Текст книги "Madame X "

Автор книги: Jasinda Wilder

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ELEVEN

I wake suddenly and completely, sensing a presence. “Caleb.”

“X.”

It is black, totally. But I smell signature spicy cologne, hear a slight breath inhaled, exhaled. The shuffle of a foot on wood.

“What time is it, Caleb?”

“Three forty-six in the morning.”

I don’t sit up. I remain on my right side, facing away. I allow myself a touch of venom in my voice. “What do you want, Caleb?”

“I’ve had enough of your attitude. I said I was sorry. It’s over.” My bed dips. A hand on my hip, over the blanket.

“Am I not allowed my own anger, Caleb? You hurt me. You frightened me. And over what?”

“You don’t speak to me that way. You don’t question me.”

“Or you’ll strangle me? Like William did?”

“Or I will be angry. And that’s not a good place for me to be, not for anyone. Least of all for you. I didn’t mean to hurt you, X.”

“Yet you did, and I’m not okay with it,” I say.

I wish desperately to push the hand away, yet it slides up my waist, and fingers hook in the blanket. Draw it away. I’m cold now.

Huge, hard hand, pushing me to my back. I don’t resist. Not yet.

“Come on, X. Let it go.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried? I can’t. I can’t just let it go, Caleb.” I finally sit up, wishing I could draw the blankets up around my chest, but they’ve been tossed aside, and it’s dark, and I don’t dare risk making physical contact.

“Goddammit. All of this because of that stupid bitch Sara.” Anger, raw and rife.

“Sara didn’t put her hands on my throat, Caleb. You did.”

“And am I never to be forgiven for it?”

“I don’t know.” I remember the taste of come in my mouth, that day.

The way my sexual service was just . . . expected. And given, so easily, without question. I despise myself. I loathe myself for dropping to my knees and putting my mouth on that waiting erection, for doing what I was told without question. Why did I do that? What am I, to offer such ready subservience?

Maybe this is all a refraction, everything distorted by my memory of a so-very-different touch on my skin, the way lips touched mine.

“No.” I say this firmly.

“No?” Amused now. “No, you’re not going to forgive me?”

“No.”

Hands on my arms, groping, seeking, finding the back of my head. Pulling me. Heat and heaviness hovering over me. “I think you will, X.”

“Caleb . . .” I squirm, trapped, claustrophobic, feeling his oppressive presence crushing me down and down and down to the bed, until I’m horizontal and hands are feathering over my skin, scraping up the loose cotton of the T-shirt I wear as a nightgown, pushing it up around my throat, baring my breasts to the shadows. All is blackness, and heaviness, and my skin being touched. Palms, gentle but insistent. Fingers finding and tugging away my underwear.

“Caleb.” I find strength. “I don’t want this, Caleb.”

Lips, on my skin, at my belly. Hair tickling my hip. “Yes, you do.”

The problem is, my hormones remember what those hands can do. The damp slit between my thighs remembers what those fingers can do, what the erection I know is ready and waiting can do. I remember, and I feel the contradiction. The lies, tangled and mixed. I lie. I do want it. I know what happened was a moment of anger, isolated. And I know, too, that it may perhaps not be so isolated. Perhaps, if I ask the wrong question, say the wrong thing, wish for the impossible, maybe those hands that can offer such pleasure will offer pain once more. Pain as punishment. Another accidental moment of strangulation, even a fist, or an open palm. Who knows?

I remember also a stolen moment in a men’s restroom, and the sensation of utter safety.

Who am I, and what do I want?

Does it even matter what I want?

“See? I can smell you, X.” A nose, nuzzling my thighs apart, inhalation. “I smell it. You want this. You want me. You’ve always wanted me, and you always will. You know it, and I know it.”

I squirm, heels dig into the mattress, feel my hips lift off the bed at the wet swipe of a tongue. A thrill, lancing through me. Such pleasure, the tongue tip tickling and twirling at the precise spot where I’ll feel the most pleasure, zeroing in, flicking.

