The truth is, I’m glad he left so easily. With him gone, I don’t have to explain things to Opal.
I stand in the middle of the kitchen with the morning quiet, the coffee lukewarm, Opal asleep. My apartment is back to what it was before Dario came in. Except for the groceries and the script, the only evidence that he was here.
That, and the taste of his mouth on my lips.
FOUR
DARIO
I tellmyself it’s a follow-up on the patient.
I’m in the parking garage on Delancey at 8:49 PM. The evening involves two post-op checks, a brief and unpleasant conversation with a man named Caruso that requires me to make decisions I’d rather not make, and a forty-minute drive across the city in the rain.
I’m sitting in my car in a concrete structure that smells like exhaust and cold water, looking at my phone. Patient follow-up. Pediatric case. Adjusted antibiotic protocol, new prescription, responsible continuity of care. That’s the only reason I’m doing this.
I text:“Hi. How’s Opal doing this evening?”
Four minutes. Then:“Fever’s down to 100.8, she got half a bowl of chicken soup into her, the new prescription filled, first dose in.”
Me:“Excellent progress.”
And then, because Lena appears constitutionally unable to deliver clinical updates without surrounding context:“Opal has rendered a formal verdict on the cherry ice pops. Seven out of ten. The deduction is for being medicinal. According to her, anything that qualifies as medicine can’t score above a seven, regardless of flavor, because the medicinal context contaminates the experience.”
I read this twice. Then a third time. I knew I liked the kid. It’s an odd feeling to acknowledge, but it’s there whether I acknowledge it or not.
“Tell her the rating system is scientifically sound,”I send back. And there it is—a perfectly clean exit. Warm, professional-adjacent, the kind of exchange that closes naturally without requiring anything more.
I put the phone in my jacket pocket. I start the car.
I get as far as the parking garage exit before I park again.
This isn’t something I examine while it’s happening. Examining the impulse would mean slowing it down enough to apply judgment, and I’ve learned over a long time that applying judgment to impulses like this one is how you end up in a very clean apartment with nothing interesting in it.
I already have that apartment. I put the car back in drive and go home.
Stop thinking, Dar.That’s what Renzo would tell me. My little brother always knows when I’m overthinking, says I make a face he doesn’t like because if I’m overthinking, I will fuck something up.
Yeah, well, Renzo, you’re in prison, so who fucks things up now?
From my apartment, I text her again:“How are you doing, Lena?”
She takes a beat with that, like she isn’t expecting the distinction. Then she answers. We go back and forth, and the conversation has a quality I haven’t encountered in a while, in that it doesn’t feel like work.
Most conversation feels like work. When people say to pay attention, my brain takes that literally. It costs me to pay attention, to interact with normal people.
But not this time. This one has a rhythm that requires no effort to maintain, which is either a simple coincidence of compatible temperaments or something I should think about more carefully. I choose not to think about it more carefully.
She tells me about a call from today with a man who disputed a charge for forty-seven minutes and discovered, at the end, that he’s been paying his ex-wife’s mobile bill for eleven months without ever noticing it on his statement. She describes the exact moment his logic collapsed with the precision of a person who watches people for a living, whether they mean to or not. No cruelty in it. Just observation.
I find myself re-reading the message the way you re-read something that’s said better than you expected. I eat dinner standing at my kitchen counter. I keep the phone beside the cereal bowl.
She’s funny in the way that people are funny when humor has been load-bearing for long enough that it’s become structural. She tells me about the man in her building who has lived therefor twenty-two years and still treats the elevator like a new and unproven technology. She tells me about Opal’s theory on the clinic fish, which is that they are in a state of organized protest, and that Lena has reviewed the evidence and can’t rule it out.
Her unexpectedly clever mind has left me with the urge to experiment.“You have a good couch.”
Blushing emoji.“Glad you liked it.”
“I liked watching you come on my cock.”Now, I wait and see. Did I go too far? Cross a boundary?
