A long moment stretches. Then, with the unruffled patience of someone who has been doing this for a very long time, "Fine."
She concedes it the way she concedes everything I actually mean—cleanly, without argument, filing it away for later.
"Then eat."
The tray is already on the floor. I don't remember it arriving. I don't remember the slot opening or the ceramic sound or anything between the last hit and now, which means time passed without me in it again.
The food is rice. Something beige alongside it. It smells like nothing, which is better than what the room smells like.
"You eat," she says, "and then you get what you need."
What you need.
The wanting is already building. It never fully leaves. It just ebbs and surges, and right now it's surging, pressingagainst the inside of my skin. Everything burns, like little coals scattered underneath my flesh.
I think abouther.
Blonde. Green eyes.
I can see them now, the image steadying briefly. Green like something living, like the color of the world outside this room, which I’m beginning to forget the texture of.
Her mouth, full and angellike, it does something specific when she's thinking. A slight compression on the left side, and I know because I watched her for…for how long?
Memories scatter, flow, fade, explode.
We’re in the kitchen. It arrives without warning, whole and specific, and for a moment, the cell disappears entirely and I’m somewhere else.
Paris. Morning.
The unique quality of light through the kitchen window, low and gold, catching the steam off the oven, and the smell—God, the smell of it, apple and cinnamon and brown sugar, warm and sweet and so far from copper and bleach that my body doesn't know what to do with the memory of it.
I was making muffins.
There’s no way to explain that to anyone who knows what I am. What I do. The things my hands have been used for. But it’s her favorite, and I wanted to see her face when she smelled them. Because I wanted to do something with my hands that left something living, that told her I loved her.
She'd come out of the bedroom still half-asleep, hair loose, wearing my shirt. The expression on her face. I've committed worse things to memory with less effort than it took to keep that expression. The specific softness of it. The way her eyes went from sleep-blurredto present, finding me at her stove, and something settled in her face like a thing coming home.
And then I fucked her on the counter.
God, it hurts. This memory hurts like my chest’s being hacked open. Because I want it…I want the memory now. Not in the past. Now. Present.
My hands on her hips, pulling her to the edge of the counter with the muffins still in the oven behind me, and she smiled when she looked at my face and understood what I was going to do.
I want to stay in this memory. I want to live in it. The weight of her thighs in my hands, the way she'd gripped the counter edge and tipped her head back, and I'd watched her come apart right there in her kitchen with the smell of apple and cinnamon filling the air and her mouth saying?—
Nazareth.
My name.
My actual name.
Not the designation, not the professional title, not Reth or boy or any of the other handles people have used for me across thirty years. Nazareth. Warm. Like she was glad the word existed. Like saying it was something she'd chosen rather than something she was required to do.
I can see her face, her lips parting with wild breaths as I fucked her, her inner walls clamping down on my cock while she came.
Afterward, she stayed on the counter, legs spread because I asked her to. Because she trusted me, because she looked at me and decided I was worth trusting, and I will never understand that decision, but I’m grateful for it in a way that has no bottom.
She sat on the edge of the counter with her hair loosearound her shoulders and her green eyes watching me with that expression she had—the one that said ‘I see you, the actual you, not the version you perform’—and I…