But stronger than the pleasure is the self-loathing. The hatred of myself for succumbing, for being weak, for giving in, for letting pleasure dictate my actions. For letting pleasure take away what little freedom I have.

I reach down, tangle my fingers in thick hair . . . and shove. “No, Caleb.” I twist, roll away.

Slide off the bed. Find the light switch, flick it on. Dark eyes, squinting against the sudden light. Mussed, imperfect black hair. A smear of my essence around the expressive mouth. T-shirt, suit slacks—tented.

Barefoot. Beautiful. Brutal.

How did I never see the brutality, before?

“X . . . what’s going on with you?”

I’m breaking. The status quo is crumbling. “I can’t help wanting you, Caleb. But I can help giving in to it.”

“Giving in to it? Like it’s forbidden, or something? Like there’s something wrong with you and I having sex?” A step around the bed, closer to me. Crowding me into a corner.

“What are we, Caleb? Who am I? What am I, to you? Where is all this going? Why am I . . .” I swallow, let out a breath. “Sometimes, Caleb . . . sometimes I feel like a prisoner here. I feel like your captive.”

A breath, harsh and long and shuddering. A hand passing down from forehead to chin. “X . . . come on, don’t be like this. This isn’t you. Why are you asking me these questions?” I’m up against a wall, and big hands land on either side of my face, framing me, hemming me in, trapping me. “You died, X. You have no one. You knew nothing of yourself. I taught you to walk again. Taught you to speak again. I taught you how to be a fucking person again. I gave you a home. Gave you a skill set. Gave you a job. Gave you a life.”

“And in return, all I have to do is have sex with you? Suck you off whenever you feel like it? Never ask questions? Never want more?”

“That’s not how it is, X.”

“It certainly feels like it, sometimes.”

“You’re wrong. We have something.” A breath on my cheekbone.

Dark eyes fraught with indecipherable emotion. I cannot read this face, cannot read those espresso-brown eyes. This, the proximity, the honesty, it’s new and disorienting. It’s as if a vein in the mountain has been opened, revealing a fissure, letting out long-pent pressure.

“What do we have, Caleb? Explain it to me.” Silence. “You saved me, yes. You’ve provided for me, yes. I remember all that. I have not forgotten. But this?” I put my hands out, touch hard pectoral muscles, move my hands between my body and the one opposite me. “I don’t know what we are. What this is. What you really want from me. I saw you with another woman. You’ve got a lot of women, you said as much. You visit women all over the city and you fuck them? And then you return here, to me, whenever you feel like you want something different, and you fuck me, too? But I’m not allowed to question that? I’m not allowed to even take a walk outside?”

“You have a panic attack just going outside. You wouldn’t know what to do out there, X. We tried, remember? You get overwhelmed. You stop breathing. I’m not keeping you prisoner, I’m keeping you safe.”

I do remember. The early days, there would be walks outside, in the city, on the sidewalks, afternoon crowds rushing past us. I’d make it a block, and then the noise and the heat and the countless faces and the babel of voices, the sirens, the cars . . . it all crashed down on me, slammed me to the ground, made my lungs seize and my eyes go dizzy, made the world spin and my head throb and I would have to be carried back inside until I could breathe again, safe in my room, in the darkness, with the mantra whispered in my ear:

You are Madame X. I am Caleb Indigo. I saved you from a bad man. You’re safe here. I’ll keep you safe. You are Madame X. I’m Caleb Indigo. You’re safe with me. I won’t ever let anyone hurt you again. It’s all just a bad dream now. You’re safe. You’re Madame X. I’m Caleb.

Suddenly it’s there, those words, that mantra, whispered in my ear, now, here and now, in my bedroom, in this moment. Reminding me, bringing me back to when the world was new, when I was being birthed into personhood. When I was relearning what language was, what it meant to speak and listen and walk and think and be alive.

“I am Madame X. You are Caleb.” I cannot help whispering it back. “You saved me. You taught me everything I am.”

“That’s right, X. You’re safe here.”

