“Yes.”
Another long breath from him, steadying. “And you need to feel the edge before you step over it.”
I don’t answer. I don’t have to. The mesh carries my silence across just fine.
“Talk to me,” he says, and it sounds nothing less than a demand.
“I don’t…”I start, then stop. Honesty or nothing. “I don’t want to feel perfect. I want to feel real. I want one night where I choose something, and I let it happen, and it isn’t because someone told me to.”
There’s a scrape—the soft sound of him shifting a knee on the worn kneeler. “You just chose to say that out loud,” he says. “That counts.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not.” He lets the quiet settle again, and it’s respectful. “I have a ritual on this night. It’s my birthday. I used to…make bad choices out of spite for the day. Now I make better ones. I ask. I wait. If the answer is no, I let that be the end of it. I leave the room exactly as I found it.”
My skin prickles. “Why this night?”
“Because once, doors closed on me and didn’t open when they should have,” he says, plain. “So now I make sure I’m the kind of man who holds the door open. That’s the shape of it.”
The habit suddenly feels less like a joke and more like a mirror. I pull a breath through my nose and lay my palm against the mesh. It’s cool against my flesh. I imagine the pattern denting my lifeline, my heartline, invoking its own authority.
He doesn’t rush. He raises his hand, stopping short of the screen, his own palm hovering like a promise that can keep being only a promise if that’s what I want. “Okay?” he asks.
The word trembles at the back of my throat and still manages to come out sure. “Okay.”
Heat meets heat through the thin barrier, no skin, just nearness. My heartbeat stutters into something deliberate. He’s close enough that I can smell soap and a trace of smoke that isn’t the church’s. Close enough that I can hear the difference between the breath he takes and the breath he doesn’t.
“What do you want?” he asks, his voice roughened at the edges, not by impatience but by restraint.
I close my eyes so I can hear the truth when it answers. “I want to be the girl who does what she wants and takes what she wants and doesn’t feel guilty about it.”
“Then do it,” he murmurs. “I’ll help you…all you have to do is say yes.”
A heartbeat passes. Then, “Yes.”
A small sound leaves him—gratitude, relief, pride—I can’t tell—and his fingers curl around the wood, careful to keep the barrier. He doesn’t press through. He doesn’t test it. He honors it like a line in a psalm.
“What’s your name, Kitty Cat?” he says after a moment, gentler than the word deserves. “Your real one. Only if you want to give it.”
I press my lips together. “Will you give me yours?” He nods. “Okay. Caterina.”
“It’s Cayce,” he returns, and spells it when I give him a skeptical look. “I swear.”
The names, slight variations of the ones we gave each other earlier, hover in the air between us. We give no last names, nothing that will anchor us outside this carved little box. Just a way to aim our voices.
“Caterina,” he says again, trying it out like a note he intends to hold steady. The way the syllables fit his mouth does something to my knees. “I don’t know…maybe I like Kitty more.”
“Your rules,” I say, because his voice is making me want to purr, and I need the rules laid out where I can see them. I see the flash of a grin through the mesh, as though he knows.
“First,” he says, “you can end anything with one word. Sanctuary. I stop. No questions.”
“Sanctuary,” I repeat, tasting it, owning it. “Okay.”
“Second. We don’t turn tonight into penance tomorrow. No hating yourself for something you chose.”
My throat gets tight. “Agreed.”
“Third,” he adds, a hint of wryness threading the heat, “we keep our feet on the floor until you ask me not to.”
