Dario
FOUR
I tell myself it’s a follow-up on the patient.
I’m sitting in my car in a concrete structure that smells like exhaust and cold water, looking at my phone. Patient follow-up. Pediatric case. Adjusted antibiotic protocol, new prescription, responsible continuity of care. That’s the only reason I’m doing this.
I text: “Hi. How’s Opal doing this evening?”
Four minutes. Then: “Fever’s down to 100.8, she got half a bowl of chicken soup into her, the new prescription filled, first dose in.”
Me: “Excellent progress.”
And then, because Lena appears constitutionally unable to deliver clinical updates without surrounding context: “Opal has rendered a formal verdict on the cherry ice pops. Seven out of ten. The deduction is for being medicinal. According to her, anything that qualifies as medicine can’t score above a seven, regardless of flavor, because the medicinal context contaminates the experience. ”
I read this twice. Then a third time. I knew I liked the kid. It’s an odd feeling to acknowledge, but it’s there whether I acknowledge it or not.
“Tell her the rating system is scientifically sound,” I send back. And there it is—a perfectly clean exit. Warm, professional-adjacent, the kind of exchange that closes naturally without requiring anything more.
I put the phone in my jacket pocket. I start the car.
I get as far as the parking garage exit before I park again.
This isn’t something I examine while it’s happening. Examining the impulse would mean slowing it down enough to apply judgment, and I’ve learned over a long time that applying judgment to impulses like this one is how you end up in a very clean apartment with nothing interesting in it.
I already have that apartment. I put the car back in drive and go home.
Stop thinking, Dar. That’s what Renzo would tell me. My little brother always knows when I’m overthinking, says I make a face he doesn’t like because if I’m overthinking, I will fuck something up.
Yeah, well, Renzo, you’re in prison, so who fucks things up now?
From my apartment, I text her again: “How are you doing, Lena?”
She takes a beat with that, like she isn’t expecting the distinction. Then she answers. We go back and forth, and the conversation has a quality I haven’t encountered in a while, in that it doesn’t feel like work.
Most conversation feels like work. When people say to pay attention, my brain takes that literally. It costs me to pay attention, to interact with normal people.
But not this time. This one has a rhythm that requires no effort to maintain, which is either a simple coincidence of compatible temperaments or something I should think about more carefully. I choose not to think about it more carefully.
She tells me about a call from today with a man who disputed a charge for forty-seven minutes and discovered, at the end, that he’s been paying his ex-wife’s mobile bill for eleven months without ever noticing it on his statement.
She describes the exact moment his logic collapsed with the precision of a person who watches people for a living, whether they mean to or not. No cruelty in it. Just observation.
I find myself re-reading the message the way you re-read something that’s said better than you expected. I eat dinner standing at my kitchen counter. I keep the phone beside the cereal bowl.
She’s funny in the way that people are funny when humor has been load-bearing for long enough that it’s become structural.
She tells me about the man in her building who has lived there for twenty-two years and still treats the elevator like a new and unproven technology.
She tells me about Opal’s theory on the clinic fish, which is that they are in a state of organized protest, and that Lena has reviewed the evidence and can’t rule it out.
Her unexpectedly clever mind has left me with the urge to experiment. “You have a good couch.”
Blushing emoji. “Glad you liked it.”
“I liked watching you come on my cock.” Now, I wait and see. Did I go too far? Cross a boundary?
Are there boundaries between two people who fucked? I know there are, but I don’t grasp them the way everyone else seems to. The shape of them doesn’t fit in my brain.
A pause. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like that. Don’t worry. I tested clean at my last appt.”
“Same. Normally, I’m more careful than that.” I take a breath. Not sure I want to be this open with her. With anyone. “But you’re different.”
“Different is not usually a compliment.”
I snort. “I mean it as one. I prefer different.” I prefer you.
“You’re different too. And I like it.”
Okay. Good. At least I haven’t scared her off yet. Always do, eventually. But I can enjoy this for now.
I send, “You fuck like it’s what you were made for.”
Another pause. Another blushing emoji. “I was just trying to keep up.”
Thinking about her, all pink-cheeked and flustered, makes my balls throb. “You liked it when I covered your mouth, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
That yes makes me ache worse, and I pull my cock out. There’s no sexier thing than enthusiastic consent, and knowing this woman is into the same shit I’m into, that she loved it when I did that to her… fuck.
It’s not easy to text one-handed, but I manage. “There are all kinds of things we didn’t get to do. Bet you look incredible bent over the counter.”
“Couldn’t say.” A pause. “But I like the idea of you behind me like that.”
“Same here. A fist wrapped in your hair, my other hand on your throat, pounding you from behind.”
“Yeah. I’d like that. But next time, I want to feel you come in me. I’m on birth control.”
“I fucking want that. Want to come deep inside you. Want to hear you beg for it.”
