5. Ezra
EZRA
The fourth-grade teacher is named Connor Reyes. He teaches across the hall from her classroom and he’s been texting Dove—I know this because her phone lights up at the same time most days and she smiles at the screen the way of someone who’s been surprised by something they weren’t expecting.
I’ve read his messages. I know his full name, his apartment address, his vehicle, where he gets his coffee. He asked her to dinner on a Tuesday and she said she was busy and he said some other time and she said sure in the way people say sure when they don’t want to close the door entirely.
I’m at the scope when his car pulls up to her building.
He buzzes her door. She comes out in the green dress with the small buttons, still getting her bag together, moving fast. He’s waiting on the sidewalk, good-looking in the kind of uncomplicated way I am not, and he smiles when he sees her and touches her arm.
She doesn’t lean into the touch. She doesn’t pull away.
I put the scope down.
I do the work that night. The kind of work I’ve done for eighteen years—quiet, efficient, the kind nobody sees happen.
Connor Reyes goes home from school and parks in his usual spot and I’m already there.
I wait for him in his apartment the way I waited for Dove—except the difference between what I do to Connor Reyes and what I did to Dove is the difference between my entire life and what my life has become.
I keep it clean. I keep it fast. He doesn’t suffer—he’s a schoolteacher, not a cartel accountant.
I sit in his apartment after and feel nothing about it.
That’s how it’s always been. Eighteen years of the same nothing.
The only person who makes me feel anything is across the alley watching television in her sleep shirt.
She doesn’t hear from him the next day. I watch through the scope—her phone stays dark at the usual hour and she looks at it, and her face does the small shift that isn’t quite disappointment and isn’t quite relief. She sets the phone down and goes back to making dinner.
I watch her make the pasta. Standing at the counter because she doesn’t like sitting alone at the table—the pushed-in chair, the unused placemat.
I watch her eat it. She’s not on her phone tonight.
She’s looking at nothing, the middle-distance stare she gets when she’s thinking about something she hasn’t worked out how she feels about yet.
She goes to the window. Holds the coffee mug and looks across the alley. I’m at the scope and the apartment is dark and she can’t see the glint from this angle at this hour. She doesn’t know I’m there. She knows I’m there.
She stays at the window a long time.
That night when I come across she’s quiet.
She lets me in—she’s stopped not-letting-me-in; the chain goes up when I leave but not when I arrive—and she pours two glasses of water and sets one on my side of the table, which is always the right side, and she sits across from me and looks at me.
“Connor didn’t come to school today,” she says.
“Didn’t he.”
She gives me the look she’s been developing—the one that knows something happened and is working out how much she wants to know.
“His classroom was dark. Nobody’s heard from him. His car’s not at his apartment.” She’s watching my face. “They’re calling it a missing person.”
I sip the water. I don’t say anything.
“Ezra.” Her voice is very level. “You’ve been reading my messages.”
“Yes.”
“You saw the texts.”
“Yes.”
“And Connor is missing.” She puts the glass down. “What did you do?”
“What I do.”
The silence that follows is different from any silence we’ve had. She’s re-running everything—the scope, the police tape across the alley, the man whose contract he completed, the word job and what it means when he says it. She’s adding Connor to the list of things that don’t survive his attention.
“He was texting you,” I say. “He wanted to take you to dinner.”
“People are allowed to text me.”
“Not him. Not anymore.”
Her hand goes to the table edge. Knuckles white.
“You killed him,” she says.
“He miscalculated.”
“He was a schoolteacher. He taught fourth graders how to do fractions.” Her voice is tight but she hasn’t stood up. She hasn’t moved toward the door. “You killed a man because he texted me.”
“I killed a man because he touched your arm on the sidewalk and you didn’t pull away and I sat at the scope and knew that if I didn’t handle it I’d spend the rest of the week thinking about his hand on your skin instead of doing my job.”
“That’s—“
“Honest.” I watch her face. “I told you what I am. You’ve been in the apartment where I kept the scope aimed at a man I was hired to kill. You know what I do. The police tape across the alley wasn’t a secret.”
“Connor is different.”
“Connor is the same. He was between me and something I want. I remove things that are between me and what I want. That’s the job. That’s always been the job.”
She pushes back from the table. Three steps to the kitchen, turn, three steps back—the thinking-with-her-body pace I know from the scope.
“I should leave,” she says. “I should walk out of this apartment and call the police and tell them about the man across the alley and Connor and the scope and the break-ins and all of it.”
“You should.”
“And you would let me.”
“Yes.”
“And then what? What would you do?”
“Disappear. I’m very good at it.”
“And I’d never see you again.”
“No.”
She stands in the kitchen. Both hands flat on the counter. Close enough that her pulse is visible at her throat.
“I should be terrified of you,” she says.
“You should be.”
“I’m not.” She turns. “I’m furious. I’m sick about Connor. And I’m not terrified of you and I don’t know what that makes me.”
“It makes you honest.”
“It makes me complicit.” She comes back to the table. Doesn’t sit—stands on the other side, both hands flat on the surface. “If I stay. If I don’t call. That makes me complicit in what happened to Connor.”
“Yes.”
She looks at me for a long time.
“Don’t do that again without telling me first,” she says. “If you’re going to—if someone is going to disappear because of me, I want to know about it before it happens.”
