Or he might say he’s not attracted to me.

Martin regards me for a moment, and then says without emotion, “If that is what you want.”

“It is.”

He nods once, places the book on his bedside table, and extinguishes the light. My heart is aflutter when he pulls me to him and pulls my nightgown up over my head. I chase away all thoughts of the last time this was done to me and focus instead on how it was the first time. I want Martin’s kisses. I want them so badly. But he’s not kissing me. His hands are moving across my body in every hidden place, and I feel a hundred thousand needles of delight, but he doesn’t kiss me. He is on top of me and then inside me and it is wonderful and pleasurable, beyond any pleasures I have ever known. There is none of the violence of the last time I was with a man. But there is no passion, either. When we are finished Martin still does not kiss me. He has enjoyed my body as I have enjoyed his, and that is all. We haven’t shared affection for each other; we have only shared our flesh. He doesn’t ask me to leave and I don’t want to. But I don’t curl up into his embrace, either. When I awake in the morning, he is already up. And there is nothing in his morning greeting to indicate that anything has changed between us.

I find him in the boiler room at the far wall laying bricks one atop the other and setting them in place with a trowel. Next to him is an old washbasin in which he has mixed the mortar. The length of bricks is at least seven feet long and extends outward by perhaps five feet.

“The hair tonic needs to cure in a warm, dark place,” he says, in answer to my stare, as though that was the only question on my mind. “I’m making a vault for it.”

It seems such a drastic measure, disrupting the boiler room with such a permanent structure. And needless.

“Isn’t it dark and warm enough down here anyway?” I ask.

“If it was, do you think I’d be going to all this work?” He doesn’t say it unkindly, but I sense his displeasure at my question nonetheless.

“No, of course not.”

He slaps on a layer of mortar and sets a brick in place. I wonder when Martin had the bricks delivered. While I was sleeping in the wee hours? While Kat and I were at the market yesterday? Some other time entirely?

“Are you wanting some breakfast?” I ask a second later, after deciding it doesn’t matter. And I want to recapture a sliver of the intimacy we had last night. Martin is doing a kind thing for his troubled cousin. I am never in the boiler room anyway. So what if there is a brick crypt crowding one length of the room?