Chapter 26 #2
I had been in the car. I had seen it. And I had spent twenty years telling myself that love was weakness, that attachment was a wound waiting to happen, that the only way to survive was to keep everyone at arm's length and never let anyone close enough to hurt you.
And then she had walked into my meeting and sat in my lap, and I had called her kitten, and everything I thought I knew had started to unravel.
The chain glinted in the low light, and I should have felt relieved I had what I came for, I could leave now, I could go back to my life and pretend that these past weeks had never happened but all I felt was hollow and cold and a little bit sick.
I had spent weeks cooking for her, learning the way she took her coffee, kissing her, sleeping in her bed.
I had spent weeks pretending to be someone I wasn't, and somewhere along the way I had stopped pretending.
Somewhere along the way I had started wanting to stay, and that want had turned into something sharp and painful that I couldn't swallow down no matter how hard I tried.
I opened my wallet and pulled out the three hundred dollars she had left on my nightstand that first morning.
She had paid me because she thought I was an escort, because she thought I needed the money, because she had looked at a man covered in tattoos and made assumptions that I had let her keep because they were easier than the truth.
The money was still folded neatly behind my ID, and I had told myself I was keeping it as evidence or as motivation or as something to throw back in her face later.
But I knew the real reason now, even if I hadn't admitted it to myself until this moment I had kept it because she had given it to me, because it was hers, because it was the first thing she had ever given me and I hadn't been able to let it go.
I set the money on the counter, and then I found the small pink sticky notes she kept on the fridge, the ones she used to remind herself to buy milk, to call her mother, to pick up her dry cleaning.
I wrote the words, my handwriting rougher than usual because my hands weren't as steady as I wanted them to be.
Don't forget to eat.
I stuck it to the counter right next to the money, and then I turned back to the couch where she was still sleeping, still holding her plush toy, still looking like the world was kind and safe and full of people who stayed.
I crouched beside her, and I let myself look at her for a moment longer at the way her lashes fanned dark against her cheeks, at the way her lips curved slightly like she was having a good dream, at the way her hand was curled around the toy's ear like she was holding onto something even in sleep.
She had covered me with a blanket that first night, and I had pretended not to notice because it was easier than acknowledging how long it had been since someone had taken care of me like that.
She had tucked me in like I was something worth keeping, she had gone back to her room without a word, and I had lain there on her too-small couch with my legs hanging off the end and thought about how dangerous it was to let myself feel safe somewhere.
I lifted her carefully, one arm beneath her knees and the other at her back, and she was so light that it made my chest hurt. Her head fell against my shoulder, her hand curled into my shirt even in her sleep, and she made a small sound that might have been my name or might have been nothing at all.
I carried her to the bedroom and laid her down on the bed, and the sheets were cool against her skin because she had been waiting for me instead of sleeping where she belonged.
She stirred just slightly, her brow furrowing for a moment before her face relaxed again, and I pulled the blanket up to her chin and tucked it around her shoulders the same way she had tucked it around mine that first night.
Then I leaned down and pressed my lips to her forehead.
I stayed there for a moment with my mouth against her skin, and I could feel the warmth of her seeping through me like something I had been missing without knowing it.
I wanted to say something, I wanted to tell her I was sorry, I wanted to tell her this wasn't her fault, I wanted to tell her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to me and that was exactly why I had to leave—but the words wouldn't come, and even if they had,
I didn't have the right to say them.
I stood up and walked to the door, and I didn't look back because I knew if I looked back I wouldn't be able to leave.
The door closed behind me, soft and quiet the way she had closed it that first morning when she had slipped out of my suite and taken my chain and left me with nothing but the memory of her and three hundred dollars on the nightstand. Everything had ended the way it started.
The hallway was dark, and the stairs were dark, and the street was dark, and Romano was waiting in the car with his hands on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed somewhere on the middle distance.
He didn't ask me anything, but he looked at my face for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted, something that looked like understanding, or maybe pity,
or maybe just the exhaustion of a man who had been watching me make mistakes for twenty years and was tired of pretending he didn't see them coming.
"Boss," he said.
"Drive," I said.
He drove, and I didn't look back.
The chain was warm in my hand, but I didn't know if that was because she had been carrying it against her things for weeks or because my own body heat had seeped into it or because I was imagining things I had no right to imagine.
I thought about the sticky note on her counter.
She would find it in the morning, and she wouldn't understand at first.
She would call me, and text me, and wait for a reply that wouldn't come.
She would go to the bar and realize I had never been an escort, and she would search for me in a city that knew how to hide its monsters, and eventually she would stop.
That was what I told myself, anyway. That was what I needed to believe that she would stop looking, that she would move on, that she would find someone who wasn't a monster, someone who didn't have blood on his hands, someone who could stay.
But I had been in the car when my parents died, and I had spent twenty years telling myself that love was weakness, and I had just spent weeks cooking dinner for a woman who thought I was poor and unemployed and desperately in need of saving.
I had let her believe all of it, I had let myself believe that I could stay, and now I was sitting in the back of a car with my chain in my hand, three hundred dollars on her counter, and a sticky note that said don't forget to eat like that was anywhere close to enough.
I looked out the window at the city lights blurring past, I thought about the way she had smiled at me that morning, and I felt something crack open in my chest that I had been holding closed for a very long time.