The intervening hours since her arrival had been tense with the lack of development. Each minute felt like an hour of pregnant silence and as each hour passes without event, doubt wells in me that I have made some error like a calling to the grave. She continued to speak to me, and I to her, but things failed to change, and as noted before, very little was actually said.
Desperate to force some action, I began to make excursion with premeditation and without prediction. At first I left for fractions of an hour, then hours at a time, whispering pleadings into the chill wind that one of these absences would push her to some revelation. The thin, crisp air and muted smells of late autumn became the constant accompaniment to my disappointment on that front.
She had taken to either sitting directly next to me, the warmth of her presence noticeable in the stillness of those walls, or standing in the furthest corner from me. When pressed, she would lock eyes, but they seemed to grace my own with unnatural infrequency. I wondered if perhaps I could be imagining it, but I got the constant paranoid feeling that we were engaged in some clandestine battle, cat-and-mouse, the roles unclearly defined and the rules completely unwritten and both players utterly unsure if they wanted to be involved in the game at all.
Despite all of this, she slept in my bed. We did not touch, the occasional graze of accidental movements left me with a chill in my bones. Under linen shrouds I slept unrestfully, awaking for long periods in the night to stare unwaveringly at a spot on the wall. I would sense a ceasing in the constant, patient pace of her breathing and would eventually convince myself to reach out to her. Then her flank would rise, a gentle suggestion on the silhouette in the darkness. My fingers come to rest again against the sheets and heavy lids close out the world.
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