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“What are you doing?” I asked when I realized he was swaying . . . dancing . . . with no music.
“You are helping me with my English, and I am sweep you off your feet.”
I put my head to his chest and laughed loudly, knowing my sister was sleeping mere feet away.
“You want to know what amuses me? You, you amuse me,” I said with a huge grin, looking up at him. “You.” I kept my smile as he danced me awkwardly around the bathroom until I let go and went with it.
The man was insane and beautiful and dancing with me in my bathroom at four o’clock in the morning, oblivious to his nudity and what looked like a painful gash at his throat.
Feeling privileged with that information, a strange new emotion burst through my veins, threatening to spill out of my pores. I was fucking . . . giddy.
“In some moments, you look at me with the wide eyes of a child,” Daniello said as he slowly spun us around the space.
“I’ve never danced before,” I said with a nervous glance his way.
“This does not surprise me,” he replied with a knowing smirk.
“I’m not that bad,” I defended as his smirk deepened.
“There is nothing wrong with keeping a part of yourself like a child.”
“I have never really been a child,” I whispered to him. “I don’t know how to be one.”
He stopped our movement, his eyes serious. “Have you ever been suspended on the surface of water? Your arms behind your head, your feet up, nothing to hold you but the water?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of my days in the pond.
“How did it make you feel?”
“I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully. “Light?”
“Free to fall, free to fail . . . simply free. You did not worry about who would catch you or what you had to do to stay on the surface. That is what being a child is like.”
I’d never had that confidence with my parents. I was always worried about the state of chaos in my house, when we would get our next meal. There was nothing about those days in Dyer when I could remember being cradled so safely. I nodded in understanding as he took my hand and led me back to the bedroom. When the door closed and we resumed relaxing in the bed, I braved one more question.
“Did the alligator get away?”
Daniello hesitated only briefly before answering. “They never get away.”
Later that morning, I stood at my sister’s bedroom door. Daniello was long gone, and I was sure he’d meant me to hear his parting words as he stood at the door while I lingered between sated and sleep.
“I will return.”
It was a new addition to our arrangement. He’d made a sort of promise to me that he would let me know when he wouldn’t be returning. I dreaded that day but pushed it to the back of my mind. As I watched my sister sleep, a bottle of prescription pills next to her from a doctor I insisted she see, I wondered if I hadn’t aided in her detachment from the new world she was in.
I gave her door a sharp knock. “Amber?”
She stirred slightly and then slowly opened her eyes to catch me fully dressed at her door.
“Shower and dress. We meet with a lawyer today.” I searched for the appropriate words to try to make my statement more casual and couldn’t come up with anything. I didn’t know how to handle the niceties of normal. I knew how to suck a cock and conduct a business meeting that co
uld earn me millions. I didn’t know how to be personable, my forte being more . . . formidable.
“Half an hour?” I asked as she sat up in bed in a daze.
Still in her pill-induced haze, she nodded before I closed her door.
Amber came into the kitchen half an hour later, freshly showered and in one of the several outfits I’d given her. Though she was still ghastly thin from her addiction, she wore a simple black dress well. I offered her coffee, and she accepted as she sat on a stool on the opposite side of the counter. Our resemblance, despite her weight, was remarkable. I briefly wondered if she thought the same.
