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“Your room,” he guessed correctly. “Since your master bedroom is one-hundred percent masculine,” he added.
“Well, yeah. In a way. But the other guest room is much more neutral. I know pink seems to give men headaches,” I added, trying to be light. Everything felt so heavy. And not just this night. My entire adult life felt heavy, weighted, making me drag along with every bit of strength within me. Light felt welcome after that.
“Okay. If I need to crash, that is where it will be. Thank you.”
“If?” I asked, shaking my head. “You’ve been up all night like me.”
“I’m used to going a few days without sleep.”
“Military,” I heard myself mumble.
“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “I might crash. I might stay up and fill in my team. My boss who should be up and moving by now. Then later in the day, someone will relieve me so I can crash for a bit before coming back.”
“Okay.”
Why did I feel like I was sinking at the idea of him leaving?
Because he was my anchor right now? The person holding me where I needed to be?
Or because he was the one person in the whole world I could be honest with?
Surely, those were the only logical explanations.
“Did you want to grab some snacks to stash away?”
Snacks.
The concept was almost foreign to me.
See, when you signed your soul away to a man like Theodore Ericsson, you gave away everything. Your own personal likes, dislikes, habits, wants, desires. You even gave up your right to snack, to eat what you want. Because he expected your weight and measurements to stay the exact same, and was quick to comment if he thought there was more fat to pinch across my tummy or in my inner thigh, if I had a back roll from a too-tight new bra that simply needed wearing in and washing to fit properly. So I adjusted. I gave up the basic human pleasure of enjoying food, adopting a strict diet that kept me the exact size I needed to be to avoid ridicule, endless taunting, pig noises, getting told I was too disgusting to even look at, let alone fuck.
His words, not mine.
I hated that word to describe sex.
Fucking.
Because, from what I had observed, men got a fuck, women got fucked over.
“You look so lost,” Smith observed, his hazel eyes – more brown in this light than green – looking almost sad.
“I… I don’t know what snacks Maritza picked up,” I rushed to cover. Why? Because I was ashamed. Because it was embarrassing to admit to the lifestyle I had been a part of.
“Well, why don’t you figure that out while I go put on a show with the mop and rags,” he suggested. Like maybe he understood, saw under my lie, knew I needed to be alone to prevent myself from being any more humiliated than I already felt about the whole situation.
When he was gone, I let myself into the pantry, finding mostly ingredients for meal prepping, but there was a shelf of things that maybe the staff liked, or Teddy requested. A giant bag of dried cranberries, mixed nuts in a big plastic container, crackers. None of which I really considered snacks. I mean if you were going to snack, you went for chips or cookies or popcorn, right?
But if I was going to pretend to be too upset to eat, I needed some sustenance. I took little plastic baggies of each with a grumble before half-turning to step back out, and noticing something tucked in the very back of the top shelf.
Leftover Halloween candy.
The good stuff.
It was the one thing Teddy was generous about, but it was likely just to keep up with the neighbors. We gave away full bars. Maritza went to the bulk store and got giant boxes of each. And since our neighborhood was aging up, we didn’t have many trick-or-treaters this year. A ton was left.
Feeling like I hit the jackpot, I loaded a ton of it into a bag, and finally headed back out.
“Nice,” Smith said with a smile as he eyed the almost overflowing bag of junk food.
“There’s more if you want some,” I told him with a small smile.
“Can’t turn down a Milky Way,” he agreed with a smile of his own.
And it just felt so normal, so natural
For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t putting on a show, being someone someone else wanted me to be.
It was the most freeing sensation I had ever felt.
And as I made my way up to bed, I wondered if that was a feeling I could ever have with anybody else.
THREE
Smith
A floor below her, I wondered if she slept as the sun crept across the sky – reds and oranges. The kind of sunrise that made staying up all night worth it.
