“Do you ever stand under the hot water and let it run hot and scald you and love it just a little?”

She looks at me. Holds her palms up to the showerhead like she is trying to catch the water it’s releasing.

“I guess?” She says.

I ask her these kinds of questions a lot, in the shower, mostly. Her responses are pensive and short. I don’t think she thinks about this stuff too much.

“I dream in the shower,” she told me the first time we took one together, “I do my best thinking here.” I watched water droplets snaking down her arms and over the little ridge on her torso where muscle gives way to roundness and flesh.

“What’re you thinking about right now?” I asked.

She smiled and I could tell she was coming up with something to say.

“Soap,” she finally answered, fondeling the ivory colored bar between her palms.

Our showers are more familiar now. Sometimes I won’t feel like getting wet and will sit on the counter by the sink and brush my teeth and listen to the thuds that come when she pulls her hair into a tight twist and squeezes out the water and soap.

Today I perched up there and studied my face in the mirror. There are all these little pore holes on my nose that bits of dirt and oil come out of if I squeeze them hard enough. It hurts though, and sometimes I get so into the squeezing that I don’t realize I have moved myself to tears, my face to blotchy redness.

This is not something I’d do in front of her, so tonight I just study my face and resist the urge to squeeze and ask her about her day.

“Oh, you know,” she says through the curtain and tells me about an angry girl she goes to school with and how some kids pulled up next to her in traffic, looked over and laughed.

“It was so embarrassing,” she says.

“What were they laughing at?” I ask.

“Nothing, I mean, I have no idea. I wasn’t even singing.”

We’re quiet for a few minutes. She rings her hair again. I hear her pick up the almost empty shampoo bottle which squeaks when she squeezes and then turns her steam to a fruity flavor. The mirror starts to fog around the edges.

“My fingers have gone all vicariously pruny,” I say and she pulls back the curtain, sticks her nose out and smiles before drawing it shut again in a wave of soap and steam.

We’re quiet again.

“So I think,” I say, shifting my weight on the counter top, “the best way is to have the parents do all the shuffling around.”

“Huh?” She says, pulling the curtain back again and looking at me. “Oh, right.” She closes it again.

We’ve been talking about divorce recently. About having kids and then, inevitably fucking them up. “After they split,” I told her, “I packed all my clothes into a duffle bag and carried it between their houses for years.”

“Why didn’t you just leave stuff at both places?” She asked.

“I didn’t want to get to one parent’s house and find out I’d left something I needed at the other’s.”

Tonight, after she’s showered and dried off and let me lay diagonally on her bed and watch as she smooths lotions over her skin and puts on underwear and pulls up the sheets, I call my mom. We talk awhile about my headaches, some movie she saw. And then she’s telling me about Homer’s daughter, Lilly who lives in Amherst with a mortgage and a tenured job.

“Her partner,” Mom says, “her wife, actually, after ten years wants to separate, see other people – and Lilly, Lilly is just devastated.”

“Wow,” I say. I have the phone in one hand, my big toe in the other. I’m chipping off my pedicure in satisfying peels of red polish.

“And they’ve got two little children. Homer says she calls sometimes at night and just sobs.”

“That’s awful.”

“Well I can’t help but think how smart he is to just let her cry.”

At dinner she lights candles. Doles salad onto my plate. I finish first, which is normal now; a bit of a joke. She eats slowly and puts her fork down in between bites to talk and chew and just “enjoy her food.”

While she does this I ask new questions and run my pointer finger back and forth through the candle flame, each time holding it a second longer.

“Careful,” she says.

I look up at her and back at the candle.

“When I was little,” I say, “I had a big thing for wax. I liked to stick my fingers in it and let it burn the tips then dribble it in shapes over my arms. Mostly, it dried and flaked off but sometimes I could peel away whole shapes and keep them intact.”

She nods and later lets me hold a candle over her bare stomach but squeezes my arm and jerks up and says That really hurts when I let the wax trickle off the wick and onto her skin.

In the mornings I watch her move around her space. Watering plants. Rearranging couch cushions. I like to do this. Familiarize myself with her ways. When she reads something online it’s with the same furrowed forehead she wears when examining the contents of the fridge. When she looks me in the eye it’s with the same lip bite she listens to her voicemail with.

This morning she opens the refrigerator and wrinkles her forehead and says, “I think I’ll go to the store.”

“Want me to come?” I ask and she shakes her head.

“It’s alright, I’ll just go.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

After she goes I look at the door and wonder if she’ll pop back in and say Forgot my keys. But she doesn’t and I sit in the quiet and pick at the skin around my fingernails and watch the swaths of light move from narrow to wide where they fall in bars across her living room rug.