Wells
EIGHTEEN
Carne Vale: Carnival takes its name from carne vale, a farewell to the flesh, a last indulgence chosen in full knowledge of the fast to come. He says goodbye to one self and keeps the other, calling the silence a mercy.
She still thinks Midnight is a stranger on a black screen who paid for access, asked for exclusivity, and failed to show up for his Thursday call. A business arrangement that closed.
I can make that sound almost noble if I keep the language clean enough.
I didn't log on because continuing would have been reckless. I didn't message her to let her know because anything I said as Midnight is now tainted. I kept the payment scheduled because I made an agreement, and I always follow through.
All of that is true enough to use, but none of it is the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I sat at my desk Thursday night with my hand on the mouse and the login page open.
The cursor waited, and so did she. I knew she was there, ready for me, and I still didn't click.
Not because I had stopped wanting Peoria. That would have been easier. I didn't click because the second I pictured the call connecting, everything came apart in my head.
After that, all I could see was Cera.
Cera at her desk outside my office with coffee beside her keyboard. Cera in Conference Room two, pushing back like she wouldn't be intimidated. Cera on a balcony in Tampa, watching me through the smoke and asking questions no one else in my life ever dared to ask.
The discovery should have killed it. That was the rule I trusted because it had worked before.
Years ago, I traced a woman who had gotten too close, and once the mystery became a name, an address, and a face, whatever had hooked me went cold.
The chase had been the point, and the woman had only been the shape it took.
Peoria should have gone the same way, but knowing turned every memory inside out and only made me want her more.
Every memory I have of Peoria now carries Cera beneath it. Every moment I spent with Cera in my office, on the plane or in that hotel room is now shadowed by what I know, that she's the woman who told Midnight about counting cars on a roof before she was old enough to know loneliness had a name.
The black screen doesn't protect me anymore. It doesn't enhance the fantasy. It only makes me aware of how I'd rather touch her, feel her, than jerk off to a caricature of her.
I thought Friday would be easier after that. I had made the clean decision. Midnight was done, Peoria could stay behind the screen, and Cera could stay where she belonged, three feet down the hall and safely out of reach.
That lasted until I saw her.
She looked up when I passed her desk, and every useful thought I had built around distance went useless. There was no mask, no wig, no red lipstick. There was only Cera, looking at me with those brown eyes and no idea I had heard her breathe herself to sleep.
The answer to that secondary problem came before lunch. I could transfer her, move her under someone else, put a wall of policy between us, and call it leadership.
She has more than earned her place at Stone Intermodal, and that is the reason I would give if anyone asked. It's even true. She makes the dissemination of my work better, there is no denying that.
No one would question it. Everyone knows I don't work well with others, much less manage anyone. I could put a manager between us, move her desk to another floor, and make the whole thing look like a practical adjustment. Most people would wonder why it took me so long to implement it.
But I left everything exactly where it was.
The thought of walking into my office Monday and not seeing her outside my door made something hard and ugly move through me. She is mine and I want her with me.
I want to keep her where I can see her. I want her in my office, in my car, across from me at dinner, close enough that I do not have to imagine the shape of her mouth through a screen.
I set my bourbon down on the desk without drinking and press my thumb against the edge. The pressure gives me something simple to track for a few seconds before the rest of it comes back.
I pulled an all-nighter Thursday after I closed the call window. Not because I needed proof. I already had enough. I did it because I needed to understand how I missed it.
By three in the morning, I had traced the mask, wig, contacts, and lipstick to an order Locke Armanelli placed three weeks before Masked Maiden went live.
It would have been easy to find if I had been willing to look.
One deeper background pass after HR sent Cera’s file across my desk would have been enough.
I could have known before the interview.
Before the office. Before Florida. Before my desk.
Before I wanted the truth to be impossible.
My throat tightens, and I let go of the desk.
She would see the lie first. Then the trace. Then every moment after it, every look in the office, every careful word, every inch of space I gave her while holding information she didn't have. She would leave, and she would be right to.
I click to open my OnlyFans app on my desktop. My reflection stares back from the black before the login loads.
I won't tell Cera I'm Midnight. I won't tell her I know she is Peoria. That silence is a lie, and I have already decided I can live with it. The asymmetry exists, but I didn't create it. I'm managing it, and this is the best way.
I broke my own rule to trace her, and the information came back before I could decide whether I wanted it. Now I have it and I can't unknow that now.
Midnight has to die.
No goodbye, no staged farewell. A manufactured exit would be active deception, and that turns my stomach in a way the silence doesn't. I won't perform closure when that's the opposite of what's happening here.
The month I already paid will stand as severance. It squares the debt. After that, no calls. No money. No contact.
Vanishing is cleaner. Vanishing is kinder. What she doesn't know can't hurt her.
I exhale and delete the account.
I stand and move to the window. The river reflects the last of the light, a stripe of gold cutting through gray water.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice I don't want to hear reminds me I have done this before. I've paid to make a problem disappear. Cash and silence and distance, the tangle severed cleanly.
I push the thought away.
This is different. That woman tried to extort me. Cera has done nothing wrong. This is not about making her disappear. This is about protecting what we have before the truth destroys it.
I drop my hand and check the time.
