Chapter 9 #2
"That… makes sense," I manage. "And I—I want to. Find out." My throat is tight. "I just don't know how. I don't know where to start."
He looks at me for a long moment. And then he says it. Not as a line. Not as anything but a man speaking truth to a woman across a quiet room.
"You have not taken off your mask."
It happens before I can stop it.
The next line is already in my mouth. It's been there for twenty years, folded up small, and his words pull it loose the way you'd pull a thread and watch a hem come down.
"Nor shall I," I say. "It is the only honest thing I own."
He goes still.
I should explain. I should laugh it off and say sorry, it's from a play, never mind. But I don't. I hold his gaze and I wait, and the waiting is its own kind of dare.
His mouth curves. Slow.
"A strange honesty," he says, "that hides the face."
My breath catches.
He knows it.
He knows the next line, no fumbling, no reaching.
A Fashionable Deception. A play we read in tenth grade.
The one I auditioned for and never got to be in because my mother said theater was vanity dressed up as art, and what would people think, Audrey, you up there pretending.
I read every part alone in my room with a flashlight after lights-out.
I knew Cleone better than I knew myself.
I haven't said those words where anyone could hear them. Haven’t said them alone in over two decades.
"The face is the great liar, sir." My voice isn't quite steady. "It smiles when it is breaking. Mine has had years of practice."
He takes a step toward me, but not all the way. Enough that the space between us changes into something with weight.
"Then let me see it break." His voice has gone low and rough at the edges. "I should like to know you once before the music stops."
"And if there is nothing underneath worth ?knowing?"
"Then I shall have ruined a fine evening to find it out." He takes another step, closer now. I can feel the heat coming off him. "Take off the mask, Cleone."
I feel the heat of the words, my fingertips curling into the comforter.
"You ask the impossible."
"I ask the only thing." His eyes hold mine, and there's nothing rehearsed left between us. "Everything else here is borrowed."
My pulse thunders in my ears. The room is so quiet I can hear my own breathing—too shallow, too fast. He never once looks away.
He never once reaches for a word. They come to him whole, like they've been sitting in him the same place mine have been sitting in me, waiting all these years for the right person to say them back.
He's near enough now that I have to tip my head up to hold his gaze.
There's one line left. Cleone's surrender. I've said it a thousand times to my bedroom ceiling, alone with a flashlight.
I've never meant it before.
"Then borrow me, sir." My voice drops to almost nothing—the offer, the terms, all in one breath. "One night, and no promise past the dawn."
It's a chaste enough line. It plays clean on a high school stage, two kids in cardboard masks under the theater lights. But I'm not thirteen, and there's no stage, and the way I say it strips it down to the bone.
His eyes go dark.
"To borrow you one night," he says, rough, barely a line at all anymore, "is to be ruined for every night after."
For half a second, neither of us moves.
Then it isn't a play anymore. It isn't lines, isn't Cleone, isn't anyone but me reaching up, and him already there, his hands finding skin like he's wanted to all night, my fingers at his buttons, the words disappearing the way they were always going to.
The new sheets are cool against my back when we land.
I don't think about whose bed it used to be.
It's mine.
Later, the world is quiet, and our breaths have finally found the same rhythm.
I lie on my side with my head against his shoulder, his arm heavy across my back. The lamp is still on. Outside, a truck passes, far off, and the sound fades into nothing.
The new room smells like fresh cotton and like us.
"How did you do that?" I ask.
"Do what?"
"The play. You knew every line." I prop myself up to look at him. "I wasn't sure if you were quoting it at first, but then you just—kept going. You never even paused."
Something shifts in his face. It isn't obvious. Just a small tightening, there and gone, like I'm looking at a version of him the rest of the world doesn't get to see.
"I read it once," he says.
"Once?"
"In high school. Same as you, probably." He's looking at the ceiling now, not at me. "When I read something, it stays. Word for word. It’s always been like that for me."
I sit up a little more. "You have a photographic memory."
His mouth twists, eyes still focused on the ceiling.
"Kids tried to use me for it. Teachers thought I was cheating until they figured out I wasn't." He takes a shallow breath.
"It's a party trick people make you perform.
And it's easier to let everybody think the only thing in my head is batting averages and bad decisions. "
He says it lightly, but it isn't light. I can hear the shape of an old wound under it, the same way mine has a shape.
So I don't make it a big thing. I don't gasp or quiz him or ask him to recite the phone book. I just lie back down against his shoulder and feel him relax by a degree he probably doesn't realize.
"I wanted to be an actress," I say to the dark. "When I was a kid."
His arm tightens, just slightly. "Yeah?"
"I auditioned for A Fashionable Deception.
For Cleone when I was thirteen." I trace a line on his chest without thinking.
"My mother found out and said theater was vanity.
Pretending to be someone you're not, in front of people, for attention.
She said God's always watching, like He'd be watching that specifically.
" I huff something that isn't quite a laugh.
"I memorized the whole play alone in my room with a flashlight.
Every part. I never said a single line of it where anyone could hear me. "
He's quiet.
"Until tonight," I say.
He turns his head and presses his mouth to my hair, slow, and doesn't say anything at all. He just softens around me, and somehow that's louder than any words.
His gift and my ban. The thing he had to hide and the thing I wasn't allowed to have. Lying in the dark, they fit together like they were cut from the same cloth.
"I should go before it gets light," he says, eventually.
"I know."
He doesn't move yet. Neither do I.
"Next time," he says, against my hair, "I get to pick the play."
Next time. The words sit in my chest, warm and terrifying.
"We'll see," I say.
I feel him smile. "That's a yes."
It is, and we both know it.
The package comes nine days later on a Tuesday.
Plain brown box, no name on the return address, left on the porch by a driver who's already gone by the time I get to the door. I carry it in, checking that the kids are still glued to the TV in the other room, and run upstairs to set it on my bed before cutting the tape.
On top, there’s a folded note in handwriting I already recognize.
Doll Face,
Chase you soon.
—A
Under the note, wrapped in tissue paper, is a costume. I lift it out, the tissue paper falling away, and—
Heat climbs my neck first. Of course it does. It wouldn't be from him if it didn't make me blush.
And then, holding it up in the morning light of my new bedroom, in the house where I have been so careful and so good for so long, I feel the other thing come up underneath the blush and overtake it.
I smile. Slow and wide as I recognize the script at the bottom of the box.
The Marshal and the Magpie. He's going to be the lawman. I'm going to be the thief he can't quite bring himself to catch.
I fold the costume back into its tissue, still smiling, and that's when it lands—the idea, bright and ridiculous and so perfect I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud in the room.
I reach for my phone. I have some shopping to do.