Lena
THIRTEEN
I drop Opal off at school on a Tuesday morning and watch her run across the blacktop toward who I assume is Bea without a single backward glance.
Not even a wave. Just the blue flash of her backpack and the sound of her voice cutting through all the other voices, already mid-sentence before she reaches her friend, already deep in whatever urgent thing she’s been saving up since yesterday.
Something about their hopscotch victory by the way they hop on one leg as they talk.
I stand at the gate for a moment longer than I need to. She doesn’t look back. She never looks back anymore—she used to, before she was sick, before the bad stretch, when she’d turn and find me with her eyes one last time before going in, as though checking that I was still there.
She doesn’t need to do that now. She knows I’m there. She’s stopped needing the confirmation.
That should feel like a good thing. It does feel like a good thing, at least a little bit.
But it also feels like watching a door close that you didn’t realize was open until the click.
I take the bus back, trying not to cry. The penthouse is quiet when I let myself in—the particular quiet of a weekday morning. No Opal, and Dario’s office door is open. Then water runs in the kitchen, and there’s the low sound of something on the stove. He’s cooking.
It’s funny. Before living here, if I came home and heard sounds in my apartment when I came in, I would have backed out and called the cops. Not that they would have shown up in my neighborhood, but I still would call out of a sense of that’s what you’re supposed to do.
But walking into this apartment, my first thought is not, Get out!
It’s, Oh, I wonder what Dario’s up to now.
Strange that I feel safer with the man blackmailing me into sex than I ever felt on my own.
I drop my bag, go to the kitchen doorway, and lean against it.
He’s at the stove with his back to me, shirt sleeves pushed to the elbow, doing something with a pan that smells like butter and garlic and something herbal I can’t identify from here.
He’s not aware I’m watching him, or if he is, he doesn’t show it.
There’s something about the unselfconsciousness of the way he moves in this kitchen that I find I have to observe for a moment before I trust my voice to come out normally.
I should speak so I don’t startle him when he’s doing something dangerous with a knife. “You’re making lunch.”
He doesn’t turn. “You’re observant.”
“It’s ten thirty.”
“It’ll be lunch by the time it’s ready.”
I sit at the kitchen counter. He’s making something with pasta and what turns out to be a quick sauce that involves more technique than it looks like. I watch him deglaze a pan, and my understanding of what’s happening in that skillet is entirely surface-level. I can cook, but he’s a cook.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I look at it and then look at it again. Are they serious? “I got a job offer.”
He turns at that. “Tell me.”
I tell him as I scan the email. “Peters Logistics. Downtown office. Junior supervisor. The salary is… holy shit. It’s forty percent higher than the call center supervisor job would have been. I can set my hours. An actual title on a business card.” I can’t read the rest because my hand is shaking.
“That’s one hell of an upgrade.”
I nod. The HR manager who called said they’d had three rounds of interviews before they found my application, and it was the strongest in the pool, which she said like it was obvious, like of course it was the strongest, and I had to work not to make a sound when she said that.
Dario goes to the wine rack—it’s eleven in the morning, and he goes to the wine rack—and comes back with a bottle that I can tell from the label is not the kind of wine you drink at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.
He opens it and begins to pour into water cups. I assume that’s because they were closest, but I don’t know anything about wine, so maybe they’re the right glasses for this wine. “It’s not even noon.”
“No drinking before noon is a silly rule made up by Big Sobriety.”
I gasp a laugh, shocked that he made a joke. “You’re funny when you want to be.”
He frowns. “I was serious.”
When I squint at him, the corner of his mouth does that thing it does when he can’t hide his thoughts—a tight flick upward. He’s laughing on the inside, and he can barely contain it.
I grin at him, and he can’t hold back his smile any longer. Eventually, we take the food and the wine out to the balcony, and we eat at the small table out there with the sun moving across the railing. The pasta is very good. The wine is extraordinary.
We eat for a while in the easy quiet that’s been developing between us over the past weeks—the kind that doesn’t require filling, that doesn’t have any social anxiety in it. I’ve never really had that before with anyone, and it’s nice.
“Crazy to me that a forced letter of recommendation got me here.”