There's still two hours before I pick her up for dinner.
I need something else to occupy my mind, so I pull up the financial trail I've been tracking. The screen fills with shell company names, offshore account numbers, trust structures layered so deep I cannot find the floor. The same wall I hit before. The same dead end.
I lean back and light a cigarette. The smoke burns on the way in.
I check Dane's accounts again. Still nothing.
I stub out the cigarette and close out the tab. I know the money will give me more strings to follow, but I don't have enough time to follow each of those now.
The frustration sits low in my gut, not sharp enough to spiral but heavy enough to carry.
I stand and move to the bathroom to get ready for Cera.
The hostess seats us at a corner table where the light barely reaches, and Cera slides in across from me.
She unfolds her napkin and lays it over her lap without looking up, the motion unhurried, the same hands that ran down her chest under my command on a screen I will never mention to her.
I know that movement now. I know a hundred of them.
The server takes the order, white wine for her, bourbon for me. When he goes, the quiet comes down over the table, and it's not comfortable.
I lean my forearms on the cloth. "I was cold with you yesterday."
She tilts her head. "Is that an apology or meeting minutes?"
My mouth wants to lift and I let it. She never hands me an easy out and she isn't about to start. "Funny."
She waits. She's good at it. She doesn't fill the silence, she lets it work on me, and it does.
"I've had things pressing on me. Work, and other things." I move my hand over the table, a useless gesture, because the rest of it has no shape I can give her. "I handled it badly. You didn't earn that."
"Okay." Her voice gives me nothing.
I press my thumb to the edge of the table. "I don't do this often."
"Do what?"
"Apologize."
She blinks slowly and takes a deep inhale. "I gathered."
The server sets the wine down. She lifts the glass for a sip, and her throat works when she swallows.
There it is again, Peoria, surfacing in the woman across the table, her bare mouth where the painted red usually sits.
It's so obvious now I can't understand how I missed it through all of our calls.
I leave my bourbon where it is. I have no business dulling anything tonight.
"I want this to be something." The words come out flat. "You and me."
She sets the glass down and raises her eyebrow. "You want this to be something? It's something, alright."
"I'd like to see you outside of work." I say it more plainly, because I mangled it the first time.
"You're my boss, Wells."
"I'm well aware of that."
She leans back. "Is that even allowed?"
For a second, the old wiring takes over, the part of me that has spent thirty years deciding the smart move is the closed door. Maybe I read this wrong. Maybe it was only ever heat for her, a thing to burn off between deadlines, and I turned it into more on my own.
"I hear you."
She studies me, and I make myself stay in it and let her look. "What exactly do you want with me, Wells?"
The want is right there, and the words are nowhere near it. "Forget it. Forget I said anything."
The retreat is automatic. It's what I do. Close the door before it closes on you. This is why I swore off of real relationships.
She doesn't let me drop it. She picks up her wine and holds it without drinking, watching me over the rim.
"No, I want you to use your words to tell me. I'm not going to try to decode what anything means anymore."
Something in my chest pulls loose. "I'm not good at this."
"I can tell."
She folds her hands on the table. "Then tell me what real means to you."
I don't have it ready. I've spent my whole life making sure no one ever asks me a question like that, and now she has, and the answer is so simple it scares me.
"More."
"That's vague. You're going to have to be more specific."
"I know." I exhale, and the next part costs me everything. "I keep people at a distance. It's the only thing I'm good at. I don't want to do it with you. That's as clear as I can make it."
Her face changes, not much, but enough that I track it. There's a small give around her eyes, and her shoulders drop a fraction.
"I'm trying to read between your lines here. You're warm one minute, and the next you're so cold I forget you're the same person."
There are two of me, and she has met both. I know that's not what she's referring to, but the irony sucker punches me.
"I know. Our working situation makes it complicated, and all this other shit I've been dealing with hasn't helped."
She almost laughs. "You are not selling this very well."
"I know."
"So why should I say yes?"
I look at her. The sharp eyes, the set of her mouth, the walls she keeps up that I want behind more than I've wanted anything in years. Under the table my knee sits an inch from hers.
"Because you want to."
She doesn't answer. She picks up the wine and drains half of it, and when she sets the glass down she holds my eyes and doesn't look away, and the quiet between us goes taut, the kind that has nothing to do with talking.
"Mighty confident of you to say that," she says.
"What can I say? I'm good at uncovering things most can't."
"Hmm," she hums, as if she'd never considered that. "Okay, if you say so."
"Okay?"
"Okay. I want to see where this goes." She leans in, and the wit drops out of her voice. "But I like my job. If this falls apart, I'm not the one who loses it. And quit with the eggshells."
"Fair."
The server comes back with menus, and she takes hers and starts to read, cool again, like she didn't just hand me the thing I've never had to ask for. I watch her over the top of mine.
After dinner, I walk Cera out of the restaurant with my hand resting against her lower back. The contact is deliberate. I'm allowed to touch her now, and it doesn't have to be only after the pressure valve blew and we resorted to sex.
The guilt still sits underneath it, though.
Midnight is already dead. I won't log in again. I won't send her money after this month. I'll let the arrangement die in silence, and she will never know the two men were one.
It is the only way this works.