And, for the first time in six years, for the first time since the night of dreams and red-eyed monsters and blood, I feel a kiss pressed to my lips, soft and slow and hesitant, as if to kiss thus is as new both for the one kissing and for me.

I dare not even breathe until the lips pull away. Dare not. To breathe would be to inhale the poison of truth, mixed with confusion, laced with seduction.

I press palms to chest. Push.

“I have grown, Caleb. I have changed. I have learned new things. I am not at all sure of anything anymore. Least of all you and I.”

“Damn it, X.” This is hissed. “Don’t do this to me.”

A long, long silence. I do not move, for I cannot. The heavy, perfect body still hems me in, traps me against the wall of my bedroom, arms beside my ears, lips not quite touching mine.

“Don’t do this to me.” This is, very nearly, a plea.

I feel something sharp within me. I push again. Harder. Until the wall of chest and arms and thighs swivels away. I dart past heat and anger, slide into my bed, naked but for a thin cotton T-shirt whose hem just barely covers my backside. I turn away from the scrutinizing gaze. Breathe deeply, evenly.

“X?”

I do not answer.

A sigh. It sounds . . . sad. Forlorn. Lonely. Sharpness in me, something hard and callused. Something that remembers a moment in a men’s room, when I felt safe.

When a kiss made me feel . . .

Treasured.

I was changed in that stolen moment with a stranger.

And I cannot go back.

TWELVE

A full month passes.

I do my job, pretend to be aloof and untouchable, snap at and insult rich young boys and correct their grammar and their posture, push them to the edge of their tolerance. And then, just when they start to think ill of me, I allow them to guide the conversation, pretend to care when they speak, encourage them, let them test out their charm on me. Pretend to be charmed. Pretend to be almost seduced. Pretend to be flustered when they get too close. It’s all a game. It’s always been a game. But now, it seems even more a game. I am numb within, and the burden of playing pretend is heavy.

Alone, I wait. But my bedroom door is not darkened again. No deep-of-night visits.

What is this thick, curling, yet somehow weightless feeling within? Is it hope? Relief? Should I feel relieved that the visits seem to have ended? I owe my life. My self. My past and my future.

It is a heavy debt.

Something changed, and I cannot pinpoint the precise moment when, or how, or why. Or even what. Something to do with Jonathan, oddly. Seeing his transformation, perhaps the only true success I’ve ever had, watching him unfold and be reborn out of his cocoon, become a man worth knowing. It made a lie of what I do, for the alteration was all of his own doing. I provided the impetus of seeing the need for change, perhaps, but that at most only. I did no changing.

Now I wonder what service I provide. I once thought I did something worthwhile. But now I wonder. These young men who pass through my life, what do I do for them? And what payment do I receive for doing so?

How have I existed—somehow the term lived seems too strong, suddenly—for this long, having asked no questions?

I’ve been floating along, doing as I’m told, blinded willingly.

Now I see more clearly, but all I am able to make out is outlines of absence, the shape of all that is missing. I see how much I do not know.

And then, one day six weeks after the charity auction event, my door opens, and my heart ceases to beat.

I sit on my couch, sipping tea, waiting for my last client of the day. Oddly, I have received no dossier, no contract. Only a notice stating that the final time slot of the day—six forty-five in the evening—has been filled at the last minute. The client will provide all necessary materials at the time of service.

I sit, leg hooked demurely over knee, and wait. Smooth my dress over my thighs; it’s a white dress with a square neckline, the hem falling to an inch above my knees. Blue peep-toe wedge heels. Hair in a deceptively complicated knot at the nape of my neck, the sapphire pendant at my breastbone.

Ding.

Watch my door handle twist, watch the door swing inward. Shrug my shoulders, square them, let out a breath, force my posture to appear relaxed, my expression blank, indifferent. Tug the hem of my dress closer to my knees, so as to not bare too much flesh.

Saucer in my left hand, cup in my right. Plain white china, gold lining the edge of the saucer and the rim of the cup. Harney & Sons Earl Grey Imperial, a touch of milk.

These details are seared onto my brain.

