Page 30 of Wells

“Thank you,” I say, and the word carries something it has never carried before.

"It's my pleasure, Midnight. That was amazing. We should do it like that more often."

"Not so shy anymore, huh?"

"You make me feel like I could do anything."

I smile at that and take another drag.

She runs her fingers over her chest, humming a few notes under her breath while she stretches out, still bare but for the underwear. I don't know the song. It lodges in me anyway, the kind of small thing I will not be able to shake, though I could not say why it matters. I'm too many sleepless nights deep this month to chase the thought down.

We talk about nothing in particular. She tells me about a new yoga pose she has been working on, and I tell her about a movie I half-watched last night. She laughs, and I soak it all up, knowing now that I've had more of her, there's no going back.

She yawns into the back of her hand. "Night, Midnight. Don't let the bedbugs bite."

"Night, Peoria.”

With her, the armor's down. I notice it the way you notice a sound stopping, the absence of a thing that has run so long you forgot it was there. I don't put it back up right away. I sit in the dark a while longer and let it stay down, and I don't let myself ask why I'd rather feel exposed with her than safe without her.

This growing need for her is a trap. I can see the shape of it even if I can't find the door out.

The part that sits the worst is that I could end it tonight if I wanted to. I could have her real name and her real face inside an hour, the street she lives on, the route she takes to work. Finding people who do not want to be found is the thing I do better than anyone in this city. And I will never aim a single one of those tools at her, because the day I know who she is, she stops being the one part of my life no one gets to touch, me least of all.

So I keep her a stranger on purpose. I want a woman I have promised myself I will never find and will never meet, and lately I catch myself wishing the wall between us was not one I built with my own hands.

I can't tell which is heavier to carry, that I could have her and won't, or that I have started to want to.

NINE

Cera

Passing in Costume: During Carnival you brush past people who know you and feel nothing, your own face hidden an arm's length from theirs. She sits barefaced beside the very man her other self performs for, and neither world admits the other exists.

I wake, and he is still on my skin. None of it is real. There are no hands, only the low voice living in my head and the ache between my legs where his words went last night.

Dusky morning light leaks through the blinds, too bright even at this hour, nothing like the dark room where Peoria comes out to play. My bedroom smells like coffee from the pot I set to brew before I fell asleep. My sheets are twisted around my hips. My body remembers before my brain catches up.

"Peoria."

Granted, it's my fake name, but he said it like he could reach through the screen and tip my face toward his, and something in it made my chest pull.

He asked me for more than the arrangement last night, more than the mask and the lights and the part I know how to play, and I gave it to him before I let myself decide whether it was safe. That's the part that will not leave me alone this morning. It's not that I did it. It's that I enjoyed it more than I ever imagined possible.

My chest tightens now, the same as it did then. I do not know what tipped it over, whether it was hearing him come undone or whether it was me, letting myself be that open and not reaching for the script to hide behind.

I press my thighs together and the soreness blooms, proof of what his voice did to me, of how far past the performance I let myself go.

My hand slides down my stomach. My fingers find the heat between my legs and I am already wet, already ready, which is ridiculous because I came apart for him last night and my body has no reason to still be this wound up over a man I have never seen.

I circle my clit, and my hips lift into my hand. The ache spreads insistently, and I bite my lip because the jolt shooting up from my center is so good it hurts. This is a disaster waiting to ruin me.

I hide behind blue contacts over my brown eyes, behind a wig that turns my brown hair platinum. The mask, a fake city worn like a name, a whole invented version of myself, all of it was built to keep the real me safe. And the man behind a black screen has gotten further into the real me than anyone who ever stood in front of me in daylight.

My breath catches. My fingers move faster. I think about the sound he made when he finally stopped holding it back, the one I'm fairly sure no one else has ever been given, and I tip over the edge with his name in my mouth and no idea what his face looks like.

I come hard and loudly in my empty apartment, my body clenching around nothing, my thighs shaking. Afterward, the room is still, too revealing, as the light brightens, exposing my foolishness.

I pull my hand away and stare at the ceiling. My heart pounds. The coffee pot beeps from the kitchen.