Years of dealing with people who consider themselves my superiors have taught me to keep my face unreadable. I’m the perfect picture of a calm intellectual. You can insult me, you can fall apart in front of me, and I won’t move a centimeter.
As for intimacy, I’ve never had to work for it. By most conventional standards I’m considered attractive, and more often than not I’m the one receiving the offers.
I have two women who always pick up when I call, and it would be so easy to forget the chaos in my head for a couple of hours. But something tells me they’re too composed, too polished, and too hollow compared to what my mind actually wants right now.
I push the thought aside because the last thing I need is to invite scrutiny into my life, and that’s exactly what would happen if a scandal around my integrity got started.
Like any problem I haven’t yet cracked, Amalia Sanchez has a solution I haven’t found. And once I figure out what makes her so relentlessly interesting to my mind, the fascination will dissolve and some other, more compelling unknown will appear on the horizon.
My phone buzzes with a message from Andreas, and when I check the screen, I find an address.
He’s the tech genius between the two of us, and when I need to find someone, I can count on him to move fast.Not always,a voice in my head says, but I know as well as anyone that some things can’t be forced.
It takesme thirty-five minutes to reach Carlos’s apartment. He runs the floor at one of the venues where I occasionally play poker.
I play rarely, always for high stakes, specifically to quiet the part of my mind that sometimes reminds me that I could know every theory and every formula in existence and still not have been able to save my brother when it mattered.
Carlos opens the door almost instantly, probably without checking the peephole, and when his eyes settle on my face, he takes two steps back.
“Hey, Charly. Nice place,” I say, letting the door close behind me. “For someone who theoretically brings home just over five hundred dollars a month, being able to afford this neighborhood and marble floors is either extraordinary luck or magic.”
Magic in the sense that he’s been skimming from players’ winnings and counting on nobody noticing a few thousand dollars short.
Most people don’t notice, writing it off as standard casino fees. I’m not most people. I know my percentages. I know my numbers.
“SeñorSilas, what’s going on...”
“I hate being taken for a fool, Charly. So I’ll give you two options: you return every cent you held back last week, or your wife finds out about Diandra and every gift bought for her on the credit card.”
He knows I’m not joking. My tone doesn’t leave room for negotiation, but I can already read from his face that there’s no real choice here because he’s already spent the money.
“You burned through seven thousand five hundred and ninety dollars in under a week? Diandra must be very happy right now.”
“SeñorSilas, I’ll get it back,se lo juro.”
Except he has no way of getting it back, which is exactly why he does what he does at the casino.
“That’s a shame. A real shame.”
One tap on my phone and the photos are sent to his wife. I watch the color drain from his face in real time.
Then I hit him. Once, clean, the back of his head connecting with the wall hard enough to rattle the frame hanging beside it. Not out of anger. Just to make sure he remembers this conversation every time he sees me walk into that casino.
“Ay,Diosito Santo,” he whimpers, sliding down slightly before catching himself.
There was a time when watching a grown man break down over something I caused might have moved me. Now all I feel is a wide, hollow nothing.
“Next time you see me at that casino, Carlitos, you make sure my count is right, unless you want your boss to hear about what you’ve been pulling. And we both know that doesn’t end with a text to your wife. It ends with broken bones.”
He just nods, eyes wet, gaze not quite meeting mine.
Before I walk out, something near the door catches my eye. A small cluster of hair elastics on the side table, the kind with little flowers in different colors, some of them with tiny beads that catch the light. Sparkly, ridiculous things.
I’ve spent the better part of my life avoiding anything that loud, anything that cheerful. Color has always felt like it belongs to people who haven’t seen what I’ve seen. And yet I findmyself reaching over and pocketing them before I’ve made any conscious decision to do so.
And for the life of me, I hate that I don’t hate it.
The next day finds me in the staffroom, spread out across one of the corner tables with course materials and a coffee going cold beside me. I’m working through example data sets, the kind of quiet, methodical work I actually love, when Rodolfo storms in.
