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That’s because I am a man donning a mask. A man hiding a monster inside.
“You know enough.”
“I could always know more.”
“I feel the same about you.”
“You know plenty about me.”
I angle my body so that I’m partially facing her. My thumb and forefinger clip her chin and force her gaze. “But I want to know more. I want to know every weird thought in your head. Every quirk, habit, and tendency of yours. Tell me all about yourself.”
Her brows raise and she repeats my own words to me. “You know enough.”
I taste her lips. She settles into my kiss without protest. My arms wrap around her, and I draw her closer until she’s up against my chest, almost in my lap. It’s where we reach a stalemate for the moment. The taste of warm, sweet lips on mine and my hand gripping the side of her neck. We kiss because neither of us wants to divulge another word.
The dark secrets we’re hiding. The darker truths we’re keeping from one another.
I know it with certainty. It’s easier this way.
20Lyra
Hearing Damage - Thom Yorke
“You.”
It’s how Fyodor Kreed greets me outside the Easton Opera House. I’ve been waiting on the top step for over thirty minutes. Several passersby have pointed up at me and conferred with each other with the zeal of gossip queens.
After the first few, I began flipping them off.
Childish? Maybe. But the longer Fyodor left me waiting, the more I went crazy. I picked at my uneven nail beds and tapped my feet—adorned in sleek, red-bottomed pumps Kaden bought me. I checked and double-checked my make up and the high bun I’ve styled my thick box braids in before starting the neurotic, nervous cycle all over again.
Glancing at the time. Fretting over whether I’ve been stood up. Burning with embarrassment as yet another person gapes at me as he passes by.
It’s drizzling out, and I’m five minutes away from giving up altogether when, finally, Fyodor shows up.
He arrives in a yellow taxicab. His umbrella pops out of the open rear door first. Then he emerges, a slight man with a permanent frown and heavy brow. The eyeglasses perched on his dissatisfied face resemble the thick plexiglass you find in sports arenas.
I sit and watch as he hobbles up the steps one at a time. His hip jerks and his foot kicks out.
It takes him forever to reach the top of the cascading steps leading up to the opera house.
But when he does—he gives me an unimpressed once over and then addresses me not by name.
“You,” he spits. “Follow.”
So, I listen. I scramble to get up from the spot on the step where I’ve camped out for almost an hour, and I become his shadow.
He unlocks the grand front doors and then hobbles inside. I lurk after him. He steps onto the elevator. I step onto the elevator.
We ride in tense, unfamiliar silence. He stares ahead at the closed brass doors. I do the same, mimicking him moment to moment.
With the ding, he exits and makes as sharp a left as humanly possible on his short, uneven legs.
“My office,” he says. He thrusts an aggressive finger at the open doorway.
I go inside first. Seconds later, I flinch at the loud slam of the door.
His office is a suffocating four walls painted depressive gray and filled with a variety of instruments. In the far corner, as if in afterthought, a puny desk is jammed against the wall. Stacks and stacks of what I’m guessing are musical notes cover the top of it.
