"Look, I don't have anything for you to wear," Gabriel said as soon as he had locked the door and sent his suitcase bouncing onto the worn springs of the motel bed. He had gone back to the same establishment and checked in for another night, requesting a double. There were so many vacancies, and the proprietor seemed so uninterested in even Gabriel's face that the watchmaker felt secure no one would notice the half-dressed girl going in before him. "I mean, nothing clean. I was only supposed to be here a day and a half."

"This'll do." Jackie ran her arms over the vest. Here, under the yellow light, she could make out the subtle zig-zag pattern in the material, thin black lines over brown.

He observed her, mouth slightly parted.

"No, that's not going to work," he decided.

Maybe she didn't notice. The vest was long enough to hide her ass and the topmost parts of her thighs, so she probably felt concealed. When she moved her upper body, however, it became highly apparent that the arm holes were the chinks in the armor. When she turned toward the square, unframed mirror on the wall and lifted her arms to rake her fingers through her tangled hair, she unwittingly exposed a side view of one breast. Gabriel felt a quick heavy rush in his groin and turned to his suitcase, throwing the latch.

"Here." He reached her yesterday's shirt, a cream-white long sleeve with a missing button. He had never felt the need to throw it out, because the cotton had that soft, worn-in feeling which came with much bleaching, nor had he ever gotten around to replacing the button, as the vest covered it.

"Can I use the shower?" she asked, accepting the shirt. He felt his knuckles brush hers, bare skin shielded by the soft threading, and it occurred to him that he had not touched her, not even a faint brush of elbow when the sweater vest changed hands in the car.

Absently, she lifted the garment and pressed it briefly to her nose. Gabriel felt another twinge of involuntary arousal and was, this time, totally nonplussed by his response. He only hoped the shirt didn't stink. The cold spring rain hadn't come till today. Yesterday, the full Texan sun had been blazing overhead. Maybe it would smell like his deodorant, spicy and invigorating.

"The shower?" she asked again.

"Sure."

She disappeared through the cheap press-wood door. When the lock turned, Gabriel pulled out his phone and dialed. Virginia picked up after one-and-a-half rings.

He talked to his mother for longer than he normally would have. He could hear the girl in there, in the shower, washing off the real evidence and the imaginary filth that would take more than the tiny motel soaps and weak stream from the showerhead. Again and again, the image of Jackie standing naked in the rain returned to him, her flat belly shining, nipples pearled and dripping, and shame followed.

He kept forcibly reminding himself that she had just been assaulted. Assaulted, because the word rape brought ugly, violent noises and visions and scents to him, sweat and blood and other fluids, and the bottoms of her chilled feet with a pair of big, cleated boots between them, digging into the mud and pushing it into wet hills. He would follow her ankles and calves. When he arrived at her knees, a chill would run up his spine, and he would reiterate, assaulted, assaulted, to regain the safe distance of sanitized language.

Then he would wonder-against his will-whether she was behaving normally. That is, as a victim of assault ought to behave. Which was unfair, and he loathed himself for questioning her story when he had no basis of judgment. There was no normal. The act in and of itself was abnormal, evil. She was almost certainly traumatized. Maybe she was in shock.

Maybe she's lying.

So he talked to Virginia for a good ten minutes, explaining that a storm system had moved in and delayed his flight. He let her warm, loving, excessively protective tones wrap him up in familiarity, something like being wound in a coarse woolen blanket. He fended off her concerns as they swarmed him, batting one aside after another, smiling because it was normal. This was his life, quiet, banal.

He had just managed to banish the image of the cleated boots when the shower cut off. The girl's footsteps reached his ears, followed by the noisy hum of a hair dryer.

"I have to go now," Gabriel told Virginia. "I'm tired. Anyway, I want to have another look at the timepiece before morning. I'm not sure I packaged it right."

A total lie. He had shielded and boxed the little clock with the loving concern of a father swaddling his newborn son.

"Are you well?" asked Virginia. "Did you catch a spring cold? Do you have allergies? They have different allergens down there, I'm sure. For all their talk about clean country air-"

"Mom, I'm fine. What are you talking about?"

"You're whispering."

Oh. He realized she was right. He was keeping his voice low, afraid Jackie might poke her head out of the bathroom and speak if she heard him, thereby revealing her presence.

