Free The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt Page A

herself back against the dressing table and watched him feed the tags back into the pocket and fasten the button. He took the shirt from the bed and shook it out and draped it over the chair. He still had water dripping from his hair, dripping onto his shoulders and down his stomach. It trickled down the side of his chest and seeped into the towel about his waist. She thought she ought to look away, but she didn’t.
    “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be nosy.”
    “I have given you many chances,” he said. “So many. That was your last. Do you understand?”
    She nodded.
    His chest lifted as he breathed. How was it that she hadn’t seen him, hadn’t even heard him enter the room? The bathroom door was wide open now. All the steam was gone.
    “Now,” he said. “I am wet. I want to get dressed.”
    She stepped away from the dressing table. She wouldn’t let him see that she was scared. “You can’t keep wearing the same clothes,” she said.
    “What is it to you?”
    “They smell.”
    He glanced at her but said nothing, so she walked slowly to the door, then stopped again. He lifted his shirt off the back of the chair. “I know how to make egg omelets,” she added, “if you’re hungry.”
    He nodded but that was all.
    She felt stronger now. She stood in the doorway, waiting.
    He turned his head to look at her. “I want to get dressed,” he said again, and then he flitted her away with the flick of his shirt and she quickly left the room.
      
    They ate in silence, the small lamp casting a vague light across the blackout cloth at the dining-room window. Their shadows played across the walls. They did not speak. She kept her head down but strained her eyes to watch him without looking up. He had opened one of her father’s bottles of wine, but he barely had more than a few sips. He sat in her father’s seat in his collarless shirt, his jacket hung over the back. Perhaps it wasn’t his shirt, but that of Jack Henry Bayliss or some other English hero. His dark, damp hair kept falling into his eyes, and occasionally he would push it away with his finger; and then she would see the blue of his eyes again. When he laid his hand flat on the table she wanted to reach across and touch it, just with the very tips of her fingers, to see if he was warm.
    When he was finished eating he folded his napkin. He watched her as she pushed the dried-egg omelet around her plate. She had been famished but now she couldn’t eat—not with him watching her—and anyway, the omelet had tasted powdery, the egg so tough she could have soled her sandals with it. If her mother hadn’t let the chickens go they could have had real omelets, real chicken. The man probably wouldn’t have thought twice about killing one with his bare hands.
    She gave up and put her fork down. He was tapping the table with the nails of two fingers, tapping out a rhythm, a marching drumbeat, the wineglass tilted in his other hand. Tup-tup-tuppity-tup. He looked right through her, as if a film or a dream was playing out against the wall behind her. Tup-tup-tuppity-tup. His lips were red with wine. His skin almost dark in the candlelight.
    His fingers fell still and he glanced at her.
    “Have you finished?”
    She nodded.
    He pushed his plate aside and stood up and, taking his jacket from the chair, he walked out of the room.
    “Thank you,” she whispered to herself.
    “Oh, that’s quite all right,” he said.
      
    In the sitting room she watched him put the blackout frame back up at the window, pressing it into place, a tiny torch gripped between his teeth. She held Mr. Tabernacle to her chest and watched him as the room grew darker and smaller, frame by frame. Soon he was not much more than a dark figure up against the wall, only his hands occasionally seen in the torchlight as he worked. She felt as if she were being packed away into a box.
    “Do you have blackouts in Germany?” she asked him, because she was