Powell's, Sunday, His Phone

She already knew how the first paragraph ended. That was the point.

The Powell's satellite on Burnside ran quieter on February Sundays — a low murmur of browsers, the occasional soft collision of a spine against a shelf, rain doing its patient work against the front windows. She was standing in Pacific Northwest Fiction with the book open at page one, the same page she had opened it to four times in the last six minutes, and she was reading the same sentence she had read before: the one about the river in January, the way the narrator describes cold as a thing with intention. She had always liked that sentence. Right now she was using it as a fixed point.

The hum climbed a level.

She felt it first in her stomach — a small contraction, low and involuntary, the kind her body produced before she had given it permission. The denim at her inner thighs held steady, indifferent, seamed and unyielding, and the pressure of standing with her knees close together meant she felt the shift in frequency before it fully registered as sensation. Her right hand kept the book open. Her left hand held the spine from underneath, fingers curled, thumb resting against the cover's edge. She did not move either hand.

Somewhere in the store, her partner was looking at something else entirely. She had watched him drift toward the travel section twenty minutes ago, phone in his jacket pocket, expression pleasant and unhurried. She had thought: he looks like someone who is not doing anything.

The sentence about the river. January cold with intention. She read it again.

The breath she took in went to a normal depth. The breath that came back out was shorter than she'd planned — not audible, not even close, but it left her mouth before she was finished with it, like a door she'd meant to hold and hadn't. She pressed her lips together after. A woman in a yellow raincoat moved past the end of the aisle without looking at her.

The hum held.

She was aware of the back of her neck — a faint warmth there, rising from the collar of her sweater, the ribbed wool that had been sitting against her skin long enough to carry her own heat back to her. She was aware of her thighs. Not moving. Knees still close. The denim registering everything it had been asked to register and offering nothing back.

She turned the page.

It was a blank page — the verso before chapter one, nothing on it. She looked at it anyway. Her partner had not adjusted the app in the last two minutes. The hum sat exactly where he had left it, patient and specific, and she stood in Pacific Northwest Fiction with her knees together and the book open to nothing, reading the first paragraph of a novel she had read before.