Poured Over

Zahra woke up on a mattress that was not hers, in a room she did not recognize, with one shoe on and one shoe off, and for a good thirty seconds she lay there staring at a ceiling that had no light fixture, just a smooth oval of plaster with a faint ring around it, like somebody had removed a lamp and never bothered to patch the paint. The comforter over her was heavier than anything she owned. It smelled clean, like a hotel, which was somehow the most reassuring detail of the whole morning.

She was forty-four years old and she had woken up in strange bedrooms before, though not many, and not in a while. The last time had been a work conference in Dayton three years ago, and even then she had at least known the name of the hotel. This room had beige walls, a dresser with nothing on it, a window with the blinds pulled down but not all the way, so a thin stripe of morning sun lay across the carpet like somebody had drawn it there with a ruler. Her purse sat on the floor by the door, upright, zipped, her keys placed neatly on top of it. Somebody had tidied around her while she slept, which was either very polite or very unsettling, and she lay there a while longer trying to decide which.

The night before came back in pieces. Closing shift at the café, which was normal. Ross counting the drawer, which was normal. The two of them sitting at the corner table after the lights were off, which was not normal, because Ross did not sit, Ross was the kind of man who stood behind the counter the way a lighthouse stands on a rock, planted, always facing out. But he had sat down across from her with two of the employees-only cold brews and he had said he had something to tell her, and she had thought, oh great, he is closing the store, or he is married, or he is dying, the usual menu of things a boss means when he says he has something to tell you at nine thirty at night.

Instead he had told her he was not human.

She remembered laughing. She remembered that clearly, the laugh, the way it had come out of her before she could stop it, and the way Ross had not laughed along, had just sat there with his hands flat on the table, waiting. Then things got less clear. There had been a demonstration of some kind. There had been her saying words, though she could not remember which words. At some point there had been a car ride, because her car was presumably still in the café lot, and at some point she had ended up here, wherever here was, in a guest bed with one shoe on.

The important thing, the thing she kept circling back to, was that she did not feel frightened. She felt like she had drunk a lot of coffee and then slept eleven hours, which, to be fair, she probably had. (You would think a person would feel something more dramatic, waking up in a monster's house. Mostly she needed to use the bathroom.)

The bathroom was across the hall and it was spotless, one towel folded on the bar, a spare toothbrush still in its packet on the counter with a sticky note on it that said, in small tidy handwriting, for you. That note did something to settle her more than anything else had. Monsters did not buy guest toothbrushes. Or if they did, they were very organized monsters, and honestly she had dated worse.

The smell of coffee reached her before she got down the stairs. Not the café smell, which was burnt and sweet and layered over itself from years of the same wall absorbing the same steam. This was a single clean thread of it, one pot, brewed recently, drifting through the house like it had somewhere to be.

The stairs creaked in the same three places any stairs creak, which she found oddly comforting. The house turned out to be a suburban house, a cul-de-sac house, the kind with an attached garage and a lawn that had been mowed in careful stripes, and she stood at the bottom of the stairs for a moment genuinely thrown by this. She had expected something else. Caves, maybe. A tower. Not a two-story with a sprinkler timer on the garage wall.

Ross was in the kitchen with his back to her, and he was doing something so ordinary, rinsing a carafe, that she almost said good morning before her brain caught up and reminded her about the not human part. He was in the same clothes as the night before, a gray button-down with the sleeves rolled, and the kitchen around him was neat in the way of a man who lived alone and had decided at some point that order was easier than the alternative. A row of mugs hung from hooks under a shelf. There were trade magazines fanned out on the coffee table in the next room, the kind with dense cover lines about import tariffs and roasting equipment.

He heard her and turned, and the first thing he did, which she thought about for the rest of the day, was look at her face and then look away, giving her the room to speak first if she wanted to or not speak at all.

"Good morning," he said. "There's coffee. And I can make eggs, if you eat eggs."

"How did I get here?"

"I drove you. Your car is at the shop. I texted my own number from yours so you'd have the address when you woke up, in case you wanted to check." He nodded at her purse, which she realized she had carried down with her, clutching it, without noticing. "You were pretty tired."

She got a mug down from the hooks without asking, which felt like the kind of thing a person does only in someone's actual house, and poured coffee, and the two of them stood in the kitchen in a silence that was not exactly comfortable but was not the other thing either. She looked out the window at the fence and the neighbor's trampoline and the ordinary blue sky.

"The eggs," she said finally. "I eat eggs. Over medium."

"I can do over medium."

"You're being very calm about all this."

"So are you," he said, and she did not have an answer for that, so she drank her coffee and he got a pan out and the eggs happened.

It was while he was at the stove that she saw it. He had both forearms resting on the counter, sleeves rolled, and the skin there moved. Not like a muscle twitch. The skin itself shifted, settled, and along the outside of each forearm a set of low ridges rose up, four or five of them, running from wrist almost to elbow, the color of the skin just barely darker there, like old faint scars but symmetrical and smooth. They came up slowly, the way a cat's claws come out when it stretches, and then they were simply there, and Ross kept working the eggs like nothing had happened.

