Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
She slid off and handed me the helmet, chin ducked under the edge of the hoodie. The braid lay over it like a rope. She looked at the door, then at me. The surprise was back, faint, like the echo of a bell. I didn’t make her say it. I didn’t make her ask.
“I don’t let women I fuck sleep over,” I stated the plain warning, no apology.
Her mouth parted. A thousand things moved behind her eyes—pride, hurt, relief again, a stubbornness I liked too much. She nodded once. “Okay.”
I didn’t fill it. I didn’t patch it with pretty. I didn’t do pretty unless it’s earned. I swung my leg off, set both helmets on the seat, and stepped in close enough to put my hand at the end of her braid. I didn’t tug. I didn’t pull her in. I just held the last inch of it between my fingers so she’d feel what I meant.
“Text me when you’re off again,” I said. “If you want more of tonight.”
She swallowed. “More talking? More pasta?”
“Yes,” I said, because that was the truth available. “And kissing that doesn’t always have to be more but can be when you want that too.”
That startled a smile out of her, small but unhidden. “Okay.”
She turned for the door, then looked back like the thought pulled her spine. “Your daughter,” she said. “Does she know you cook?”
“She knows everything she needs to which does mean she knows I cook,” I explained vaguely. “Goodnight, Melody.”
“Goodnight, Enzo.”
The metal push bar took her in. The rectangle of light from the back hall cut across the concrete for a second and then was gone. I stood there long enough for a mosquito to find the inside of my elbow and then long enough again to slap it and smear it off on my jeans. Then I got on the bike and started it up, the rumble loud in the quiet, and I let the night take me back the way I came.
On the road, I thought about the way her body softened under my hands once she believed me. I thought about the rules I keep and the way they keep me.
I didn’t apologize to the dark or to the pines or to myself for the line I drew. I didn’t feel sorry when the house took me back in its normal comfort as the keys hit the bowl with a sound that tells you that you made it home.
I didn’t feel clean, either. I felt like a man who’d handled a fragile thing with hands that were used to rough work and managed not to break it, this time. But I would, wouldn’t I? In time.
Inside, I set her glass in the sink and rinsed it so the wine wouldn’t sour in the cup. Sure, she wasn’t exactly twenty-one, although I thought she was a little older until I looked up her employee file. She had a maturity to her, life experience aged her. She wanted wine, I wouldn’t hold her back. I put the leftover pasta in the fridge even though I’d probably eat it cold at midnight. I stood at the window and watched nothing. The trees made the slow, old sound trees make when they remember wind.
If she texted, I’d answer. If she didn’t, I’d let it be.
I pulled my cut off the chair back and hung it where it belonged. Then I sat on the couch where we’d been and laid my head back and closed my eyes. Her weight wasn’t there anymore, but the impression of it was. I didn’t hold onto much. This, though, I’ll keep that for a minute.
Sleep came the way it always does when you don’t force it—after you stop looking at the clock and after you stop naming the thoughts. I drifted into a calm slumber that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while, maybe not ever.
13
MELODY
I didn’t sleep much after he left me. It wasn’t the kind of awake that comes from caffeine or noise. It was the quiet awake, the kind where your body obeys the dark but your mind keeps the lights on.
Every time I rolled over, the sheet rasped against my skin and I remembered the couch at his place, the slow orbit of his hands on my back, the way his mouth had turned careful when my breath hitched. Gentle but firm.
He was both, and that confused me.
Back home, “firm” meant a door that shut from the outside and a key you didn’t possess to escape. It meant rules shaped by someone else’s palm. It meant being told the right kind of love didn’t need your consent, it was destined and expected to be accepted without question.
With Thrasher, firm was blunt talk and a hand that steadied, not a hand that pinned. He drew lines like a man who trusted himself to hold them. He’d told me exactly what he didn’t do—“I don’t let women I fuck sleep over”—like a warning sign posted at the edge of a cliff. No apology, just the statement.