You have done this forty-one times since the night you decided not to ask.
Tonight Reef runs the tap and waits, the way he always waits, for the water to turn from cold to that warm mineral heat that smells faintly of the pipes, of the building, of Porto in late winter. The kitchen is narrow enough that his back is against the counter when you step in. He pushes your left sleeve up past the elbow, folding the cuff twice, deliberate, his thumb finding the old scar at your collarbone on the way — a place he doesn't need to touch but does. You let him. You lean back into his chest. Across the light shaft, a window in someone else's kitchen goes dark, and you watch the dark spread there while his ink-stained fingers close around your wrist and draw your hand under the water.
He does not soap them right away. He holds your hands open under the stream and lets the heat do its slow work, the way he learned to, the way you taught each other without meaning to, four years ago, the first time, when it was an accident and then a joke and then the thing you couldn't stop doing.
Count them.
The first time: a Tuesday, you'd cut yourself slicing bread and he washed the flour and blood off so gently you cried and pretended it was the onion still on the board.
The eleventh: he wrote a coordinate on your palm in pen, a private map of where he claimed your pulse lived, and washed it off so it would only ever be his.
The twentieth: you washed his, for once, and found the small scar behind his ear under your fingers and he let you, and that was the night you understood you'd been allowed all the way in.
The twenty-ninth: he came home late. He came home smelling of a soap that was not your soap — citrus and something clinical — and he stood at the sink and you washed his hands and the smell came off them into the water and went down the drain and you did not ask. You ran the water hotter than usual. He didn't flinch. Neither of you said the word that was sitting on the counter between the two mismatched cups like a third presence.
The thirtieth: same.
The thirty-first through fortieth: same, same, same, same — each one a little more careful, each one a held breath, the ritual unchanged on its surface and underneath it now a thing you were both protecting from speech, because to speak it would be to map it, and once a thing is mapped it can be deprecated, archived, shut down, and you are a woman who spends her days transcribing the last words of systems being switched off, and you know exactly how the final interview goes, you know it ends, and you did not want this to end, so you kept your hands under the water and you counted nothing.
You are counting now.
Forty-one.
The autonomous systems in the walls are cycling down for the night, that subsonic hum dropping a half-step lower. Reef soaps your hands at last, working the lather into the webs of your fingers, slow, no reason except that you started it once. His mouth is near your ear. He could be about to say something. He has been about-to-say-something for thirteen washings.
He wants, you know, to find the one thing in you he cannot put on a grid. And the terrible tenderness of it is that this — your unasked question, the green soap you swallowed, the count you've kept in secret — this is that thing. You have become, for him, the unmappable. He loves you partly for the locked door you've made of yourself, and you made the locked door to keep him, and you cannot tell whether that is the marriage or the wound.
He rinses your hands. Turns off the tap. The silence after the water is enormous.
Across the shaft, the dark window stays dark. He presses your wet hands flat against his sternum, over the heart, the way he has done forty times before, and you let him, and you don't ask, and tomorrow night, if there is one, you will do this again, and the doing will look exactly like love because it is, because it was, because you cannot tell the difference anymore and have decided, not to learn.
