My body went still. Every muscle. My hands on the notebook—I felt my fingers tighten on the cardboard cover, the tendons in my forearms standing out, my knuckles going white. My jaw locked. My heart, which had been pounding fast since she started asking questions, went faster—a surge that I felt in my temples and my throat and lower, somewhere I had no business feeling it, not here, not now, not with her looking at me like that.
She didn't look away.
She didn't laugh it off.
Didn't break eye contact. Didn't rush past it with a deflection or a follow-up that would let us both pretend she'd been kidding. She just sat there, cross-legged on the bed with a chihuahua in her lap, and looked at me with those dark, steady, impossibly brave eyes, and the word hung between us like a live wire.
"That's not what this is," I said.
The sentence came out rough. Scraped. The voice of a man whose throat had gone dry.
"What is it, then?"
She asked it quietly. The testing was gone. The precision was gone. Underneath both, a real question. Genuine. The voice of a woman who needed to understand what was happening between them because the not-understanding was becoming unbearable.
"I'm keeping you safe."
"Safe from what?"
And the way she said it—the emphasis, the slight pause beforewhat, the direction of her eyes—made it absolutely clear what she was talking about.
The kiss.
She was talking about my mouth on hers. About what happened when two people who'd been keeping each other at arm's length stopped keeping and started reaching.
She was talking aboutme.
She pushed further. Of course she did. This women didn’t retreat.
Fuck. Imagine what she’d be like in bed.
No, Santo, don’t imagine that.
"Is there corner time?"
My grip on the notebook tightened until the cardboard bent.
"Would I have to kneel?"
The questions came with the cadence of someone presenting findings. Organized. Specific. Each term deployed with the deliberate accuracy of a person who had done research and understood the vocabulary and was watching my face for confirmation the way a student watches a teacher's face during an oral exam.
“What about a paci? Make me drink from a sippy-cup?”
She knew the words. She knew what they meant.
My pulse was a drum line. My hands were white-knuckled on the notebook. My breathing was controlled, but only because I was controlling it, and the effort was visible, and she could see it, and the fact that she could see what she was doing to me and kept going —
She wasn't mocking me.
She was asking to be held.
The notebook sat on my knee. My handwriting stared back at me. Six rules that suddenly looked like the skeleton of something much larger, the foundation of a building I hadn't known I was constructing until this moment, when the woman I was building it for sat in front of me and saidwould you spank meand meantcan I trust you with the parts of myself I've never shown anyone.
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
The room held its breath.