Chapter 9 #2
His eyes drop to my mouth when I moan. Just for a second. Fast. Controlled. But I catch it.
Of course I catch it.
I notice everything.
And now I know one more thing about Saul Bennett:
He listens when I make sounds.
Day five, a plant.
Small. Green. Stubborn-looking. The kind of plant that survives neglect, emotional abandonment, and probably mild arson.
“The apartment needs something alive in it,” he says. “Besides you.”
Sir. You cannot just casually imply I’m alive and expect me not to spiral erotically.
I take the little pot. Cradle it in my hands. He’s handed me responsibility, hope, and possibly a shared custody arrangement.
“I had a plant,” I say quietly. “In my real apartment. On the windowsill.”
The words real apartment taste weird. Like they belong to someone else. Like Stevie Reeves said them once and Beth Taylor is borrowing her mouth.
I don’t say: it’s probably dead now.
I don’t say: I wonder if anyone watered it.
I don’t say: everything I used to have is gone and this tiny succulent is making me want to sob.
Saul doesn’t make me say any of it. He just nods, like he understands all the words caught in my throat.
“This one’s hard to kill,” he says. “Even if you forget to water it. It’ll wait for you.”
I almost laugh. I almost cry.
I almost climb him like a jungle gym and tell him I would also wait for him if he asked.
Day five, he teaches me the security system, which is deeply unfair because I already feel emotionally compromised and now he’s brushing against my hormonal aura.
“Arm it before bed,” he says, standing beside me at the panel. “Disarm in the morning. It’s simple, but you need to be consistent.”
He’s explaining the keypad. I’m not absorbing a single word because his arm moves and my brain hits a horny firewall.
I’m too aware of how close he’s standing. Close enough that his shoulder brushes mine and my nervous system files a missing persons report for my dignity. Close enough that I can smell him. Not cologne, just him, soap and skin and something that my brain wants to categorize and keep.
“You enter the code here,” he’s saying. “Then press arm.”
His arm is right there. I could bite it. I would apologize. Eventually.
“Got it,” I say, stepping back before I do something stupid like lean into him. “Arm before bed. Disarm in the morning.”
Do not mount the U.S. Marshal.
His bicep brushes mine and I immediately forget how doors work. Or numbers. Or words. I nod like someone who understands electronics and not like someone who’s imagining licking his collarbone.
He looks at me. Studies my face like he’s trying to read something written in a language he doesn’t quite speak.
“You okay?”
No. I’m two inches from pressing myself into you like a needy housecat and I don’t know what that says about my mental health.
“Fine,” I say. “Just tired.”
He doesn’t look convinced. But he lets it go.
That night I put the plant on the windowsill and stare at it. Maybe if I watch it long enough, it’ll tell me who I’m allowed to be now.
Day six, I accidentally commit joy.
I don’t mean to. Haven’t laughed since before the restaurant, before Dario, before any of this. Laughing feels like something that belongs to Stevie Reeves, and Stevie Reeves is supposed to be dead.
But Saul’s telling me about the hotel breakfast buffet, about powdered eggs that look like “sadness in solid form” and a waffle iron that waged “personal war” against him, and the laugh escapes before I can catch it.
Bright and sudden and completely beyond my control.
His face unlocks. Like I’ve just input the right code and suddenly there’s this other version of him standing in front of me.
The almost-smile becomes a real one. Full, unguarded, transforming him into someone younger and softer and so beautiful my heart jerks, yanked off course.
“There she is,” he says quietly.
I don’t know what that means. Don’t know what he sees when he looks at me. But for a second, I feel like myself again.
Then the moment passes and I remember that myself is someone I’m not allowed to be anymore, and the laugh fades, and we go back to talking about nothing important.
But I catch him looking at me differently for the rest of the day.
Like I’m something precious. Like I’m real.
That night it hits me that Dario hasn’t crossed my mind in hours.
Cue the guilt tsunami. Full-body, stomach-drop, traitorous bitch guilt. Like I cheated on a ghost with a houseplant and a man who installs curtain rods.
I sit on the edge of my bed, my new bed, Beth’s bed, and try to conjure his face. Dark eyes. Dark hair. The way he moved, controlled and dangerous.
But the details are fuzzy. Like a photograph left in the sun too long.
I should be holding onto him. Should be keeping him clear in my mind, sharp-edged and permanent.
