AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Too soon, the elevator stops moving. Aiden shifts out from behind me and moves to the opposite side from where we got in. Like before, he opens both doors and then lifts a safety bar too. “Mind your step here,” he tells me when I approach. And I know it’s because there’s nothing but a sheer drop down below.
I make an inelegant—and probably completely unnecessary—jump off the elevator and straight into Aiden. He releases a littleoomphas my elbow connects with his stomach. “Sorry. Again.” I don’t know why I’m still whispering, but the night is so quiet around us that it seems odd to talk at a normal volume.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
“This way.” He walks at my side now, shining the flashlight directly in front of our feet as we make our way over a polished concrete floor.
Inside the shell of the building, it’s cool, almost damp. It smells like earth and dust, but the feeling the decay stirs in me isn’t forlorn. There’s a comfort in the mustiness; it’s like a peaceful settling that comes after a place hasn’t seen people for a long time. My imagination almost wants there to be roots cracking through the concrete and grass springing up through the cracks as if nature is taking over again.
We round a ginormous concrete pillar in the center of the room. “Holy crap!” I gasp when the City of Los Angeles at night opens up to me. Downtown LA sparkles, a million and one lighted windows silhouetting the tall buildings they’re a part of. From our vantage point, I can point out the Two California Plaza and the Aon Center.The streets down below are relatively quiet, only the occasional car plodding by.
“So?”
“It’s incredible,” I reply immediately, my voice filled with wonder. “God,” moving forward a little, I squint, trying to find the Bank of America Plaza, “everything looks so small from up here.”
“Perspective is everything.”
“It really is.”
He comes to me. This time, I lean back into him, reveling in the warmth his body heat provides this high in the cool, evening air.
“Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of something, your vision is limited by what you know. When you’re standing on the streets of LA, for example,” he takes my hand and interlaces our fingers, “you don’t see past the corridors created by the buildings that surround you. You have two, sometimes four possible directions you could take at any one time.”
Curious as to where he’s going, I don’t interject. I just listen.
“But when you take yourself out of the context, or rise above the city if you will, the entire world opens up before you.” He’s quiet for a moment. But when he says, “Twice, you’ve put me in a position of judgment over you,” I tense, inexplicably weary.
“Don’t panic.” Taking our interlaced hands, he raises both our arms to wrap around me. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you to understand.”
“Okay.” But I don’t know if I am ready to hear it. This wasn’t part of where I thought the evening would go.
“I know everything about you that you don’t want me to know. And it’s hard for you.” His arms tighten around me, and while I can’t accept it just yet I know he’s tryingto comfort me. “I know you’d rather I didn’t have all that information. But it does give me perspective, Catherine. I know, in the depths of my soul, what you’ve been through because, in some ways, I live it every day. I see them on the streets, the working girls and addicts who are now where you once were.”
There are tears in my eyes and when the first one falls there is nothing I can do to stop it. The shame is unstoppable.
“So, when I look at you, and I see you, it’s not just as an escort or an addict or any other labels you want to wear. It’s as a woman who has, by some miracle, managed to pull herself out of impossible circumstances and reinvent herself entirely.”
I don’t know what to say.
So, I don’t speak at all.
“I think your only problem, the one you’re still struggling with, is that you’re still on the street corner down below, choosing the two or four options available to you because your perspective is jaded.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s not for you. I understand that. I didn’t live it. I didn’t even go through it with you. I’m seeing the woman you are now, and I’m astounded and hurt when you call yourself a whore, or worse, askmeto call you one.”
“I d-”
“Say you don’t sleep with whores, Aiden,” he repeats my earlier words verbatim.
Ididsay that. And I’m only just realizing that, instead of demeaning myself and scaring him away as I’d intended, I hurt him. I imposed my perspective on him because it’s how so many others before him have seen me.
And I have become used to it.
I have come to expect it.
