And he lay silent still gazing up at the mottled spray of the plaster wondering how many other times she’d lain so, naked beside some man as she spoke of her life, the parts she’d pick and choose to offer up each time somewhat different and knew he would not ask her, would not only not want to know but whatever she told him he would not be able to believe, even were they to lie so through a thousand nights to the numbered dawnings and her tellings adding layer to layer as her soul clarified itself before him; even then he would know there was something not told, something held back, and he admired her for this.

He rose from the bed and stood looking at her. In the gaseous yellow from the streetlamp her body was pale, the color of old riverstone bleached by sunlight against the furrows of the sheet, her legs running out from her as water flows down from above, her hips meeting the swelling in his brain and chest and then the concave fall of her waist and the thin rise and spread up to her shoulders, the knobs and raised planes of her shoulderblades, her head and arms akimbo hidden under the dark spray of her wild torn hair. The underside of her heels resting at bed’s edge made to fit exactly his palms if he were to step forward and lift them up. He rubbed his face with his hands and then ran them down over his chest.

“Joey,” he said, “we can do whatever we want. There’s not a thing can stop us. We’re orphans, both of us. We’re free.”

She rolled over and sat up, pulling the sheet around her waist. Her back to the window, her face a blank mask, she spoke from within the tangle of knotted hair. The tips of her breasts as eyes out of a void. “I had you pegged for a runaway farmboy.”

He nodded, not confirming or denying. “I killed my mother. Getting born.”

She sat silent with that a moment. “You never knew her.”

“No.”

“Like my father.”