She had a memory then, a short sharp one from the night before, of reaching out and touching his arm right there, right on that spot, and the counter beneath, and him going very still. She did not remember what she had said while doing it. She remembered what the ridges had felt like, warm and slightly rough, like sun-warmed stone.

"You showed me last night," she said.

"I did." He did not turn around. "You took it better than I expected. You asked a lot of questions. One of them was about taxes, which I'm still not sure I understood."

"That sounds like me." She looked at the ridges, and he let her look, which she appreciated. "Does it hurt? When they come up."

"It's the opposite of hurting. It's what happens when I'm not holding it down. Like unclenching a jaw you didn't know you had." He plated the eggs and slid hers across the counter. "I've held it down for four years. In the shop. Everywhere, really. Last night was the first time I didn't."

She sat down at the small table by the window with her plate and her mug and she ate the eggs, which were good, over medium like she asked, and she thought about what it cost a person, or whatever Ross was, to spend four years clenching.

There was a question she should ask, she knew, the practical one, the what are you exactly one, and the other practical one, the what does this mean for my job one, and she would get to those. But the kitchen was warm and the coffee was good and the man across the table had bought her a toothbrush and written for you on a sticky note, so for the moment she let it be, and asked him to pass the pepper instead.

* * *

She thought about the night before while she ate, the parts that had come back in pieces.

The closing shift had been a normal one, or normal enough. Friday, which meant the after-dinner rush and then the slow drain of laptop people who stayed until the last minute out of politeness or obliviousness. She had wiped tables. Ross had counted the drawer at nine forty, which she remembered because he never counted that early, and he had done it standing where she could see him, which he also never did. Then the last of the customers left and she hit the lights on the front half and the place went into that state cafés have after close, half lit, chairs stacked, everything suddenly louder somehow with nobody in it.

He had set two cold brews on the corner table. The employees-only ones, the batch he made himself on Sundays and never put in the case. He had not asked if she wanted one. He had just set them down and sat across from her, and that was not normal either. In four years of working for him she could count the times they had talked for more than two minutes, and most of those had been about the schedule or the grinder.

She remembered asking him how long he had been planning to tell her. She remembered him saying he had not been planning to tell her at all, that it had just gotten heavy, carrying it, and she had laughed, because what do you say to that. Then he had said the words themselves, plainly, sitting very still with his hands flat on the table, and she had laughed again, harder, and he had waited through it without looking hurt or annoyed, just waited, and when she was done laughing he was still sitting there with his hands flat on the table and the laugh had nowhere left to go.

She remembered the ridges, after that. Not the exact words. The touch.

And she remembered the moment before any of it, the actual hinge of the night, which was him asking her to stay. Not stay over. He had not put it that way. He had said, after the taxes question and a dozen others, that he had a couch, and that she looked as if she had been driving on fumes for a long time, and that she could stay and drink the second cold brew slowly or she could go and he would drive her to her car anyway. That was all. He had said it like an offer of a ride to the airport, no weight on it, and she had looked at him and thought about her apartment and the dishes in her sink and the alarm she would have to set, and she had said yes.

She had said yes without knowing why. That was the part she kept turning over now, in his kitchen, with the eggs. She was forty-four years old. She had said yes to a lot of things in her life and she could usually trace the reasons afterward, even the bad ones, even the ones she was embarrassed by. This one she could not trace. He had asked her to stay and something in her had simply gone, yes, the way a lock goes when the right key turns. (Which is a nicer image than she probably deserves for sitting in a stranger's kitchen in yesterday's clothes, but there it was.)

He had driven her here. That part she half remembered, the streets looping, the identical houses. She remembered the sprinkler timer on the garage wall, a little green-lit box, because it was the only interesting thing on the whole block. She remembered him texting his own number from her phone and she remembered thinking, with a drunk-tired clarity, that was the most careful stranger she had ever met.

"You went somewhere," Ross said now, from the counter, where he was rinsing the pan.

"I was going through the night. There's big gaps."

"Gaps are fine. You can ask me anything in the gaps and I'll answer, or tell you I don't want to answer, which won't be often."

"That's a strange way to talk."

"I've had a long time to get strange at it."

She looked at her mug. Then she looked up at him and said the thing she had been circling. "Show me the back of the house. I saw the fence out the window and now I'm curious about the whole thing, which is probably a trap, but."

He dried his hands on a towel and said it was not a trap, and led her through the living room past the coffee table and the trade magazines and out a slider door to the back patio.

The yard was small and neat, fenced, with a strip of gravel along the fence line instead of grass. There were two chairs and a low table and, off to one side, a raised bed with something leafy growing in rows that she did not recognize. He set the coffeepot he had carried out onto the table between the chairs and she sat down and he sat down across from her and for a minute they both just looked at the yard like it was a view of something.

"So," she said. "I'm going to ask the question I skipped at breakfast."

"The what are you exactly one."

"That's the one."

He nodded, and the ridges on his forearms stood up a little, and he did not press them down, and she took that as a sign of something, though she could not have said what.

He told it plainly, which she appreciated, because she had spent the morning braced for either a shrug or a speech and he gave her neither. His people were from a planet she could not pronounce and did not try to. They had ships, old ones, and a habit of sending small crews out to look at other worlds the way surveyors look at land, and his crew had been a bad one, or a good one depending on