Watch over the rim of my teacup as the door swings open, a male frame fills the opening. Steps through. Closes the door.

My heart freezes. Lungs halt midbreath. Teacup at my lips, paused. Eyes wide open, unblinking.

It is him.

Logan.

Dark blue denim, tight around thick thighs, a rip at the left knee, right thigh. Rectangular outline of a cell phone in the right hip pocket. Black T-shirt, V-neck, hugging ribs and his powerful chest, sleeves taut around golden biceps. Mirrored silver-frame aviator sunglasses hanging at the apex of the V. Wavy blond hair swept back, hanging around his jawline, a strand across his too-blue, almost purple eyes. Jawline so hard, so strong it could be hewn from seaside cliffs. High, sharp cheekbones. Lips curved in a knowing smile as he meets my gaze. Lips that kissed me, lips that stole my breath and with it my life.

“Found you.” I shiver at the intimacy of his warm rumbling voice.

It seems a voice I’ve always known, a voice heard in unremembered dreams, the dreams you forget upon waking, dreams you wish you could return to as you surface to wakefulness.

I gently set my teacup and saucer on the coffee table, so as not to betray my shaking hands. I cannot take my eyes off Logan. I also cannot speak, cannot offer so much as a polite hello.

He moves toward me, eyes on me the whole while, and sits on the coffee table, a sturdy thing of thick black wood and polished glass, an antique map of the world under the glass. So close. Knees brushing mine.

He leans forward, into my space. Smiles. “What’s the matter . . . Madame X? Cat got your tongue?”

I breathe in, and my eyelids flutter and I am shaken out of my paralysis. Cinnamon and cigarettes. His jaw moves, rolling, lifting, compressing; gum, the source of the cinnamon.

“Logan. I—what are you doing here?” I sound suspicious, worried, upset even. “How did you find me?”

“Once I had your name, it wasn’t that hard. Getting an appointment this soon was, though. You are in high demand, it seems.”

“Why are you here?” I have to remember to breathe, force each breath in, each breath out.

“I’m your six forty-five.” He moves nearer. “I’m here to learn, Madame X.”

Every lungful is full of his scent, spicy cinnamon, faint acrid cigarette smoke clinging to cotton. Other scents, too faint to identify. The smells of a man who’s gone through the day after a shower, life smell, city smell.

“So. How’s this work, Cinderella?” He pinches the handle of my teacup in a big thumb and forefinger, lifts the cup, and examines the contents. “Tea, huh? Got any more? I could use a cup of tea. Or something stronger, if you’ve got it.”

I take the welcome excuse to move away, to find somewhere I might find my breath, my equilibrium. “I have tea, or scotch.”

“What kind of scotch?”

“Laphroaig. Single malt, eighteenth year.”

“Ah. The good shit.” He moves to take my spot on the couch, my teacup still in hand. “I wouldn’t mind a tipple, then,” he says with a lilting fake accent, eyes twinkling.

“How would you like it?” I ask this faced away now, decanter in hand, tumbler turned upright.

“Neat, please.”

I pour a single finger, and then some instinct has me add a second. Replace the crystal stopper. Turn, and watch as Logan puts his lips to my teacup, his lips matched to the pale red imprints of my lips left by my lipstick. Tips back the teacup, drinks my tea, replaces the cup in the saucer. Why does that cause me to shiver, from bones to flesh, scalp to toes?

I hand him his scotch, and his fingers brush mine. My skin burns where his touched me. Tingles. I withdraw my hand, curl it into a fist. Still it shakes, scorched by a momentary glancing touch.

I cannot turn away, cannot look away as he now lifts the tumbler to his lips, and I cannot help but watch as he tilts the glass, the thick amber liquid slipping between his lips, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows.

I feel a jealousy for the scotch, touching those lips.

And then I feel stupid for thinking such a ridiculous thing.

I blush.

Me. Blushing.

I duck my head to cover my embarrassment, but then he’s laughing as he swallows and sets the tumbler down. “What?”

“Nothing.”