Instead, I’m thinking about Saul’s forearms while he drilled curtain brackets. Saul’s voice saying there she is. Saul’s tongue doing unspeakable things to a walnut cookie while his eyes tracked my mouth.
I don’t know what that makes me. A traitor. A survivor. A woman transferring all her unresolved need onto the nearest man who treats her gently.
I don’t know who I’m becoming.
But she’s horny, soft, and dangerously close to believing she’s allowed to exist.
Day seven.
Last day.
Saul sits on my couch looking like a government-issue daydream while calmly explaining what to do if someone tries to murder me. I’m nodding like I’m listening, but I’m mostly cataloging the slope of his throat and wondering if he’d taste like coffee.
I’m curled up on the other end, legs tucked under me, trying to listen. Trying not to make eye contact with his hands. Or his jawline. Or his entire terrifying stability.
“Questions?” he asks when he’s done.
“Yeah,” I blurt. “When do I get to stare at your forearms again?”
Okay, not what I say. What I say is, “When will I see you again?”
But it comes out like I’m auditioning for abandonment issues: the musical.
He doesn’t treat me like I’ve said something pathetic. Which somehow makes it worse, because I’m two seconds from sobbing into his t-shirt like it’s a weighted blanket with biceps.
“Two weeks,” he says. “I’ll call before I come.”
Two weeks. Fourteen days without the knocks on my door. Without the coffee and the curtains and the way he looks at me like I’m still real.
“I’ll be available,” he adds. “Anytime. You call, I answer.”
Bro. Why would you say that. Why would you say that like you’re a wish and I’m allowed to make it.
“I know,” I whisper.
I’m already imagining how his voice will sound when I do call. In bed. With the lights off. Pretending he’s still here.
“You’ve been really kind,” I say, which is not a normal way to say “Please wreck me emotionally and also physically.”
He just looks at me. Faded blue eyes and that unreadable face that makes me want to take off my shirt and scream ‘notice me, you saintly bastard.’
“You made me cookies with walnuts,” he finally says. “Kind recognizes kind.”
Excuse me sir I’m too emotionally unstable for you to drop love language bombshells disguised as throwaway lines.
I’m actually picturing his mouth on my neck and trying to calculate if it’s illegal to fall in love with your U.S. Marshal.
“Saul.”
“You’re going to be okay.” He cuts me off gently, like he knows if I start crying neither of us will survive it. “You’re stronger than you think.”
I nod.
I want to believe him.
He stands.
I walk him to the door.
“Two weeks,” he says again.
“Two weeks.”
He lingers in the doorway. Opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else.
Doesn’t.
And then he’s gone, leaving me standing in the echo of everything we didn’t say, holding my ovaries like a funeral clutch.
The door clicks shut. I lock everything, deadbolt, chain, emotional regulation. None of it helps. The apartment is still full of Saul-shaped air, and I’m not okay.
I stand in the middle of my apartment and try to remember how to exist without someone checking on me.
The evening stretches long and quiet.
I make dinner and eat it like it’s a chore. Try to do data entry and immediately start typing Saul Saul Saul into the spreadsheet like a summoning circle.
I watch TV but nothing sticks.
Eventually, I start touching everything like a widow in a war movie. His gifts. His presence. The goddamn succulent that’s now emotionally complicit in my collapse.
The blackout curtains. The good coffee. And on the couch, where he set them on day two: the pillows.
Not beige.
That’s what I notice first. Everything else in this apartment is beige or tan or cream or some other shade of giving up. But these pillows are soft blue, like faded denim, like his eyes.
I don’t know if he did that on purpose. Don’t know if he stood in a store somewhere and chose this color because it meant something or if it’s just coincidence.
Either way I grab a pillow like it’s a flotation device and I’m drowning in loneliness. Which I am.
Which is fine. Everything’s fine.
I’m just spooning a goddamn pillow and pretending it’s a man who installed my security system and made me feel real.
I sink onto the couch, pillow clutched against me.
Two weeks.
I can survive two weeks.
I survived the restaurant and the trial and the haircut and the name change and saying goodbye to everything I’ve ever known.
I can survive fourteen days of silence.
I press my face into the soft blue fabric and breathe.
It doesn’t smell like him. It smells like factory plastic and heartbreak.
But it’s his color. That stupid tender blue.
I cling to it like it’s going to whisper “You’re doing so good, sweetheart,” in his voice if I squeeze it hard enough.