His footsteps.
Gray has been pacing. Not constantly. But every so often, downstairs, I hear him do a slow walk from the front door to the back, pause, then go up to the office. He hasn't slept either.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling beams and try to figure out what I feel about a man who would tie me to a chair to keep me alive.
The honest answer is something I'm going to take up with my therapist when I get home.
I've been down this road before, in a softer version. Three years ago, a thing with a photographer named Deon who knew his way around a knot. We weren't serious. He was patient and he was skilled and he taught me what the wordsubspacemeant in a way a textbook can't. Then he took a gig in Berlin and I took a promotion and we faded out the way those things do.
I haven't let anyone near that part of me since. Not because I didn't want to. Because most men who think they know what they're doing are one bad conversation away from being a disaster. I can smell an inexperienced top from across a bar, and every one of them thinks he's the exception.
Gray isn't inexperienced. Gray has never even said the word out loud to me and I know it in my teeth.
It's the way he saidcontingency.
Flat. Uninterested. Like he was telling me where the generator was.
A man who's done it. Not a man who's read about it.
I flip onto my side and groan into the pillow.
This is the absolute worst time for my body to decide it has opinions.
At two inthe morning I give up.
I pull on a cardigan over my tee, leave the leggings, and pad down the hall in bare feet. The office door is open. A strip of yellow lamplight cuts across the floorboards.
I stop in the doorway.
He's at the desk. Laptop open. Two phones beside it. A notebook with handwriting so clean it looks like engineering.
He doesn't look up.
"You should be sleeping."
"You should be sleeping."
"I'm working."
"I'm thinking."
He glances up then, and whatever's on his face goes still when he sees me. Just a flicker. A man catching himself.
I come in anyway and sit on the edge of the little leather chair by the bookshelf. Tuck my feet under me.
"Tell me what you've got."
"Confidential."
"Mercer."
"Simone."
I wait.
He sighs.
"Tremblay."
