A part of her, an ankle or a knee, pops as she passes through the doorway. I open my eyes in time to track the silhouette motion of one calf, the flex of one foot, before she disappears into the hall. Out of sight, she becomes the soft crush of heels and toes sinking into carpet, the whisper of fabric being raised from the floor, the hiss of cloth sliding against skin.
The oven door creaks open. I hear the tinny clang, the puff of displaced air as it seals shut. There is a moment of nothing, then the metal on metal grate of the chain latch, the grind of the guts of the door-knob. Street noises rush in- tires squelching against wet pavement, the frantic bleating of a horn in the next lane over. I grab my glasses and throw back the covers. Before I can sit, she's closed the door, shutting me in with an interminable silence.
I kick my feet free of the sheet and roll off the bed. My shorts are somewhere here in the dark, but the lamp is dead, so I forget it and charge out to the sitting room. The copper light streaming through the gap in the curtains cuts across a heap of denim on the floor. I wrestle the trousers over my knees, the buckle of my belt flogging my thighs. I snatch my T-shirt from under the coffee table and whip it over my head, shivering, engulfed in cold cotton.
She will have made it to the street by now. She will have turned east, heading toward the nearest Apparition point two blocks away. I kick my trainers onto their soles and cram my bare feet between the rise of the heel and the thin, padded tongue. Socks, underwear: Floppy wastes of time. Perceived essentials, that, it turns out, aren't.
Essential now is speed. Necessary to this moment are keen eyes and a loud voice. As I pull on my coat and slam out the door, what is absolutely indispensable, what I am totally without, is a hint of her motive. Barrelling into the foot traffic, scanning the crowd, I find myself slipping into Auror mode, retracing, probing my memory for anything that could be labelled 'evidence', trying to objectively reconstruct the scene. I have the who, what, where, when, and how. Missing is the why. Why would a young woman sneak out of a warm bed to wade through this February mizzle in the middle of the night? The objective answer: Countless reasons- she forgot to lock her doors, she fancied a walk in the rain, or, perhaps, the cat needs feeding. So sod objectivity and ask the real question, patently un-impartial and painful: Why would she want to sneak away from me?
The answer, I know, isn't a bludger through a window. It's a dozen tiny pings against the glass, the hundreds of spider web cracks spreading slowly, joining over time, until one wrong nudge sends the whole thing collapsing from the frame.
So I start at the very end, looking for that last careless word or gesture. I search for the Devil in the details.
Those final moments when we were both still awake, still lazing in a haze of dopamine and sweat, what I remember is the weight of her, the firm ridges of her ribs pressing against my open hands. She spoke, answering me, and I turned my head so the tip of my nose and my mouth were on her stomach. I didn't register the exact second her fingertips grew still in my hair, but when I realized she'd stopped moving, I looked up to where her face was listing against the pillow, her lips a lingering flesh red, swollen and parted. I pulled my hands free and pushed myself up over her. Her hand sank down, her fingertips falling to the place my lips had been.
I remember the air, too cool on my chest, and the arc of her legs falling together as I pulled the duvet over her- over us. I lay on my stomach beside her, the tip of one curl coiled around my finger, and I thought if she could fall asleep lying there beneath me, she must have felt as safe, as positively right, as I did.
Now, I can only suppose she didn't feel that way, at all.
And I'd like to believe that by lying still and listening as she left, by choosing not to act, I was really just doing what she wanted. I'd like to think my intentions were entirely noble. But a second, sotto voice in my head is churning out phrases like "passive aggressive", and "blatant narcissistic denial", and it makes me sick at myself to have to admit there is truth in the words- that I didn't want to believe she would leave me, so, to punish her, I just lay there and let her go.
The under-voice splutters up something about "latent self-destructive tendencies", and I clench my jaw and quash the thought down. All this sunk-in psycho-babble is irrelevant. What matters now is that I'm pushing past these scattered clusters of pub-goers, that I'm up on my toes, craning my neck, looking daft and desperate to catch a glimpse of her somewhere beyond. She can't have got that far ahead of me, and, while she's fast- the fact still remains- I'm faster.