She walked out.
I let her.
The two sentences sit side by side and gnaw at each other like dogs under a table. I lean back against the mantel, palms flat again, and look at the fire because it gives me something to stareat that can’t stare back. The restraint is the part of me I respect in daylight. The anger at that restraint is the part that makes me better at this than men who call their hunger honesty.
She didn’t run.
She trembled, but she didn’t run.
I pour another half inch and drink it because I need the taste to be wine now and not the echo of her. The liquid cuts through the ghost and leaves something simpler: purpose.
You built a house to heal,the accusation states,and used it like a stage.
Not yet, I answer the voice that likes to prosecute. But the set dressing is in place, and the audience is just me.
I learned this once the way you learn anything that matters: night after night beside a woman who wouldn’t hand over the razor blade until I taught my body to be boring at 3 a.m. She had a laugh that came out sideways, a scar at her hairline from a bottle someone threw in a kitchen she still called home because the English language does not supply enough words to fix that. She curled in a blanket and stared at the grout line on the therapy room floor and told me she didn’t need a man to save her. I told her I didn’t need to. I told her I needed her alive in the morning. On the sixth night, she handed me the blade because she was tired of pretending she wanted to keep it. Power through care is a dangerous thrill. Tonight I felt the edge of that thrill when Aurora’s mouth opened on mine.
It excites and frightens me.
The fear is a good sign. It means a line is visible.
“Reid,” I say into the bone mic, because I need a witness who isn’t a priest. “Online?”
“Always,” he says. He’s fifty feet from me and three floors away, eyes on the same lines I’m starting to draw.
“You wanted gradual orientation,” he says, a statement that leaves room for me to betray my plan.
“Change of plan,” I say. The smile finds my mouth without permission, and I let it because there’s no one here to mistake it for triumph. “She’s already halfway inside. We need to move faster.”
“Define faster,” he says. He doesn’t argue with the premise, because he wouldn’t win. He asks me to make my terms clear.
“Evenings,” I say. “Private studio blocks. No staff in the room. Door open. I guide the work. We shift fromtourtopractice.If she wants to know what we keep and why, she learns at the canvas. Eyes, then hands. There’s a mural study in the pilot wing we can use. It’s nothing but at the same time it’s everything.”
“You want a timeline?”
“Three nights,” I say. “By the time she realizes what we’re doing, she’ll be asking for it.”
He lets that sit in the line between us. “Asking for what exactly?”
“Instruction,” I say, clean as surgical steel. “Structure. Me. All three in one shape.”
“You will keep your hands to the protocol,” he says, which is how a good soldier asks a bad priest not to sin. “No closed doors or sleep-hour visits.”
“Protocol holds,” I say. “Except where I’m rewriting it.”
He grunts like a man who accepts he’s not stopping the train and chooses instead to oil the tracks. “We’ll keep Lila scheduled. Simone can build her a retreat inside the retreat. Jonah posts his wall like a saint. The senator’s office stays distracted by its own reflection. If the press sniffs, I’ll hear it through the floor.”
“Good,” I say. “Your job is to buy the quiet. Mine is to use it.”
He clicks off so he doesn’t have to say what he thinks of that sentence.
I pace because stillness now would turn into fantasy too easily, and fantasy in the wrong room becomes something you mistake for a plan. The salon walls throw my shadow back in pieces. I pass the window and catch the glass using my face like a canvas: dark-eyed, jaw set, a man who can pass as civilized until you make the mistake of turning your back on the part of him that runs toward fires. The rain streaks the black behind my reflection in slow veins. I could leave the room. I could walk into the corridor and breathe air that hasn’t been held hostage by cedar and heat. I don’t. The room is a choice I made. I stand in it until choice stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like ownership.
I see it, because the body sees first. The room in night-mode. Lamps only. The easel set for her height; I adjust the angle half a degree so nicotine-stained old men in my head stop complaining about technique. She stands in front of paper we will both pretend is the only witness. Shirt sliding off one shoulder because she’s working, not seducing me; paint on the back of her hand up to the wrist; her hair dragged into something that keeps it out of her eyes. I step behind her and fit my body to the negative space she leaves because that is how you correct a stance without turning a person away from the work. I take her right hand in mine and move the brush through air first, then over wet color, long strokes down and across so the mark follows breath instead of fighting it. My mouth is close enough to speak softly and be heard:loosen; see; breathe; not there—here.The art world would call it mentorship and pretend not to see what is obvious: that sometimes the lesson is the heat coming off the man behind you and the fact that he doesn’t make you smaller when he brings you nearer.
Is this therapy or is it seduction dressed in lab coat airs? Yes. It can be both. I’ve saved lives with both more often than men who condemn this sentence have saved lives with either.
I close the folio because my hands know when ink has said enough and the rest will come down to how well I keep them where they belong. The empty glass on the table catches the firelight and throws it back up the wall like a warning, or an applause cue. I leave it where it is and start to move because motion spends energy faster than thought.