I’m standing in front of the couch, to the side of the coffee table. Close, but a polite, appropriate distance away. Yet he is able to reach up, brush my cheek with his thumb. “You’re blushing.”

“No.”

He laughs again. Stands up, crowds me. “You are. I can tell. Why are you blushing, Cinderella?”

“I’m not blushing. And my name isn’t Cinderella.”

“You are, and I’ve decided it fits. I like it.”

“You’ve decided.” There’s a sharpness to my tone.

So close. Too close. A foot remains between our bodies, but it’s too close. The air fairly crackles between us.

He grins, a cocky tilt of his lips. “I’m just teasing, X.”

“Why Cinderella?” I hear myself ask.

“Well . . . you showed up, all belle of the ball, mysterious and sexy as hell. Everyone wanted to know who you were. You left in such a rush, you all but left a glass slipper behind. You wouldn’t tell me your name. And that dress?” He lets out a deep breath and shakes his head, as if overcome. “That dress. Jesus.” He shrugs. “Seemed like a fairy tale to me.”

“I see.” I move away, stride to the window, and I feel his gaze on me as I walk.

Do my hips always sway so much when I walk? Do my thighs always brush so deliciously against each other with each step?

I watch a man and his wife walk hand in hand together, thirteen stories down. I cannot think to invent a story for them. I can almost see myself down there, walking hand in hand with a blond man. Neither of us talks. We just walk, fingers twined, moving in sync. I don’t know where we go, the blond man and I. It doesn’t matter; we’re just going, and we’re going together.

I shake my head, turn around—freeze, gasp. He’s there, somehow behind me and I didn’t hear him move or sense his presence. Scotch left on the table, hands loose at his sides. Indigo eyes knowing. Seeing. Piercing.

“Who are you, X?” Voice like a bow drawn across a cello string, the lowest, deepest, most soulful note. Caressing me, shivering my bones, making my skin pebble, just his voice. It’s like a touch, somehow intimate.

How do I answer? I feel tightness in my throat. “I don’t know.” My capacity to lie is snared and discarded by the openness in his eyes.

“You don’t know who you are?” Disbelief.

I find myself defensive. “And who are you, Logan Ryder? How would you answer such a question?”

He blinks slowly, stuffs both hands in his hip pockets, gazes at me for a long moment. “I am Logan Ryder. I’m an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and a philanthropist. Unmarried and unattached. A semireformed troublemaker.”

“That’s what you are, Logan. Not who you are.” I press my back to the window, needing space.

When he’s close, I can’t breathe, but not from panic. From something else. A chest-tightening anticipation. Memory. Fear of what I might do if he presses in again, the way he did in the bathroom. I have no control when he’s near. He short-circuits me, and I am unnerved.

“I was born in San Diego. Grew up poor. Surfer kid. Spent my days on the beach, on the waves. Skipped more school than I attended.” His eyes are distant, seeing the past. “Got into trouble. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Did some bad shit . . . saw friends die, and I realized I had to get out of that life or I’d end up either dead or in jail. Seemed to me at the time that the only way out for someone like me was to join the army. So I spent the next four years wearing army green. Never saw combat, but I did get plenty of training in how to work hard and party hard. Got my GED, so at least some good came of it.”

“That’s your past, not who you are.” My palms are flat against the cool glass.

“It’s more than anyone else knows about me.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah . . . oh.” He smirks. “I’m getting to the part that starts to define who I am. After I phased out of the army, I was bored shitless. Had some money saved and nothing to do. Bummed around a bit, started getting into trouble again. I’ve got a knack for trouble, you see. It follows me, and I follow it. We’re very closely intertwined, trouble and me. I met this guy at a bar in St. Louis. He was a private security contractor. Talked a good game, got me to sign up for a tour in the desert. One tour as a defense contractor turned to two, turned to three. Good money, bad shit.” He shrugs. “Got out after the third, took my money and ran. I’d seen enough. Done enough. So I took what I had, bought a bar in Chicago, redesigned it, rebranded and restaffed it. Sold it. Did it again. Made good money, discovered I had a good head for that kind of thing. And I liked getting my hands dirty, ripping the places apart and rebuilding them. Then I had this investment opportunity . . . over here, in Manhattan. A big money investment, big risk, big return. It . . . didn’t pan out. Let’s just say that and leave it there.”

