We stand in the cold floodlight, and I breathe, and it seems like he doesn’t. Or if he does, I can’t see it. And I should say “stay away from me.” I should say “I’ve been here before, and I know how this goes.” I should call security, but what would that do? I think it would take at least ten guards to handle Saint.
Instead, I ask, “What did he want?”
Saint looks at me, and for the first time since he sat behind me in a classroom and said one word against my back, I see something in his face that isn’t calculation or patience or of someone managing their own interior motives.
I see something that looks like someone trying to decide how much truth a person can take at once.
“Tell me,” I press.
“Stay away from guys like Victor.”
“Do you fall into the same category as Victor?”
He drags his gaze over my face. “Does it look like I fall in the same category?”
Tiny chills run across my arms as I take in his size and handsomeness. The intense gaze I find fascinating when it’s aimed at me. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll find out soon.” And he walks away.
Amy
There is a type of morning that belongs only to people who did not sleep.
Not insomnia. Insomnia is restless. This is different.
This is the morning after a night spent entirely conscious, watching the ceiling shift through its gradations of dark, thinking thoughts you have promised yourself you are done thinking.
By the time the first gray light comes through the gap in the curtain, you are not tired so much as emptied. Scoured clean of everything that isn’t necessary.
I have had a lot of these mornings.
I shower before five, the way I always do, when the bathrooms are empty, and I don’t have to manage the performance of being fine in front of anyone. The hot water runs long.
I stand in it and let it do what it does—not comfort, exactly. More like reset. Like washing the residue of the night off so the day can start with a clean surface.
I don’t look at the mirror above the sink when I get out.
I haven’t looked at a mirror properly in years. Not the kind when you actually see.
I look at my face, wondering whether I look presentable enough to move through the day without anyone asking questions. But I don’t look at the rest.
The rest is what my father left.
Not all of it is his. Some of it is mine—the small pale lines on the inside of my left forearm at fourteen, when his were the only marks on my body, and I needed something that belonged to me.
Something I had chosen. The logic of it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and I know I’ve sat with a therapist, named it, and put it in its proper clinical container.
But at fourteen, you don’t have the vocabulary. You just have the unbearable pressure of a body that doesn’t feel like yours and the desperate need to interrupt it.
I stopped at fifteen.
Roman found out at sixteen and used it, as he used everything, as information. As leverage. Something he knew about me that I couldn’t take back.
I pull my sleeves down, and I get dressed.
I learned to read rooms through smell before I understood what I was doing.
In my father’s house, you learned which version of him was home before you saw him. The combination of whiskey and Old Spice meant the bad kind of night. Whiskey alone meant he might fall asleep before he got to me.