Page 33 of The Lion in the Library

“I want something from you,” I said. “But it isn’t that.”

She laughed, startled into it, and the self-consciousness broke open and became something lighter.

“Good,” she said, and reached for the buttons of my shirt.

Her fingers were steady, methodical, unhurried. I stood very still, because I had the sense that this was something she was choosing deliberately — not performing, not rushing — and I did not want to interrupt it. When she reached the last button and pushed the shirt back from my shoulders, her hands moved over my chest and my ribs and the tattoos there with the focused attention of someone learning something they wanted to know.

“Your turn,” she said.

I reached for the zip of her dress and found it, and drew it down slowly, and she let me. When the dress fell she stood in simple cotton, unselfconscious now, her chin level, and the look she gave me was direct and clear. No performance. Just her.

“Dios mío,” I said, which was not articulate but was entirely true.

She smiled. “Come here,” she said.

We had been together, in the end, with the stumbling, particular honesty of two people who had both learned to perform versions of themselves for too long and were now, deliberately, not performing.

She whispered to me in Spanish, the words coming faster and more freely than they did when she was careful, her accent exactly itself, no modifications. I understood most of it and the rest I understood from her voice. I spoke back in the language we shared imperfectly, which was also the language we shared most truly, and it seemed to me that something about the imperfection was exactly right — that we were both most ourselves in the gaps, in the places where we had to reach for what we meant.

Afterward I held her while her breathing slowed, my hand tracing aimless patterns on her arm, not thinking about anything in particular, which was itself unusual. I was, generally, a person who thought about things. Who ran scenarios, considered angles, prepared for contingencies. It was what made me useful on a football pitch and occasionally exhausting everywhere else.

I was not doing any of that now. I was just here, in this room, with this woman, and it was enough.

More than enough.

I thought, briefly, of the various versions of this moment I had experienced over the years — the ones that had been exciting and superficial and ultimately hollow, the ones I had walked away from feeling less rather than more. I had been very good at choosing people who required nothing of me, who were impressed by the surface and uninterested in what was underneath. It had been, I understood now, a form of cowardice. Safer to be admired at a distance than known up close.

There was nothing at a distance about this. Estrella knew me. Not the whole of me, not yet — there were still years of that ahead, I hoped — but she had seen enough to choose me anyway, and that was a different thing entirely from being chosen for the name or the career or the carefully maintained public image. She had chosen Leo who sat in a library getting nowhere on a book he couldn’t figure out how to write. Leo who made engine noises on the floor with a four-year-old’s cars. Leo who was thirty-three and uncertain about his future and had never quite figured out how to be in a room full of people without performing.

She had chosen that Leo. It was, I thought, the most significant thing that had ever happened to him.

“You’re trembling,” she said, after a while.

“So were you,” I pointed out.

“I’m not embarrassed about it.”

“Nor am I,” I said. “I was nervous. I wanted it to be right for you.”

She lifted her head to look at me. “Was that the thing you were worried about? Whether it would be right for me?”

“Among other things,” I admitted.

“Leo.” She put her hand flat on my chest, over my heart. “It was right. It was very right.” A pause. “It was the rightness that was slightly overwhelming, I think. The fact that it was — actually real, and not something I’d—“ She stopped.

“Not something you’d let yourself believe in,” I finished.

“Yes,” she said. “That.”

I pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Outside, the city was quieter still. The lamp on the nightstand cast a circle of warm light that didn’t reach the corners of the room, and within that circle we were the only things that existed.

I thought about the book. About the question I’d been trying to answer for the better part of a year: who was Leo Ramirez when he wasn’t The Lion? What was left when you removed the fame, the contracts, the careful management of a public persona built over sixteen years?

Lying here, I thought I was beginning to understand that it had been the wrong question. Not who I was without all of it. Who I was with the things that actually mattered — this woman, those children sleeping in the next room, this apartment with its worn furniture and its purple-tape welcome sign and its refrigerator covered in a family someone had drawn with markers.

The question wasn’t what remained when you stripped everything away.

The question was what you were building.