She takes a moment. “Are you touching yourself, doctor?”
“Yes. You?”
“You’ll never know.”
“Tease.”
Laughing emoji. “Didn’t tease you in my living room, did I?”
Fair enough. “No. You took my cock like you were made for it. Such a good girl.” The memory is almost enough to get me there.
“Are you alone?”
“In reality, yes. In my head, you’re here.”
Those dots pop up. Die down. Pop up again. “And what am I doing in your head?”
Heat drives up from my balls to my spine and back down. “You’re on your knees. Mouth around my cock. Choking on it.”
“You’re getting me so wet. Bet you taste like heaven.”
I growl, “Mm, fuck!” as I come in my hand. The mess doesn’t even bother me like it normally does. I’m too gone.
I send, “You made me come. Happy with yourself?”
Grinning emoji. “Very.”
The woman makes me laugh. That’s… new.
We’re texting past ten, and I’m surprised by her stamina, given her day.
After eleven, she starts to wind down. I can read it in the rhythm, the way you read any system.
The gaps between responses are lengthening, the answers getting slightly shorter, a typo she doesn’t go back to fix.
The adrenaline of seventy-plus hours of managing a sick child is finally metabolizing, and what’s underneath it is surfacing.
She mentions that Opal has been sleeping soundly for over two hours.
I’m glad to hear it, and then I realize I’m glad to hear it, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“Goodnight, doctor.” Then, sixty seconds later, “Thank you for today. Both of the todays. And tonight.”
I sit with that. The comma in the middle of the first sentence. Deliberate, slightly formal, a tease from a measured distance. The second sentence accounts for more than I’ve offered, which tells me she knows the score, or is beginning to.
“Sleep well,” I write.
I set the phone on my desk and look at the ceiling.
My apartment has accumulated nothing in six years.
I come here to sleep and to think and sometimes to conduct conversations I don’t want recorded anywhere, and beyond that the space doesn’t get much use.
The furniture is dark and chosen to be functional rather than comfortable.
The bookshelves are organized by subject.
Everything is where it should be and nothing is where it isn’t, and standing here most evenings, I feel roughly nothing about that.
Tonight, I notice it differently. Wonder what Opal would say about my place. How Lena would look on my bed.
I’ve spent a long time calibrating what I let cost me something.
It’s a useful skill in my line of work. You develop it, or you break down, and I don’t break down.
I make choices, and I build a life that fits inside them, and it’s a functional life.
The apartment is clean. My work runs precisely, which is what that work requires. I am a man who functions.
I sit down at the desk.
The recurrence pattern, the immune presentation, the question of whether there’s an underlying susceptibility worth investigating beyond the treatment protocol I’ve already adjusted. I could refer her to a specialist. I know the right people, I can make that happen. I turn the thought over.
And then I pull on the other thread. The one she drops and covers quickly during our conversation. Something about money, a brief reference to a thing she’s dealing with, followed by a fast redirect into safer territory. There’s a shape to the gap she leaves. I read gaps.
What I find in twenty-two minutes confirms and exceeds what I’ve estimated.
When you know the right people, and the wrong people, it’s easy to learn what you need to know. There are few men who work Lena’s neighborhood. Not much money to be made there, but there are those who take alternative payments, and unfortunately, her loan shark is one of them.
Edward Esposito. I know the guy. Esposito runs short-term personal loans, which is a nice way to say loan shark.
His rate structure is deeply illegal under state statute if you know which subsection to cite, which his clientele generally doesn’t, because the profile of someone who goes to Esposito is someone for whom the gap between what they need and what they have becomes urgent faster than they can develop a strategy for it.
No idea what she owes, but it can’t be pretty, based on Opal’s care history. Her income, after taxes and the fixed costs of living in this city with a child. The realistic payment she can service versus the rate at which the balance grows.
He will come calling. Soon, I imagine.
Esposito isn’t running a real loan operation, he’s running a mechanism, and the mechanism is effective precisely because the people it catches are the ones who can’t afford to examine it too closely when the money is in front of them, and the need is immediate.
You don’t ask about the rate when your kid has been sick for three weeks, and the clinic waitlist is six days out, and you’re already two shifts behind on rent.
I set the laptop aside and sit with it for a moment.
Esposito is protected. He’s operating under Marco’s umbrella, meaning we have the same boss. Meaning I can’t touch him.
Yet.
I tell myself I’m just thinking. I’m a man who thinks extensively before he acts, and the thinking phase can last a long time, and it doesn’t obligate any particular outcome. I’ve told myself this before. I know how it goes.
I think about what Esposito does when his borrowers fall behind. Specifically, what form his patience takes when it runs out. I know this with some precision. It isn’t a gentle process.
Her goodnight is still on the screen. The comma in the middle, like a door left open just enough to let a little light through.
I don’t sleep until almost dawn.