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I’d stripped down to my skivvies and crawled into Phil’s bed. Now I dove back out of it and dug through the pile of my clothes for my phone, but a short message from Cindi settled me down. Phil—or someone in the Big Power Tiny Action organization I’d just joined—had jiggered things overnight to keep me in Vegas and Liam in Phoenix through the rest of the weekend at least. A longer note from Liam apologized a lot and promised to make it up to me. I sat back down on Phil’s bed and pondered whether I could fit out his window. Head first or feet? Shoulders stuck in the opening or ass wedged in the wall?
    Not like he—they—couldn’t find me, even if I managed to squeeze through. Where would I go? And it wasn’t really Phil I wanted to flee, just everything I’d seen while I slept, and what it all meant.
    I stood up and stretched. Celeste had been right about the futon mattress—it was unforgivingly firm. I wanted a shower and clean clothes and decent food and time to think it all over. I settled for Phil’s vintage bathrobe of white-and-blue, striped cotton, soft enough to make me wonder if Celeste had a stash of favorite clothes hidden for me, and if they’d fit, and whether she would have been prettier in them.
    I tiptoed past Phil, sprawled on his sofa, looking more poleaxed than asleep, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other fallen off his chest. He was still wearing all his clothes. I could have walked right out the front door and slammed it and gotten away, but I guess I didn’t want to. I rubbed my lips, remembering his rough mouth.
    His narrow galley kitchen was separated from the living room by a Formica bar. The fridge, pantry and stove all stood on the opposite wall in a line with the sink. A very squashy work triangle, but useable enough until you opened the fridge.
    “What are you doing?” Phil sank onto one of the barstools.
    “Good morning!” I said. “Wow. That’s backwards too.”
    “What?”
    “The morning. We shouldn’t be seeing each other with morning hair and the sleep stupids before we’ve had sex. We should be all after-glowed and satisfied before we have to look at each other in this condition.”
    Phil scrubbed at his face. “Why is the refrigerator door in the hall?”
    “It was backwards. I noticed it yesterday. The handle and hinges were on the wrong sides.”
    “So you’re switching them? Before breakfast? God, before coffee?”
    I surveyed Phil’s kitchen, then his face. They were both a bit of a wreck, honestly. Both probably my fault. “I don’t drink coffee,” I reminded him.
    “But I do,” he said and stalked into his bedroom.
    Fifteen minutes later he had showered and dressed, and I had reassembled his kitchen and done my best with his coffeepot. Five minutes after that, he suggested we go out for coffee.
    “Ask a carpenter to dress you and you’ll wear wooden clothes,” I snapped, then tried to figure out what the hell I meant. Phil waited. I said, “You didn’t ask for any of this, did you?”
    He shook his head and looked tired. “It’s okay,” he said. “I did know you do that—order your physical environment when you feel frightened.”
    “I do that, or Celeste did?”
    His rogue eyebrow twitched upward, but his voice stayed calm. “She did too, actually, but I wasn’t thinking about her.”
    Nothing in his face moved. He sat impassively on the barstool, swiveling gently, looking out through the sliding glass doors into the yard.
    “Bullshit,” I said.
    He swiveled back to scan my face.
    “No, not Celeste,” I said. “It’s all me.”
    The eyebrow quirked a question mark my direction.
    “You’ve been thinking about Celeste since we met,” I said. “She’s been a shadow under everything you’ve said. So either you’re so repressed you don’t know you have feelings at all, or you’re lying to me.”
    “I have not lied to you.”
    I mirrored his total lack of movement.
    “But I haven’t told you everything,” he said.
    I