There’s something on the nightstand.
A brick of cash. Banded, fat, careless, sitting next to my dead alarm clock like it grew there overnight. No note. Of course no note. What would it even say? Thanks. Sorry. See you soon. He doesn’t need to write it down. He told me in the desert, he told me in the club, now he’s told me in the worst plainest language there is, a stack of hundreds on a secondhand nightstand, the only kind of sentence this man writes.
I don’t touch it.
I want to, is the ugly truth. Not because I want his money, though God knows I need it, the rent, the knee that still needs a surgery I keep not scheduling, the long list of things money fixes. I want to touch it because touching it would make last night a transaction, something clean with a price on it, a bad decision I could write off and move past.
That’s what the cash is for. It turns me into the thing he told the whole club I was, a kept girl, a man’s pretty habit, somebody who got paid. If I take it, I know exactly what I am this morning.
So I don’t take it. I leave it sitting there next to the clock, his cold flat answer to a question I never asked, and I let myself be something with no name on it instead.
I lie in my cold bed in the gray light with my whole life rearranged around me, one thought running on a loop, clean, useless, far too late.
What in God’s name did I just get into?
My phone buzzes on the floor where it fell out of my jeans. Then again. Then a third time, fast, the specific rhythm of the group chat waking up. The girls. The ordinary world. Crystal already typing a paragraph about something that doesn’t matter, the day starting like it’s any other day, like the woman reading the screen is the same one who got dressed for work yesterday.
She isn’t. I’m not sure who the woman reading the screen is now. Somebody with a man’s money on her nightstand, his marks on her hip, his name still warm in her mouth, pretending none of it happened so she can answer a text about brunch.
I look at the cash. I look at the phone. I look at the dent in the pillow next to mine.
Then I reach down and pick up the phone, because at least that I know how to answer.
5
SEVASTIAN
Ileave before she wakes.
I tell myself it’s practical. I have a city to run, a body in the desert, a second body that turned up overnight in a parking garage downtown wearing one of my men’s faces. So the truth is I don’t have time to lie in a stripper’s bed watching the light come up. That’s the version I take down the stairs with me. It’s a good version. It has the advantage of being mostly true.
The other part, the part I leave on the nightstand with a brick of cash so I won’t have to look at it, is that I don’t trust what staying would mean. I have spent a very long time being a man who wants nothing he can’t walk away from. I walked away from her bed at four in the morning with my chest doing something I did not authorize. I’m furious about it in the only way I let myself be furious anymore, which is quietly, completely, my face giving back nothing at all.
By six I’m at Dust to Dust, and the casino does what the casino always does. It makes me feel like myself.
She’s a beauty at this hour, my gold-veined monster, empty of whales and noise. The floor sits dim and hushed, the slot banks sleeping, the domed ceiling overhead painted like a cathedral I’ll never set foot in for any honest reason. A few servers drift through in last night’s costumes, killing time before their shifts end.
The cleaning crews work down the slot banks with their carts, scrubbing last night out of the carpet, perfume, smoke, spilled gin, the faint cold metal smell of money that’s been through ten thousand hands. They go quiet and polite when I pass, the way the whole world tends to when I pass. I built a palace to wash dirty money through. I named it Dust to Dust because I have a sense of humor about what I am, even if nobody else is allowed to laugh.
Roma falls into step beside me at the elevator. He’s been awake as long as I have. You wouldn’t know it. He hands me a coffee I didn’t ask for, which is the nearest thing to affection either of us permits before noon.
“You look like hell,” he offers.
“You’re fired.”
“Okay.” He produces the second coffee he was holding behind his back and gives me that one too. I rehire him.
“They’re all upstairs,” he says. “Vadim got in twenty minutes ago. Everyone’s twitchy.”
“They should be twitchy. We lost a man.”
“Yuri.” Roma says the name flat. “Found him in the Sands garage, level four. Two in the chest, one in the head. Professional.”
“Morozov sending a thank-you note for the desert.”
“That’s what the room thinks.”
I drink the coffee. It’s good. Roma knows how I take it, knows a hundred small things about me, and he is the only man alive I’d turn my back on without thinking twice. There’s a short list of people in this world I trust. It fits on one hand with fingers to spare. Most days I’m grateful it’s that short, because a short list is a list you can keep alive.
