I sat on the edge of the bed. I shut my eyes and let myself, for thirty seconds, feel the thing I had been not-feeling since the corridor.
It wasn’t subtle.
A pull at the base of my throat. Heat behind my sternum. Static along my forearms, the kind that arrives before lightning. My body’s report on what it had stood half a foot away from, arriving late because my brain had been busy doing professionalism.
Skin warm. Breath shallow. I had an unhelpful awareness of my own mouth.
I had walked past men more attractive than that on better days. None of them had stuttered my pulse and dragged the heat up my sternum in the time it took to traverse a corridor.
The file had said dragons were scent-driven. I hadn’t appreciated how inconvenient that fact was about to become.
The books had a name for this part. The pull. Which was ridiculous. My imagination was running rampant. I needed to set aside the fiction. This was my job.
I opened my eyes. “He’s the enforcer,” I said out loud. “He’s going to be standing in every doorway you walk through for the next two weeks. Get used to it.”
It didn’t help.
I continued, “It’s a chemical event. Data. The body reacting to a new stressor.”
That helped a little.
* **
I gave it an hour.
Normal people landed in a new city, found their room, and called their mothers to assure them they were safe. So I called mine.
Mama answered on the second ring. “Mija.” Not a greeting. A diagnosis. “You sound tired.”
“I just landed, Mama. I’m fine.”
“Seattle,” she said, the way she said the name of every city that took me somewhere she could not picture and did not trust. “For translating?”
“For translating.”
The lie sat between us, technically true and morally slippery. My entire career had lived in that space long enough that I should have been better at standing in it.
Mama was quiet. She read silence the way I read rooms, only with longer practice, better instincts, and the unfair advantage of having known me before I had a professional face. She heard the thing under the words. She always did.
And then, the way she had learned to do with my work, she chose not to reach for it. “Did you eat?”
“I had coffee.”
“Coffee is not food, Catalina.”
A pot shifted on a stove three thousand miles away. I could picture it too clearly: her hand on the wooden spoon, the towel over one shoulder.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You will not.”
“No,” I said. “Probably not.”
She made the small sound she made when I had disappointed her in an expected and therefore survivable way.
“Cuídate, mija.” Take care of yourself.
“Sí, Mamá.” I ended the call and sat with the phone in my hand until the screen went dark.