"You want to know me," I say. Not a question.
"I want to know who I kissed. Because the man in the hardware store and the man in the gallery and the man in my studio—they're not the same person. You shift. You adjust. You show me different surfaces depending on what you think I need to see, and I can't tell which one is real."
"They're all real."
"That's not how it works."
"It is for me."
She shakes her head. She's frustrated—I can see it in the tension of her shoulders, the way her hands grip each other. She came here for answers and I'm giving her riddles, and she's a woman who works with her hands, who understands the world through material and force, not through abstraction and evasion.
"Why am I here?" she asks. "What do you want from me?"
The question. The real question. The one that everything else has been circling around—the nods at the bodega, the walk home, the jacket, the studio, the kiss. What do I want?
I want everything. I want to know her the way I know an operation—completely, from every angle, with no detail unexplored. I want to be in the room when she wakes up. I want to watch her work from inside the studio instead of through a camera. I want to hear her say my name the way she said it in the studio—rough, breathless, like it was pulled from her against her will.
I want things I can't name and don't deserve and will probably destroy by wanting them.
"I want you to stay," I say.
She stares at me. The apartment is silent—no street noise at this height, no neighbors, just the hum of systems running in walls. My world, sanitized and controlled and empty.
"Everything about you is a locked door," she says. "This apartment. Your answers. The way you look at me like you already know something I haven't told you. I feel like I'mstanding outside a building with no entrance, and you keep inviting me in without showing me the door."
"Maybe the door is you."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"It means I don't know how to do this. I don't have the architecture for it—for letting someone in. I've never had it. The apartment isn't a choice. It's a symptom. I don't know how to make a space that has a person in it, because every space I've been in since I was twelve years old has been built to keep people out."
I didn't plan to say that. The words spill out like weld spatter—hot, uncontrolled, landing where they land. I watch her face change as they hit—the suspicion softening, not into trust but into something else. Recognition. She knows what it is to build a life around absence. She knows what it costs.
"What happened when you were twelve?" she asks.
"My mother died."
The silence that follows is different from any silence we've had. Not charged. Not combative. Just—open. A space where something has been said that can't be unsaid, and both of us are standing in the aftermath.
"I'm sorry," she says. Simply. No performance of sympathy. Just the words, given cleanly.
I nod. My throat is tight. I haven't told anyone about my mother in years—the Order knows, of course, it's in my file, but I've never said the words voluntarily, as an offering, to another person. The exposure feels like standing in a cold wind without a coat.
She looks at me and I look at her and the distance between us is still ten feet but it's not the same ten feet.Something has been exchanged. Something that changes the weight distribution.
"I should go," she says. But she doesn't move.
"You should," I agree. And I take a step toward her.
Not fast. Not sudden. Slow, deliberate, the way I crossed the studio—each step a choice that doesn't feel like a choice. She watches me come. Her chin lifts. Her eyes don't leave mine.
"If I stay," she says, and her voice has dropped, roughened, "I need to know that what happens is real. Not a performance. Not a surface. If you touch me and it's another locked door, I'll—"
"It's not."
"How do I know that?"
I reach her. Close enough to feel the warmth of her body through the green dress. Close enough to see the pulse in her throat, rapid, visible. Close enough to smell her—the soap, the vanilla, the trace of metal that never entirely leaves her skin.
