At one in the morning the only light in the room came from a small plastic clip bent onto the top corner of a paperback, throwing a narrow cone over her folded knees and nothing else. He slept on his side facing away from it, or she had thought he did.
"Read it to me," he said into the dark, not turning over. His voice had the flat calm of someone only half returned from sleep, which was its own kind of honesty — he would not have asked awake.
She found her place again by touch more than sight and read on low, the way you read when the house is sleeping and your voice has agreed to behave itself. He did not move. She could feel him listening with his whole back.
The chapter had been circling for forty pages — a kitchen, a stalled argument, two people who kept almost touching and then finding a reason not to — and now, on this page, it finally stopped circling.
Her voice caught exactly where the sentence did, at the word finally, and she sat there with the book open and her mouth closed, aware of him fully awake behind her now, aware that he had noticed exactly where she had stopped.
He reached past her shoulder and clicked the light off at the hinge, the little cone of white gone in one motion, and said, close enough that it moved her hair, "Keep going."
She told him she could not see the page anymore. "I know," he said, which was not an answer, and also was.
So she kept going anyway, inventing the rest of the paragraph against his ear in a voice gone even lower, the sentences no longer the author's, her free hand finding where his hand already was.
He did not correct her. He did not ask what came next in the actual book. He only matched whatever she said half a line behind her, like a man learning a room by touch, and the dark took care of the rest.
Somewhere in the chapter she never got back to, the paperback slid off the edge of the mattress and landed open on the floor, face down, and neither of them reached for it, and by morning neither of them could say which page they had lost.