I head to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall.“What now?”
“The bra. Let me see it.”
I take a picture from inside my blouse. Send it.
“Nice lace. Panties to match?”
I take another picture from beneath my skirt. Send it too.
“Very nice set. You’ll model them for me tonight. Right before I take them off with my teeth.”
I shudder at the thought.“How will you fuck me tonight, sir?”
“Might not. Might just tease you until morning.”
That sounds like the best hell ever.“Please fuck me tonight, sir.”
A pause.
A picture of his hand, gripping his hard cock.“I’m saving this for you tonight. You earned it. Now get back to work.”
I’d been anticipating a real conversation. A renegotiation. Some formal acknowledgment that the terms had elapsed and we were now operating on different ground. None of that happened.
The day passed like any other day. Opal had an excellent drawing session. Dario came home before four. We made dinner and ate at the kitchen table, and he asked Opal about a word she used that she’d clearly picked up from him, and she explained its etymology with great authority, and I laughed.
That was the day the arrangement ended. That was the day everything just continued.
I still have my room. My things are in it. Opal sleeps in her east-facing room with the good light. My room is next to hers, and my clothes are in the closet, my books are on the nightstand, and my hand cream is on the bathroom shelf.
There’s a second bottle on my nightstand next to Dario’s bed. The one I’ve come to think of as our bed.
I spend most nights there. I go there late after Opal is asleep, not because he asks me to and not because of anything arranged or obligated. Those structures expired, and they weren’t exactly enforced in the first place. I go because I want to. Because sleeping next to him is the greatest physical comfort I’ve known as an adult, maybe ever.
The specific steadiness of another body beside mine that isn’t asking anything of me. That is simply there and reliably present, breathing at its own pace, warm in the dark. It makes the night feel less like something I’m managing alone and more like something I’m actually resting inside.
Some nights we don’t have sex. Some nights I come in and he’s reading, and I put my book on the nightstand and turn off the lamp, and we sleep, and there’s four inches of space between us that disappears somewhere around two in the morning. I wake up with my forehead against his shoulder and his hand resting on my arm. He doesn’t pull me there. I don’t move there consciously. We just end up that way.
I’ve tried to examine this from the outside—to look at the arithmetic of it, what it means that I have my own room andchoose not to use it. That I make this choice every night, and that the choice has never once felt difficult.
I can’t quite get outside it far enough to do the math. I’m too much inside it.
I know what this is. I think I’ve known for a while. The question is what I do with knowing it, and that’s a question I’m letting sit—not avoiding, just sitting—because I’ve learned that some things are better felt fully before they’re decided, and right now I am very much still in the feeling part.
TWENTY
DARIO
I noticeit first in the way Marco’s infirmary assistant moves when I come in to resupply. There’s a fractional hesitation in Fratelli when he looks up from what he’s doing, a brief recalibration, the expression of someone who has received new information about a person they’re now looking at. He covers it fast. He’s been doing this a long time. But I’ve been doing it longer.
“How can I help you today, Spinelli?”
“A bottle of hydrocodone—a full one this time.”
“I always give you a full one,” he grumbles as he turns to the painkiller stash. When he faces me, there’s still that look. The one that says he knows something is wrong. “Here you go. Count ’em, if you want.”
“We’re good. Gotta meet up with Marco, anyway.”
The slightest width in those beady eyes tells me everything. “Good luck.”
