened it," he said. "Or someone tried to."

The words sat in the hallway between them like something dropped. Tarannum looked at the chain in his hand and then at the door and then at him, and he watched her work through the same arithmetic he was working through — the deadbolt turned, the lock solid, but the chain hanging loose meant someone had reached in through the gap, or someone had been on the inside, or someone had a key and had not needed the chain at all.

"He has a key," she said. The words came out small, almost childlike, and she pressed her lips together afterward as if she could pull them back.

Saan looked at the door. The deadbolt was locked. The chain was loose. Nazir had a key to the deadbolt but not to the chain — the chain could only be worked from the inside, unless someone had reached through the gap with a tool, unless someone had stood on the porch in the cold and slid a wire through the crack and lifted the chain off its track and then found the deadbolt locked and given up.

"He would have come in," Saan said. "If he'd come home at six and heard us—"

"He didn't hear us. He wasn't home."

"Then who—"

Tarannum took a step toward him. Her bare foot came down on the cold tile and she did not flinch, and she looked at the chain and then at his face, and she said, "Check the shoes. Count them. He always leaves his shoes in the same place. He's a man who needs his shoes in the same place."

Saan looked down at the shoe rack by the door. The black leather shoes were there, and the brown sandals, and the old slippers. He had already counted them once. He counted them again. Three pairs. The same three pairs. No wet shoes, no muddy shoes, no shoes that had walked through the November rain and been set down in a hurry.

"The umbrella," he said.

He looked at the umbrella stand. It was a brass thing, heavy, the kind of thing that had been in the house for decades, and it held one black umbrella and one folded walking stick that Saan had never seen anyone use. The umbrella was dry. The floor around the stand was dry. There were no wet marks on the mat, no mud, no trail of droplets leading from the door to the corridor.

"No one came in," he said. "The floor is dry. The shoes are dry. The umbrella is dry."

Tarannum's fists loosened. She let out a breath she had been holding and came closer, and he could smell her now — the sex on her, the salt, the particular scent of her skin that he had spent the night learning — and she reached past him and took the chain from his hand and looked at it herself.

"Maybe I didn't latch it," she said. Her voice was different now, softer, almost relieved. "Maybe I thought I did. Maybe I was distracted." She looked up at him and there was something almost like a smile at the corner of her mouth. "I was distracted."

He looked at her. The mark on her throat. The way her hair fell in ropes over her shoulders. The way she stood in the dark of the hallway in her husband's house with her husband's nephew in her husband's shirt, and he felt the whole weight of it press down on his chest.

"You should go back to bed," she said. "He'll be home at six. You need to be in your room when he comes home."

"What about you?"

"I'll be in my room. Like always." She reached up and touched the collar of the shirt, the one she had given him, and her fingers brushed the cotton at his throat. "Give me that before you go. He'll notice if it's missing."

He looked down at himself. The white shirt was too big on him, the sleeves hanging past his wrists, the hem coming down to his thighs, and he had worn it through the house like a costume, like a dare, and now it felt like what it was — a borrowed thing, a thing that belonged to another man.

He unbuttoned it. His hands were steadier now. He took it off and handed it to her, and she took it and held it against her chest and looked at him, and he stood in the dark hallway in nothing but his own skin and felt the cold air on his body and felt her eyes on him and did not know what to do with any of it.

"Goodnight," she said.

"It's almost morning."

"Then good morning." She smiled, a real smile this time, the kind she gave him in the kitchen when Nazir was not home, and she turned and walked back down the corridor toward the bedroom, and he watched her go, watched the way her hips moved in the dark, watched the way she did not look back, and he stood there in the hallway with the cold air on his skin and the loose chain in his hand and the smell of her still on him.

He hung the chain back on its hook. It clinked softly against the door frame, and he slid it into its housing, and he turned the deadbolt one more time and then stood there with his palm flat against the wood, feeling the cold of the door through his skin.

The house was quiet. The fridge hummed. Somewhere far off, the dog had stopped barking. The streetlight through the front window put its long yellow stripe across the tiles, and he could see himself in the glass of the framed picture — a young man, naked, marked, standing in his uncle's hallway at four in the morning with his uncle's wife's smell on his skin.

He went back to his room. He did not turn on the light. He lay down on his bed, on the sheets that still smelled like her, and he looked at the ceiling and listened to the house and counted the seconds until six o'clock.

The chain was latched now. He had latched it himself. But he did not know if it had been latched before, and he did not know who had unlatched it, and he lay in the dark and turned it over and over in his mind like a coin he could not stop flipping.

At half past four, he heard Tarannum's bare feet in the corridor. She passed his door and did not stop, and he heard the bathroom door open and close, and then the sound of water running, and he knew she was washing herself, washing him off her body before her husband came home.

He closed his eyes. The water ran for a long time.