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“It’s really that bad to leave your house?”
The worst part of this humiliation is that it’s directly alongside an intense need to fuck her. Daphne is not likely to want that if we continue with this topic of conversation. It’s too late, isn’t it? It’s been too late for hours and hours. No salvaging it now.
I’m not accustomed to feeling fear like this. Panic is different. It’s irrational and overwhelming. This fear constricts my throat, but it’s entirely grounded in reality.
She won’t look at me the same way. I’ll have revealed too much.
“If I don’t have a way home, then yes. That’s what happens.”
“Since you were younger?”
“Much younger.”
Daphne breathes. In and out. In and out. “Sin said you have a whole thing around it. He said you make yourself walk fifteen blocks everywhere you go.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“To maintain a tolerance for it.”
“Like drinking?”
It makes me laugh, a short, sharp burst. “I suppose you could say that. In general, I’m painfully sober when I do it.”
“So you just…” She’s so fucking perfect. That’s the thing I can’t describe to her. I can’t even summon the words. “You have your entire life inside your house?”
“You’re not the only one who can’t leave.”
She sucks in a little breath at the realization. It’s a stark one. The frame I’ve made for her is also the boundary of my own existence. I take little trips here and there. Galleries. Openings. Auctions.
I follow my obsessions.
But on the whole, my life is here. It wears the illusion of being expansive, but even eight thousand square feet can become too constraining.
Not usually for me.
For a hummingbird like Daphne, on the other hand…
My stomach sinks. This is when she’ll reach the logical conclusion and look at me with the worst possible emotion in her eyes.
Pity.
She’ll feel sorry for me. She’ll see how small, how limited, how enclosed I am.
How worthless.
No amount of money can buy a sense of security. Believe me when I say I’ve tried. It can’t be bought or collected or kept. It will always be just out of reach. I don’t know if she’ll see it so clearly. I can’t leave her here. Technically, yes. If I had to, I could walk out. In the end, it’s not me doing the caging. It’s my past. It’s my mind. It’s the panic.
Either way, she is not alone in her captivity. Either way, I won’t leave her here. She nearly died trying to escape into the world. Being at the mercy of her own mind could be just as dangerous. I know that as well as anyone.
My thoughts retreat. They want no part of this twisted emotion. A choking disappointment. My father was right. This place is just a reflection of a wasted son. It’s a difficult thing, to be worse than my father, but I’ve managed it. The world files neatly onto canvases and colors die into black and white. Snowflakes tumble outside the window. Pure diamonds against the shadowed sea. The water teases the horizon, the two of them blending together until they’re indistinguishable.
Daphne is saying something.
I find her upright, looking into my eyes, past my defenses.
“Where did you go?” she asks. It must be the second or third time she’s said it.