I sense a major plot hole. “You’re skipping something, Logan.”

He nods. “Yes, I am. That’s a story I’m not interested in telling just yet. It’s a big part of who I am, but it’s still hard to talk about. Still sort of learning how to move past it, you could say.”

“But you ask me who I am. Not so easy to answer, is it?”

He merely shrugs, a Gallic lift of one shoulder. “Is it fair to ask a question I find difficult to answer myself? No. Of course not. But how you answer that question, it tells me something. You, for instance, didn’t answer at all. You merely turned the question back around on me. You’re defensive. Private. Impossible to know. Who are you, X?” His eyes are deep, and sharp. “Make me an answer. Something. Anything.”

I’m not supposed to talk about me. It’s never been said outright, out loud. It’s an unspoken rule. Don’t talk about myself.

But how can I not? He’s looking at me, looking into me, eyes like the deepest seas, turbulent and roiling and fraught with chasms of such impenetrable depths I could get lost and crushed and devoured.

“I am Madame X.” It’s an answer, isn’t it?

“More.” A quiet demand. A command.

“I . . . I don’t know.” I turn away, desperate, rest my forehead against the glass and fog it with my breath. “You should go.”

“I have fifty minutes left, X.”

Ten minutes? That’s all that’s passed? An eternity, stretched thin and twisted into a loop, all within the space of six hundred seconds.

“Tell me one fact about yourself. It doesn’t have to be embarrassing, or a secret. Just . . . anything.”

“Why?” I whisper it.

This should be a simple conversation, but it isn’t, and even the why of that is beyond me. He confounds me, sets all I know of how my life works upon its head.

“Because I’m curious. I want to know.”

“I’m Spanish.”

He’s too close. Leaning in. Breath on my ear. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“What happened? With the investment?” Why the hell am I asking him this?

He laughs. “Right for the jugular. It was . . . complicated. Certain elements of the deal weren’t exactly legal. I knew it, but I thought I’d gone through enough layers to keep myself clean, you might say. But . . . I got betrayed.”

“So you’re a criminal.”

“Once upon a time, yes. Semireformed, remember. All of my current business endeavors are entirely legal.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“Which type?”

“To be a criminal.”

“I came to a point where I had to reinvent myself.” He’s still so close I can hear him swallow, hear his breath.

He still smells faintly of cinnamon gum, but that scent is overpowered by scotch. I don’t know what he did with his gum; a strange detail to notice. He’s not touching me, though. Just standing in my space.

Why am I not pushing him away?

“Reinvention of one’s self is difficult,” I say.

“Yes. It is.” His finger now, index finger, on my chin. Just touching. Not turning me to him, just touching. “Why did you have to reinvent yourself, X?”

“Because I . . . got lost.” It is the shape of the truth, if lacking in substance.

“You’re leaving something out, X.”

“Yes, I am.”

“How about your real name?”

“I told you already. My name is Madame X.”

“That’s not even Spanish.” There’s a smile in his words, though I don’t look at him to see it. I can hear it, and it is blinding enough in its beauty, even heard but unseen.

I let out a long, slow breath. “It’s the only name I have.”

I sense the smile fade. My eyes change their focus, and now I can see his reflection in the window glass. His eyes are searching, a strand of golden hair across his eye. The corners of his eyes are crinkled, as if from long hours squinting in the sun. His skin is weathered, leathery. Rugged. He is beautiful, but hard and sharp, threat seeping from his pores. Yet somehow utterly gentle. So powerful, so sure of his capacity to eliminate any threat to himself that he need not posture. A tiger in the jungle that knows he is king.

“X. Why X?”

