DARIO
TEN
She shakes? I break.
The parking garage at Lena’s office building has no cameras. Good. Cost-cutting on the employer’s part, which is convenient tonight. Maybe if he paid people what they were worth, Lena wouldn’t be in her situation in the first place. I might look that bastard up when I’m done here.
I find a position near the stairwell with a clear sightline to the elevator bank, and I wait. Patience has never been something I’ve needed to cultivate. It came with the work a long time ago.
Reggie Millstone comes off the elevator at 6:12. Medium height, soft around the middle, the walk of a man who has never had a reason to watch his back. Near my age.
He’s unwinding from the end of his shift—jacket over one arm, tie loosened—and he clocks me near his car the way civilians do, which is slowly, with a half second delay while they decide whether to be concerned. “You here to pick someone up?”
“I’m a friend of Lena Swan.”
Something moves through his face fast. Guilt first, then its natural successor, aggression dressed as confidence. “I don’t know what she told you, but whatever it is—”
I hit him once in the soft tissue below the ribs—extremely unpleasant, leaves nothing visible, takes the wind out in a way that communicates the full scope of the situation without any ambiguity.
He folds against his own bumper and goes down.
I give him a moment to get his breathing back, because what comes next requires him to process language. “Come on, Reginald. Get your shit together. It wasn’t even that hard of a hit.”
He coughs. “The fuck do you want?”
“I want you to listen carefully,” I say, crouching to his level.
“You’re going to go upstairs. You’re going to go to Lena’s desk and pack up all of her belongings in a cardboard box.
Every personal item. Every photo. The plant.
You’re going to do it very carefully, and when you bring that box back down, I’m going to go through it item by item.
If anything is damaged or missing, I’ll come back.
And what I damage next time will be something you care about more than this sedan. Nod if that’s clear.”
He nods. His face is the color of old chalk.
“Take your time. Do it right. Make sure I don’t need to return.”
He gets up and goes. I lean on his car and wait.
Twenty-two minutes. I think about Lena’s face when she walked through the door—the way she was barely holding herself together. Jaw set, breathing controlled, not crying, and not going to. The strength of her conviction… how she managed her own emotions to the point of appearing to have none.
No matter what she says, it’s a fragile strength, and it will cost her if she doesn’t allow herself to react to being harassed. It always does.
That’s the detail that got to me more than anything else would have.
She’s been running this solo for five years and has refined it to a science—managing alone, not reaching, absorbing the hit, and moving forward.
That’s the type of thing that makes women have higher rates of autoimmune disease.
A lifetime of swallowing bullshit, not being able to do anything about it, being forced to grin and bear it, all of that has a fucking big toll.
I refuse to let her pay it.
Standing in the garage, I realize that I haven’t done something for somebody else with this little calculation behind it in a very long time. Maybe not ever, if I’m being honest.
Every decision I make, every favor I extend, every call I take, and every one I don’t—there’s always a ledger.
Something going in, something coming out, the balance tracked.
This isn’t on the ledger. This is just a thing I’m doing because she came home shaking and I didn’t like it, and that is, as far as I can determine, the entirety of the reason.
I sit with that for a moment. Then I hear the elevator.
He comes back, box held out in front of him, not making eye contact.
I go through it on the hood of his car—the small succulent, not a leaf disturbed.
The framed photo of Opal, cracked corner exactly as she described it.
Her notepad covered in her handwriting, her lotion, her cardigan folded neatly on top.
And on top of everything, folded in quarters, one of Opal’s drawings.
A woman at a desk. Crayon sun in the corner. The tape still on it.
Everything intact.
I look at him. He’s been staring at the floor since he handed the box over.
“This is a good start—”
“Start?” His eyes bug as he whines.
“Two more things. First, you will write a glowing letter of recommendation. Not a template—something specific. Her metrics, her skills, the supervisor track she’s been building.
It should read like it was written by someone who has been paying close attention, because you have been, just not to the right things. She’ll have it by Friday.”
“What else?”
“First thing tomorrow morning, you go to HR and file a formal complaint against yourself. Describe what you did today and what you’ve been doing for years. In detail. Without softening any of it.”
He looks up. “That’ll get me fired.”
“You should have thought about that before you did fireable things.”
“You can’t just make me fire myself—”
“I can make you do worse, Reginald.” I smile. “Do you want me to? I might get creative if you motivate me.”
