The light changes — the last of the afternoon going gold and then amber and then the deep blue that means the sun is gone and the city is taking over, filling the windows from below with its grid of light. I watch it happen from the sofa.
At some point my hand finds the sketchbook.
I don't decide to reach for it. My body makes the decision before I do, the pencil stub already between my fingers, the cheap notebook open to a fresh page. It's what I do when I can't think anymore.
I draw his hands.
From memory — sharp, certain. The long fingers, the lines of the knuckles before the damage. I get that down first, the hands as they should look. Then I draw what was actually there: the split skin across the knuckles, the swollen joints, the left middle finger sitting at a slightly wrong angle now. The pencil stub is worn almost to the wood and I lean into the pressure, pressing harder where the graphite won't cooperate, my palm warming with the friction. The lines come fast. I smudge a shadow with the side of my thumb and the graphite bleeds across my skin in a dark streak, and I keep going.
The bandages I wrapped him in. The neat white gauze, the careful even layers. I know what they cover now.
Then I turn to the next page and I draw the scars.
I do this from memory too, which surprises me — I didn't know I'd looked that closely. The thin white lines on the forearms, fading at the edges, the kind that accumulate over years of the same recurring trauma. The puckered mark on the shoulder, raised, irregular, not a clean wound. The ridge along the lower ribs, slightly thickened, the line of something that healed without help.
My pencil scratches across the paper. I don't think. I just let the lines come.
8 - Logan
The meeting has been running for twenty minutes and I haven’t heard a word of it.
Jimmy is talking. Someone else is talking — one of the security leads, running through updated protocols for the service entrance. I have the relevant files open in front of me. My pen is in my hand. The notes I've been taking for the last hour are clean and precise, each line correctly placed, and I have no memory of writing any of them.
There's static where my attention should be. A low continuous hiss that started three days ago. Since she held my damaged hands in both of hers and worked the gauze in careful even layers and I sat there and let her, which I should never have done, which was a mistake I can trace the exact shape of now.
My skin feels wrong. Too tight. Like something has been pressurizing beneath it for days and the outer layer is beginning to fail.
I'm hard. Have been for the better part of an hour. I'm aware of it the way I'm aware of the meeting — from a distance, as a fact I'm filing without processing. I'm thinking about her in that penthouse right now. Is she at the windows? Are her hands moving over that cheap notebook? Is she afraid?
The fear response. What her face does when the fear arrives.
Jimmy says something about containment. About keeping variables controlled, about ensuring the leak in the accounting system doesn't widen before I've identified the source. He pivots to the Zayas probe — the dock worker Gunner flagged, the baitthreads I've been running, whether any of the traps have moved yet. I wrote the original security architecture for these accounts. The breach is elegant, precise. Whoever built it understands how I think. The Zayas are circling and the traps are set and all of it requires my attention.
I hear none of it.
The pressure behind my sternum is almost audible. My right hand is flat on the table and I watch it, briefly, and notice that my fingers have gone slightly white at the knuckles.
Jimmy makes a note on his tablet. Looks up at me, waiting for something — confirmation, direction, anything.
I stand.
Someone is mid-sentence. The words continue for two more seconds and then stop, registering my movement, waiting for whatever has caused the interruption.
I say nothing. I pick up my jacket from the back of the chair and I walk out, and the door closes behind me without drama, and the hallway beyond it is quiet.
I keep walking. Past the mezzanine railing, past the stairs, toward the service exit and the parking structure beyond. I open the glove compartment before I start the engine. The mask is there — white, blank, where it's been for days. I leave it where it is and pull out of the structure and into the street, and it isn't until I'm three blocks east, moving through neon and traffic, that I reach across and set it on the passenger seat.
Miami at eight p.m. The windows are up, the city moving past in its indifferent neon, and the mask is on the seat beside me.
Fear, not sex. The arrangement was explicit.I stated those terms. I know what I said. I'm not confused about what I'm doing.
Sex is separate. Explicit consent. Renegotiation required.The rules existed because I knew what I was — knew thatwithout a container, without structure, without the bright line between what I'd agreed to and what I wanted, I would take. She didn't consent to this. She answered an ad for fear.
I am driving toward her anyway.
Father’s face arrives once — a flash, not a memory, more like a blueprint. The ring on his right hand, heavy gold, catching the light as his arm moved. I spent years learning to read him from across a room.You take what's yours, mijo.
I look like him. I have always looked like him. I thought I'd built myself into something else.