My eyes go, of their own will, to the painting on the wall. He turns away from me, and I sigh in relief. But I trail after him to stand beside him in front of Portrait of Madame X. He examines it. We stare at it in silence for a long, long time. I, remembering. He, perhaps, seeking clues. He will find none in the brushstrokes, nor in the composition, nor in the subject, nor in the use of color, the black and the white and the browns, not in the arch of her neck or the sharpness of her nose, the paleness of her skin or the drape of her hand. The only clues lie within me.

My voice, quiet in the golden evening light. “I lost myself. I lost . . . who I was. Who I could be. I lost . . . everything. And I saw this painting. I don’t know why, but it struck me. I had nothing, no name, no past, no future. And I saw this painting, and it . . . it meant something to me. I saw myself in it, somehow. I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I chose this painting. Madame X. Other portraits of the time, they’re given names. But this one? Just . . . Madame X. She has a name, you know: Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. But in this portrait, she is Madame X. The subject of a painting, no more, no less. Something in that meant something to me.”

I expect a comment, something deep and meaningful. Instead he turns and moves across the room to the wall opposite, to Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “And this one?”

I shrug. “I just like it.”

“Bullshit.”

I frown at the sudden and harsh vulgarity. “Logan—”

“Tell me the truth, or tell me to shut up, but don’t lie to me.”

“I wasn’t lying. I saw it, and I liked it. I felt empty, and . . . blank. Numb. The kind of numb where you have so many feelings you just stop feeling any of them. I couldn’t express them, couldn’t express anything. And this painting? It expresses so much. Loneliness, but also peace. Distortion, confusion, passion. Insanity, even. There is something to latch on to, though, in the church steeple. You look at it, and you can see so many things. Whatever your past has brought you, there is something of this painting in you. Of course, then . . . I knew none of this. Not even my name. I just . . . knew I could look at the Starry Night and it would help me make sense of some of the many things in my mind.”

“I have so many questions.” His voice is quiet as he says this, as if admitting a secret he fears will gut him.

“Me, too.” There is far more truth in those two words than I can even withstand.

I am compelled to turn away, to let myself collapse on the couch. I find my fingers wrapped around the glass tumbler, eyeing the finger’s worth of scotch whisky. Touch it to my lips. And yes, my lips touch the faint smear on the rim where his mouth pressed against glass: an intimacy. My lips burn, my throat burns, my eyes water, I cough and swallow, cough. Liquid fire races down my throat, spreads through my stomach and into my veins.

Oh.

This is why they drink such vile stuff.

The afterburn, the heat in my blood, the dizzy warmth in my skull . . . another taste, another cough-swallow-cough-cough, and the buzz expands.

I could float away.

Elbows on knees, knees together, feet wide apart, leaning forward, staring at the map with its strange spelling and bizarre curvature and not-quite accurate geographical relationships, I am dizzy and floating in the clouds, finding a looseness in my skull, something vital disconnecting. A tether, snaking and curling into itself, no longer attached.

His hand, wrapping around mine. Not taking the glass away, but rather his hand on mine, over mine, engulfing, enveloping, covering. He’s on the couch beside me. How? When? He isn’t massive. He is perhaps six feet, an inch or two more, at most. Compact. His muscles seem . . . harder, somehow. Thicker, though not as hugely bulging and perfectly designed as . . . I shake my head, forgetting where that train of thought was going. He is a predator. Every muscle honed from use. Nothing spare, nothing excess. I’m staring. Helpless.

My stare is drawn up, away from the sculpture of arms and chest and thighs, up, to tumultuous indigo pools, so bright and vivid as to be nearly luminescent.

Oh . . .

I’m drawn in. Falling forward. I see eternity in that shade of blue.

My hand, beneath his, tightens on the glass. His, on mine, lifts. The tumbler with its scotch contents touches his mouth. I tip the glass upward, my hand forming the motion, spilling the liquid onto his tongue. I can see his teeth, a pink splotch of tongue. I watch his Adam’s apple bob. He doesn’t cough as he swallows. Now the vessel, nearly empty, is moving to me. My hand under Logan’s. Our hands moving in sync. He brings the tumbler to my lips, we tilt it, and I swallow.