Declan
Ileft her apartment at nine thirty.
By ten I'm at my desk. Jacket still on because I sat down before I thought about it. The file is open on the secondary monitor. I've been looking at it for forty minutes without adding anything. That's not how I work. I'm either working or I'm not at it. Tonight I'm at it and not working.
She saidyou don't get to want me and also want me smaller.
She was right. I told her she was right. I meant it. I stood in her kitchen and agreed, cleanly, no qualifier, because the alternative was to argue a position I don't hold. That I want her to be less. That I want to take her work from her. That my discomfort weighs more than what she built before I was anywhere in the picture.
I don't want any of that.
What I want is for the men who watch her to look at something else. What I want is for the register of that message to not existin the world. What I want is not available to me. She named that. She was right. I conceded.
***
I do my magic and I set up a few things to increase the security of her chat. Over the last few days I’ve become her unofficial moderator and I take it very seriously.
An alert comes in.
New message to her private tier DM. Keyword threshold triggered.
I open it.
Read it once.
My whole body goes cold.
He describes her street.
Not the name. The detail. The coffee shop on the corner with the green awning. The blue door two buildings east of hers. The quality of the light on her building in the late afternoon, the way it catches the upper windows first.
Details that require standing there. Looking up. Staying.
I read it again. My hands are shaking. I have handled situations that would make most men sick and I did it calmly and I moved on.
My hands are shaking because he described the light on her windows.
He stood on her street. The one with the coffee shop. The one she walks home along. He stood there and looked up at her building the way I have looked up at her building and the difference between him and me is that she knows my name and she chose me and this person has decided he doesn't need to be chosen.
I push back from the desk. I stand up. I sit down. I stand up again.
I want to drive to her apartment right now. I want to be in that building. I want to stand between her and whatever this is with my body if that's what it takes. The want is physical, violent, nothing professional about it.
Someone has been on her street, looking up at her windows, and I left her there forty minutes ago. She's alone in the building he's been watching. The ring light is on. Four thousand people in her chat. She has no idea.
I think about the argument. Her face when she saidyou don't get to want me smaller.Her voice cracking on the word. The raw thing on my face that she saw and told me not to bring across the room.
I think about the afternoon light on her windows and a man I've never met who knows what it looks like and I feel something move through me that I recognize from a long time ago, from before the training and the control and the decades of keeping my hands steady. Something under the professionalism. Under the calm. The thing that makes a man want to find another man and make him understand, physically, permanently, what happens when you go near someone who is his.
I breathe.
I sit down.
I pick up my phone.
She's live. I can see it on the secondary monitor. Stream running, kill count climbing, four thousand people doing what they always do. She went live after I left. The argument happened and I conceded and I left and she set up the ring light and went to work. Because that's who she is. The counter-argument to everything I said was to be exactly herself in the space she built.
I understood that when I walked out her door. I understand it better now. And I need her out of that apartment tonight.
