Page 20

She is not making it twice.

I find my bra. My panties. The dress. His scent is still on my skin, pepper and amber, and it makes my hands go slow on the zipper. I make them hurry.

The rabbit mask is on the carpet where he dropped it. I pick it up.

On the side table, there’s an envelope, thick with cash. My pay from the night. He had it brought up so it would be waiting.

It’s a lot more than I earned.

I count out exactly what I earned. The rest stays on the side table.

The last thing is the ring.

It slides off as easily as it went on. I hold it in my palm for one second. Cool. Heavy. Beautiful. A fantasy I let be real for exactly one night.

I set it on the pillow where my head was.

Let Enzo Accardi come back to an empty room and a ring on a pillow, and spend his whole morning wondering why I walked away.

The door opens from the inside without a sound. The man posted at the end of the hall has his back to me, phone to his ear. I slip down the back stairs and through the kitchen, still dressed like staff, the rabbit mask dangling from my fingers, and nobody looks twice.

A delivery door. An alley. The sky going blue and gold.

I don’t run. Running gets you noticed. I walk fast and ordinary, like a woman late for a bus, until the Velvet Room is blocks behind me.

I’m not scared. I’m smart. I know the difference between a fantasy and a trap.

I didn’t take anything of his I hadn’t earned.

That’s what I tell myself the whole way home.

I’m wrong.

CHAPTER 4

STEVIE

Sixty-one days after the best night of my life, I pass out next to a bus tub of dirty silverware.

But first, Jess catches me smiling.

“You’re doing it again.”

Jess works the counter with me at Paul’s Diner, a slightly run-down twenty-four-hour spot in Astoria where the coffee is terrible and the tips are worse. She catches me mid-stare, halfway through rolling a fork into a napkin.

“Doing what?”

“The smile. The little secret one you do when you think nobody’s looking.” She drops into the booth across from me. “It’s the mask guy. Tell me it’s the mask guy.”

I toss the rollup into the bin. “It’s not the mask guy.”

“It is so the mask guy.”

“Two months,” Darla says from behind the counter, not looking up from the coffee machine she’s been fighting all morning. “Two months and we’re still on the masked stranger. I’ve had marriages shorter than this story.”

“That says more about your marriages than my story.”

“Mm.” She smacks the side of the machine. “Fair.”