Not don’t do it. Not get out. She’s moving the line further into the dark and she’s the one doing the moving.
“I’ll tell you,” I say.
“Good.” She comes around the table. Stops in front of me. “Stand up.”
I stand. Five-two to my six-three. Both her hands go to my chest—flat, deliberate, different from that first night. Not the push. The contact of a woman who just decided to stay in a room with a killer.
“I’m furious at you,” she says.
“Good.”
“I’m going to stay furious.” She’s pulling at my shirt. “Connor is dead because of me. That doesn’t go away because I?—“
“He’s dead because of me. You didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t stop you.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I know now.” She pulls me down by the collar. “And I’m still standing here.”
She kisses me first. Her hands in my shirt, her mouth hard against mine, and she bites my lower lip. Real bite. Teeth into flesh.
I make a sound I don’t usually make.
She pulls back and looks at the mark. “That’s for Connor,” she says.
Not forgiveness. Something more complicated than that. She pulls me down again.
I take her to the floor. Not the wall—the floor, because the anger in her is lower than that, deeper, the kind that needs weight on it. I push her down, get her skirt up, and my hand wraps in her hair and her face turns to the side against the tile and she makes a sound that isn’t protest.
Her pussy is soaking. I push two fingers in and she gasps and grips my wrist but doesn’t pull my hand away. I work them slow and watch her face pressed to the kitchen floor.
“You’re choosing to be here,” I say. “Right now. With the man who killed Connor Reyes.”
“Don’t—“
“Your pussy’s soaking.” I curl my fingers and find the spot I’ve learned from weeks of this body. She makes the sound—the real one, the one from the wall, the one she can’t muffle. “You know what I did and you’re dripping on my hand.”
“You had no right?—“
I push my fingers deeper and rub my thumb over her clit and her hips jerk toward me. “You’re soaking and you’ve had your hand in my shirt since you told me to stand up. You were wet before I walked in.”
“I—“ Her mouth tightens. “Since I heard about Connor. Since I knew. That’s when.”
The honesty of it hits me in the chest. She got wet knowing I killed a man for her. She’s been carrying that since this morning.
“Good girl,” I say.
I pull my hand back and open my jeans. She hears it—the belt, the zipper—and her back arches off the floor, presenting, her body ahead of her mind again.
I push into her from behind. Flat on the floor. My weight on her back, my hand in her hair, my cock going deep while she grips the tile.
Christ. Her cunt takes me like it’s trying to keep me out and pull me in at the same time.
Swollen, tight, resisting every inch and then clenching around me once I’m in.
I hold still inside her and feel the involuntary grip of her—the rhythmic squeeze her body does when she’s full of me, the one she can’t control.
I’m harder than I’ve ever been in my life and I can feel my cock pulse inside her.
“Still furious?” I say against her ear.
“I hate you—“ Her hips are pushing back, meeting every thrust. “You killed a man because he—god—because he texted me?—“
“Because he touched you.” I drive in hard and she gasps.
“No one fucking touches you.” I grind into her deep and hold.
Her cunt clenches so tight around me I have to stop moving or I’ll come.
“Connor touched your arm in a parking lot and I put him down for free. Didn’t even charge for it. That’s what you do to me.”
She curses my name. A vivid curse that I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of the week.
“Feel how hard I am.” I pull back and drive in and the wet sound of her fills the kitchen. “I killed a man for you and I’m harder than I’ve ever been in my fucking life. Your cunt knows it too—you’re gripping me so tight I can barely move.”
Her thighs go tighter. Her breath goes ragged. The grip of her pussy right before she goes over—I know this signal and I’m barely holding on, my cock throbbing inside her, every clench of her threatening to finish me.
“Come,” I say against her ear. “Come on my cock. Let me feel it.”
She comes cursing my name. A real curse, vivid and raw, then my name after—and her cunt locks around me, clamping, the rhythm of her orgasm milking my cock in waves, and I last exactly two strokes past hers before I slam in and hold and come so hard my arms buckle.
I fill her. Stay buried. Feel every pulse of it and every aftershock of hers around me.
I hold her after. On the kitchen floor. Her legs not reliable. She lets me.
“I hate that I can still feel you,” she says eventually.
Her face against my shoulder. “Every single day. Going to school, sitting in a meeting, standing at the board. Connor’s classroom is dark and his desk is cleared out and I’m standing at my whiteboard carrying the cum of the man who killed him. ”
She stops.
“That’s what’s wrong with me.”
I put my hand in her hair. Hold her there.
“Nothing is wrong with you,” I say.
She hums something that’s neither yes nor no.
“I’m still furious,” she says.
“Good,” I say.
She stays furious. She also falls asleep with her palm flat on my chest, over the beat of it.
I stay until her breathing goes deep. Lie there in the dark with her hand on my chest looking at the ceiling.
Eighteen years of contracts, not one moment of wanting to stay put.
Not one room I was reluctant to leave. I used to cross out of cities before the feeling of familiarity could settle—familiar meant comfortable, comfortable meant slow, slow got people killed.
I am not leaving before six.
It’s the latest I’ve stayed all week. Next week I’ll make it seven. The week after that I’m going to stop counting the hour and start counting the mornings, because counting mornings is what a man does when he’s stopped planning to leave.