“Barely forced. I thought he might piss himself if he didn’t have a reason to leave me.”
“I would have paid to see that.” Just the thought of Reggie that scared is enough to make me smile. I’m not sure what that says about me. Does that even matter? I’m so far down the rabbit hole with Dario that things like morals feel vaguely optional instead of principles to live by.
“I’m sure I could get him to reenact it for you.”
“No, thanks,” I say, chuckling. “You are remarkably comfortable with blackmail. Has anyone ever told you that?”
He shrugs. “A psychologist or two. Blackmail gets a bad reputation because most people don’t use it right. But it’s a tool. Like a hammer.”
“You know what they say about hammers, right? That if that’s all you use, every problem looks like a nail?”
He noodles on that for a brief moment. “Guess I’m a carpenter, then.”
I snort at the thought. “You’re in a surprisingly light mood today. Any reason why?”
“Rough morning at Marco’s.”
“And that put you in a good mood?”
He nearly smiles. “I’ve often found that when I’m prone to dark thoughts, letting my outward self indulge in whimsy keeps me from saying those dark thoughts out loud or acting upon them. A distraction technique. Usually prevents me from acting irrationally.”
“You? Irrational? No!” I hope my sarcasm cracks through his thick skull.
He pauses, and I can’t tell if he’s considering what I just said or if he’s too lost in his own thoughts to notice my sarcasm.
Dario’s brain moves a dozen levels at a time, and sometimes I struggle to keep up.
I’m not sure if that’s because he’s so much smarter than me, so much crazier than me, or both.
He continues, “Which is not to say that all of my dark thoughts are irrational. Most of mine are not. They’re deeply rational but unacceptable to traditional society. So, avoiding acting upon them prevents me from unpleasantries like ostracization and prison.”
“By that logic, society is irrational.”
That gets a genuine laugh out of him. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I mean, some parts are—”
“Humanity is busy drinking, dosing, and fucking their meat sacks into oblivion, like they’re actively searching for the self-destruct button.
They pollute their air, water, and land for the benefit of pieces of paper in a rancid contest to see who can collect the most of it.
The powers that be pit genders, races, generations, sexualities, and religions against each other, all in the hope that no one notices that the powers that be have been doing this for thousands of years in order to manipulate people into giving them more money, land, resources, privileges… yes. Society is irrational. By design.”
I don’t know why I feel the need to defend society. But I find that I can’t. “For a man who does some questionable things, I can’t question that logic.” I clink my glass to his, and we drink.
I’m not much of a drinker, but we’ve nearly finished the bottle when my mind floats in wine. “None of this is what I thought my life would look like when I was twenty-one in a business school classroom.”
“What did you think life would look like?”
“I almost finished my degree,” I say, which isn’t something I’ve said out loud to very many people.
“I was good at it. Really good at it, actually—I know that sounds like something people say, but I mean it with specifics. Financial modeling, market analysis, and strategy courses. I was the person people wanted to work with on group projects. The one people copied answers from on tests.”
He’s watching me with the quality of attention he brings to everything I say, and I keep going.
“I found out I was pregnant during my second year. I didn’t tell anyone for a while—not my professors, not my roommate, nobody.
I just kept going to class and doing the work and pretending to myself that I was going to figure it out.
” I turn my wineglass in my hands. “I dropped out at thirty-two weeks. The pregnancy had gotten rough—I was on modified bed rest, I couldn’t work, I was back in my mom’s apartment in a city I’d spent four years trying to leave.
And then Opal was born, and she was so—”
I stop. The fact that he lets me talk and he listens without listening for when he can chime in…
it means something to me. I don’t get that much.
Most people don’t have a conversation with a single mom.
They listen enough to know when they can say what’s on their mind, which is nearly always unsolicited advice, as if she can’t possibly know what she’s doing, since she’s a single mom.
Not Dario. Even when I pause, he’s listening.
“She was so herself, even from the beginning. Just completely her own person from day one. And I thought, okay. This is what happened. This is what my life is now. And I rebuilt from there.”
Dario is quiet for a moment. “What would you have done with the degree?”