Page 122 of Boardroom Mask

The last time the power went out in this building, a man in a mask was waiting for me in my apartment with a gun.

My hand finds the railing and I stop moving. My heart is rampaging in my chest. I stand there for maybe ten seconds, breathing through my nose, listening hard. But I hear nothing. No footsteps, no breathing. No sound at all except the distant hum of the city outside.

Then, scared, I climb the rest of the stairs by feel, one hand on the railing, the other holding my fist out in front of me with my keys sticking through the gaps between my fingers. I reach my floor, but oddly, not even the emergency lights are on.

I find my door by counting steps from the stairwell, slot the key into the deadbolt, and turn.

It swings open… and I stop breathing.

The first thing I see in my unit is candles.Everywhere. On the kitchen counter, on the windowsill, on the coffee table, on the bookshelves, on the floor along the baseboards. Tea lights, pillars, tapers stuck into coffee mugs and old wine bottles. There have to be five hundred of them, maybe more. The whole apartment is glowing warm and gold, and there’s a smell in the air that is not candle wax. It’s garlic and butter, something roasted and herby, and underneath all of that is…cinnamon.

I should’ve known.

My kitchen table is set for two. Wine is already poured into two glasses. There’s a bowl of salad, a dish of roasted chicken with vegetables, and bread on a cutting board.

Kir is standing at the counter with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There’s a dish towel slung over his shoulder. His hair is pushed back from his forehead and he looks focused and domestic.

I open my mouth to tell him that, if he’s trying to get into my pants tonight, this is very effective, but also a whole lot of effort. He knows I’m not that hard to convince when it comes to getting horizontal with him these days.

He raises a finger without looking at me, still sawing the bread into pieces. “Don’t ask questions tonight,” he interrupts. “Just sit down.”

I look at the table. I look at the candles. I look at this man who broke into my apartment to kill me five weeks ago and is now serving me roasted chicken with a side salad.

Then, smiling, I sit down.

“Where did you learn to cook?” I ask, stealing a piece of bread from his cutting board.

“YouTube,” Kir admits as he joins me. “About four hours ago.”

I almost choke on my wine. “You learned to make thistoday?”

“I had motivation.” He takes a sip from his own glass. “Also, I burned the first attempt. And the second. Your smoke detector battery is dead, by the way. You should fix that.”

“I’ll add it to the list. Right underchange the window locksandstop sleeping with men who break into my apartment.”

He gives me an amused look. Then we eat.

It’s strange, how normal this feels. The candlelight, the wine. Forks scraping quietly against plates. If I squint and ignore a few minor details, we could be any couple in any apartment on any Sunday night in New York. He refills my glass without me asking and passes the bread before I reach for it. He eats with his left hand, which I’ve never noticed before. I file it away with all theother small, useless, precious details I’ve been collecting about him.

“I hope you don’t mind that I’m maskless tonight,” Kir says, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “It would be difficult to eat with it on.”

I laugh. But the joke opens a door I wasn’t expecting, and the laughter fades quicker than it should. I push a piece of chicken around my plate with my fork.

“It matters to me,” I say. “The mask. I should probably explain why.”

Kir sets his fork down and waits patiently for me to go on in my own time.

I take a long drink of wine. Then I put the glass down and wrap both hands around the base of it because I need something to hold.

“When I was nineteen,” I start, “I was in my sophomore year at college. I went to a party. Drank too much. I went back to my dorm room with a guy because he seemed nice and I was drunk and stupid.” I swallow. “He wasn’t nice. He wasn’t nice at all.”

The candlelight flickers across Kir’s face. He’s looking at me steadfastly. But I don’t dare meet his eyes.

“I don’t remember all of it. Just bits and pieces. The ceiling had a crack in it. There was a sock by the door I’d been looking for all week. It’s funny that that’s what I remember, but it’s like my brain just left and went somewhere else. Somewhere safer than my own body.”

I realize I’m clutching the wine glass hard enough that the stem could snap. I force myself to loosen my grip, one finger at a time.

“I didn’t tell anyone. I went back to my dorm and took a shower and went to class the next morning and just… kept going. That’s what you do, I thought. If you reported it, that meant that you… that he… like,won.”