“Looking like you’ve just discovered a problem.”
I smiled, though I did not feel amused. “Maybe I have.”
She lay down on the mattress on the floor, one arm folded beneath her head, the other resting across her stomach. It was an economical posture, as if she had made herself small out of discipline rather than modesty. I found that irritating too.
The room had only one fan, which clicked every few turns and did little to help. The rain had nearly stopped by then. The city beyond the window seemed to be holding its breath. I could hear a distant television in another flat, a woman laughing somewhere below, the metallic cough of a pipe settling after the storm.
“I should warn you,” I said.
She did not open her eyes. “About what?”
“I don’t share well.”
At that, she looked at me. “Then it’s inconvenient that you’ve already done it.”
“Have I?”
“You’ve let me into the room. That’s sharing.”
“That’s a technicality.”
“It’s still a room.”
I should have told her then that I had not invited her out of generosity. I should have admitted that I had brought her here because the thought of her standing in the corridor with her bag and that composed face had irritated me in a way that felt almost personal. Instead I reached for my cigarettes, remembered I had left them in the jacket on the chair, and stood.
“Tea?” I asked, because I needed an excuse to leave the room before it became too small to think in.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” she said, and her tone made it impossible to tell whether she was mocking me or behaving politely.
“It always is,” I said.
I went to the tiny common kitchen at the end of the corridor, where the landlady kept the gas stove and a stack of mismatched cups. The corridor smelled of wet concrete and old frying oil. Water dripped somewhere in the plumbing with the patient persistence of a bad idea. I stood there a moment, waiting for the kettle to catch, and found myself annoyed by the fact that I was no longer alone in my own room, annoyed by the fact that the annoyance itself felt childish.
When I returned, the door was ajar. Sanjana was sitting up now, one knee drawn toward her chest, reading the back of her paperback in the lamplight as if she had never been anywhere else.
“You didn’t lock it,” I said.
“You were gone for thirty seconds.”
“That’s enough time.”
“For what?”
“For someone to make a mistake.”
She set the book down. “Do you think everyone is waiting for an opening?”
“No,” I said. “Only the interesting ones.”
That earned me the smallest smile, and it disappeared almost as soon as it came. I hated how much I wanted to see it again.
I handed her the tea. Our fingers did not touch, but