Chapter 16 #4
I pressed it. The compose field opened, cursor blinking in the white.
I closed it without typing a word.
Not because they were wrong. Because the right ones weren't on the screen, and my body had known it before I let the thought finish.
I scrolled further, slower near the bottom where the newest profiles lived, and then I caught what I was actually doing and my face went hot alone in an empty apartment.
I was looking for them. Reading past faces and panels for pine and tangelo, for brown butter and musk, for mint and sea salt cutting clean and cool through all the noise the way it had cut through me at a suite door two months ago.
Watching for whether they'd activated a profile.
Whether they'd entered the market. Whether the three men who'd built a guest house angled to catch the morning light and drafted an invitation so badly kerned I'd fixed it on reflex had put themselves on the app with that same maddening attention.
They weren't there. Of course they weren't there.
They were waiting. They were doing the exact thing I'd asked them to do, coming to me only through the channels I controlled, on the ground I'd built.
Their absence from the app was proof they'd heard me.
And the proof made it worse instead of better, because now I had nothing left to resent but how completely they understood me.
They had the map and still kept their hands to themselves.
I closed the app without choosing anyone.
Set the phone face down on the coffee table.
The apartment was too warm and too small, the restlessness moving through me in long slow rolls I could track like weather coming across water.
Honeysuckle and ink, stronger by the hour, my body making itself understood in a language no amount of professional distance could translate into anything other than exactly what it was.
Two weeks, give or take. I kept the count in a paper notebook I refused to digitize, because some things deserved the dignity of paper and this was one of them.
Two weeks to decide. To reach for Stillwater through a door that wasn't work, or find someone else, or go it alone on suppressants that would fail the instant I came within scent range of any one of the three men whose biology had already put its hand on the back of my neck and called it mine.
The phone went dark on the table. Outside, Bridgeport moved through its ordinary evening: delivery bikes, foot traffic, the bodega on the corner doing its steady trade, the flower shop two doors down still lit because Sable worked later than anyone with sense.
My city. My block. The whole life I'd built with my own two hands, still standing, functioning perfectly, needing nothing.
And my body had decided none of it mattered.
That was the part that made the anger come up hot and ugly.
Not the wanting. The fact of it. My body had waited until I'd built something careful, defensible, mine, then pressed against the walls until the whole thing gave.
I'd felt that collapse once already, at the wedding.
The last time my body made a decision without consulting me, it walked me into a hotel hallway, a suite, and three men I still couldn't stop thinking about two months later.
Now it was turning up the heat under another choice until choice was the wrong word for it, leaving me to call the result agency because the alternative was worse.
My own chemistry had cornered me into wanting the one thing I'd spent two months keeping out of reach.
I was so tired of my own body making my decisions and dressing them up as freedom.
Fine. Then I'd make this one myself. Out loud, on purpose, with my eyes open, so whatever happened next belonged to me too.
And if I was going to choose, I wasn't going to do it in writing, where I could draft and redraft and sand every edge off my own voice until it sounded like a woman who had everything under control.
I'd done enough hiding in text this month to last a year.
I picked up the phone before I could talk myself back into the version of me who only ever typed. Found Miner's name. Pressed call, and put it to my ear before the shaking in my hands could win the argument.
It rang once.
Twice.
Everything in me had pulled tight. The honeysuckle came off my skin in a wave I could smell over the tea gone cold on the counter.
I stood in the middle of my quiet apartment with my heart going hard and no script, no folder, no clean professional opening to hide behind, letting someone hear me before I'd decided how I wanted to sound.
He picked up on the third ring. That low, even voice, the surprise held so gently it almost hurt, because I had never once called him, not in two months, not ever.
"Nitsa?"
My throat forgot how to be useful. I closed my eyes.
"Hey." The word came out rougher than I meant it, worn thin by two weeks of held distance. The line went still. "Can I ask you something?"