He stares at me while he runs the calculation—whether I’m bluffing, whether there’s an out. There’s nothing in my face that helps him, and eventually the math produces the only answer available to it.
“Fine.” Flat and finished.
“Good. Don’t contact her. Ever. Don’t reference her to anyone. As far as you’re concerned, she doesn’t exist. As long as she doesn’t exist in your world, neither will I.”
I leave him in the parking structure.
The drive back is twenty minutes. I ride up in the elevator with the box under my arm, my knuckles aching—two of them split where I caught his cheekbone when he shifted going down, my fault for not adjusting the angle.
Didn’t feel it while I was in the garage.
Adrenaline, most likely. I’ll tape them upstairs.
Lena is in the kitchen when I come in. She’s made tea she hasn’t touched. She looks at me, then at the box, then at my hand. She doesn’t ask.
I set the box on the counter, and she steps forward to take it, and her hand covers mine for a half second while she finds her grip—just the warmth of it—and I feel it all the way up.
“Thank you.” Not breathless, not apologetic. Quiet. Two words, direct, looking right at me, meaning them and wanting me to know she means them.
I nod once and go take care of my hand. I sit at my desk and tape the knuckles and hope Reggie got the message along with the swollen jaw.
The apartment is quiet in the way it gets after Opal is asleep—that particular, settled quiet I’ve started to recognize as distinct from the quiet of a space with no one in it.
Both are quiet. They’re not the same quality of quiet. I didn’t used to know the difference.
I’m not a man who thinks much about what he’s become accustomed to.
Accustomed is just the word for conditions you’ve stopped noticing, and I’ve spent a long time engineering a life where the conditions don’t change much and therefore don’t require much noticing.
The apartment was clean and functional and quiet.
It worked. I didn’t think about what it would sound like if it were occupied, because why would I?
I think about it now. That’s the version I’m thinking about when my bedroom door opens at midnight.
Lena comes in and closes the door, wearing one of her nightgowns. This time, it’s long and blue and made of wisps of lace, with nothing underneath.
My throat goes dry as blood rushes downward. “What is this?”
She slides into my bed. “Thank you. For what you did for me.”
“You’re wel—”
Her mouth is on me before I finish the sentence. I could push her away, let her know that what I did doesn’t mean she owes me. I didn’t do any of that for a reward. I did it because it needed to be done.
But I’m not some knight, here to rescue the damsel in distress.
I’m not noble, and she’s not innocent.
She straddles me beneath the blanket as I skim my hands over her nipples, using the lace to stimulate them even more. Then I grip her tits as she grabs my cock. I’m already hard for her. I was hard the moment she walked in, wearing this gown. Her soft, warm hand makes me inhale.
What follows is better than the first time. Less like establishing something, more like two people who’ve already established it and are moving inside it freely. She’s warmer. I’m less elsewhere.
The feel of her body on mine is strangely addicting.
That hot, wet, tightness, gliding up and down my shaft.
The way she leans onto me, her breasts on my chest, her mouth devouring mine.
The damn feel of this woman might be enough to kill me.
She rides me like she’s enjoying this just as much as I am.
In the dark, between kisses, she sweetly whines, “Dario, fuck.”
I grab her ass over the sheets and squeeze, making her buck on me harder.
Faster. I sit up, forcing her to do the same, then wrap my arms around her waist to bring her against me.
I like it this way—her on top, our bodies as close as possible.
Her scent is heady, and I tear through her lace with my teeth so I can taste her tits.
She squirms against me, riding for all she’s worth right before she’s coming on my cock, a dance of pleasure. Her voice cracks when she pours curses on my ears. When she shakes this time, it’s for all the right reasons, and one of them makes me come too.
Afterward, she stays close, her hand flat on my chest, and her breathing slows and evens out. I lie in the dark and let it be exactly what it is.
In my professional life—both of them—the categories overlap frequently enough that I stopped tracking the boundary a long time ago. It was cleaner not to. If something is useful and I want to do it, fine. If something is useful and I don’t want to do it, I do it anyway. Most of the time.
If something is useless and I want to do it—that’s the category I’m least practiced at, the one I’ve kept the smallest, and it’s the one that seems to be expanding.
There was no profit in what I did tonight. And I did it anyway.
I don’t examine it further. I close my eyes and fall into a dreamless sleep.