"Uh-Am I? I think it must be the signal-"

The bathroom door opened, and Jackie emerged, eyes cast down to where she was pinching the shirt shut over her navel.

"Hey, this shirt has a button off," she said. Her voice sounded shockingly loud and abrupt to Gabriel, who threw up a hand and gestured for silence. Jackie continued for a couple seconds before taking note. "Do you have a safety pin or something I could-?"

She saw him then and stopped with a look of wide-eyed apology, clamping her hand over her lips.

"No-no, of course not," Gabriel spoke with brusque reassurance into the phone. He bustled past her and flicked on the old television set which sat on a small table next to the mini-fridge. "It's the TV. I'm bringing you a snow-globe, something new for your collection. You don't need to know what everything costs. Yes. No. Of course I will. You know I will. I always do. Yes, I do. You just forgot. Okay. Yes. I know, I love you, too. Goodnight. Bye."

He hung up and turned off the television.

"Was that your wife?" the girl asked. Her voice sounded small and serious, as though it had finally occurred to her that she might be intruding on more than his charity.

"No."

"Are you married?"

"Why?" Annoyed, he looked at her and waited.

"It's just . . . you looked kind of panicked," she answered with a soft laugh. "Girlfriend?"

"It was my mom," he admitted. "She likes me to check in."

"Oh, yeah. Moms are like that. So . . . are you married?"

"Again, why?"

"Well, why else would you care if your mom thought you were . . . you know . . . spending the night with somebody?"

He shook his head wordlessly for a moment, then removed his glasses to clean them. A long-standing nervous tic.

"I'm not married," he said. "I don't want her to get the wrong idea, that's all. I just . . ."

"Just don't want her all up in your business?" Jackie tried to help him. But that was too big a leap, even for a stranger. Virginia was nothing if not in his business. She would have run his life if he had been weak enough to let her. Even so, the fight he put up was barely adequate. She encroached constantly, and he allowed it, because he loved her.

"It's just not my lifestyle," he said quickly with an air of having something very personal squeezed out of him, and he returned his glasses to their perch.

The girl nodded.

"Yeah, I guess that doesn't really surprise me," she said.

Gabriel didn't want to know what she meant by it, so he went to his bed and reopened his suitcase.

"I do have a safety pin, actually," he told her, unhooking one from a pocket in the lining.

While Jackie fixed the gap over her navel, Gabriel checked himself in the ugly little mirror. Despite the futility-he was going to bed, after all-he fixed his hair, using his fingers to comb it into his habitual part. Jackie, having secured the pin, immediately reached up and rumpled it, undoing his work.

"Hey!" He dodged away from her touch as much as from the disorder, pulling up from the slight stoop he had assumed before the mirror.

"What? I was fixing your hair."

"I just did," he informed her, smoothing it again.

"Oh my god, you do that on purpose?" Jackie bit back a laugh.

Gabriel knew she was lying about her age. He would have bet long odds on it. He'd been a teen once, too-he'd been laughed at before. She was sixteen at most, or he was the President of the United States.

She proceeded to walk around him with an air of appraisal. He watched the stiff motion of the shirt against her hips and legs from his periphery, felt her eyes moving on him. A tingling, not entirely unpleasant sensation stole through his chest. "You know . . . with your eyebrows and your nose . . . I mean, not that it's big or anything, but-well, it ain't small . . . I think if you lost the part and combed it-"

She reached for his hair again. He caught her wrist and stared darkly down into her face. Her complexion was peachy-golden now that the color was back in her cheeks and her hair was dry. Blond waves fell soft and silky and thick over her shoulders. The shirt hung better on her than it ever had on him.

"Jackie? You can stay, but this-this is not a pajama party. Okay? We're not giving each other makeovers."

Not that he could blame her for the impulse. She was one of those, the effortlessly beautiful. Beside her, before her, he must seem like a black hole, sucking all the light out of the room with his dull, pallid ordinariness.

God, she was pretty.

Assaulted, too, he reminded himself. Traumatized. And sixteen, probably. And an irritant.

"Sorry," she mumbled, offended. Pulling her wrist away, she gave him back the safe, sanitized distance-now in physical form, which was even more necessary to his peace of mind.

He wondered what her hair would feel like against his lips.

She was angry with him now. Good. He hardened his gaze, made it just a shade less friendly than the stoic professionalism with which he greeted his customers.

"Go to bed," he told her.