He pays the taxi driver. We are stopped, rows of brownstones on either side. Darkness like a blanket, pierced by lamplight. Logan’s arm around my waist, helping me walk the few feet from where the taxi let us out to Logan’s front door.
Will I sleep with Logan? In his bed? On a couch? A spare room?
So much of me wants to go home. This feels like an adventure, like something from a story, and I just want to return to real life. But it’s not life, it’s not a story, it’s not a fairy tale.
What is it?
I’m very tired.
I want to go back to when I was naked in the hallway, Logan’s hands on me, back to when things felt simple and possible. In that moment, everything was simple and easy. I just wanted him.
I still want him.
I feel safe, his arm around me like this.
But I don’t know what tomorrow will be like. For that matter, I do not know what now will be like. I am lost and confused and homesick. This is the longest I’ve ever been away from my condo, away from all that is familiar.
I feel Logan tense, come to an abrupt halt. “Stay here,” he whispers to me, and helps me lean against the tree.
The light shines from below, bright. I blink, and see Logan standing with his hands in fists at his sides. He is taut, coiled.
I peer into the shadows and see another shape, sitting on the steps to Logan’s brownstone. A familiar shape. Familiar broad shoulders, familiar curve of jawline seen in profile, those cheekbones, that forehead, those lips.
I step forward. “Caleb?”
“Stay there, X.” Logan’s voice is hard as iron. “And you stay right where you are, Caleb. Keep away from her.”
“X. Let’s go.” That voice, deep and dark as a chasm.
I blink, sway on my feet. Logan, in front of me, acting as a human shield between Caleb and me.
Caleb, standing now, hands in pockets.
Two men; one dark, one light.
I want to run, want to climb into this tree and huddle in the nook of the branches.
Caleb takes another step closer to me, Logan blocking the way with his body.
Tension crackles.
Violence is thick in the air.
I cannot breathe, panic welling up within me, as familiar as the wrinkles on the palms of my hands.
I see eyes like midnight shadows, staring at me. Expectant. Knowing.
Seeing me, seeing me.
“It’s time to go home, X.” That voice, implacable, like darkness made flesh, like shadows that curl as sleep stakes its claim, shadows not to fear but rather shadows that lull, shadows that witness dreams and wait through the night until the sunrise.
“You don’t have to go with him, X.” Logan.
“You know where you belong. It’s time to go.” Caleb.
Where I belong? Do I know where I belong?
Caleb strides away. Toward a sleek, low, black car, Len waiting, holding the rear passenger door. Logan swivels to face me. He is not standing in my way, not preventing me. Nor is he touching me.
Caleb to my left. The condo, what I know. My library. My window.
Logan in front of me. The brownstone, Cocoa. The fantasy of normalcy.
“You are Madame X.” The voice to my left, confident, calm, strong. “And you belong to me. You belong with me.”
“But you don’t have to, X.” Logan reaches for me but doesn’t touch me. Not quite. Almost, but not quite. “You don’t have to. Don’t you see that?”
I feel the pull. An invisible thread, ensnaring my wrist. My ankle. My waist. My throat. It isn’t a scent, or a memory, or a touch. It isn’t sorcery.
I lost twenty years of memory. I lost all I was. I lost me.
But now I have a past. Six years, perhaps only a fraction when compared to the totality of my life, but it is the only history I know. The library. The window. Tea. The way time passes in lulling increments, each moment ordered and known and understood.
Logan . . . he represents the unknown, a future that could be. A dream. A dog to nuzzle my cheek, to welcome me. Kisses in the madness of wild moments, passion that consumes. Disorder, frenzy of need, time like sand slipping through a clenched fist, so many new things.
But then there’s Caleb . . . my savior, my past, and my present. I’ve gotten a glimpse, rare and precious, past heaven-high walls and into the inner sanctum of who the man really is.
Caleb has given me so much . . . a name, an identity, a life.
He is a mystery, and often inscrutable, but he is all I know.
I choke on my breath.
I feel my foot slide backward.
Logan’s eyes distort, and his jaw clenches. He sees the infinitesimal slide of my foot, and he correctly reads the sign for what it is. “Don’t, X.”
“I’m sorry, Logan.”
“Don’t. You don’t know what you’re doing.” He sounds utterly sure of this.
“I’m sorry. Thank you, Logan. So much. Thank you.”
Caleb stands waiting, watching, tall and broad and clad impeccably in a tailored suit, navy with narrow pinstripes, white shirt, thin slate-gray tie. Fingers uncurl from a fist, palm lifted, hand extended. “Come now.”
I cannot make myself break my gaze away from Logan’s, away from the sadness, the need. He, too, sees me.
I back away. Back away.
Logan lifts his chin, jaw hardened, fists at his sides, brow furrowed. Faded jeans, a pale green henley, four buttons at the neck, each one undone, sleeves pushed up around thick, corded forearms. I see his hands—and for a moment, only those hands. They touched me, so gently. I felt a lifetime of touch in what in this moment feel like were stolen moments.
A moment is a fortieth of an hour.
How many fortieths of an hour did I steal with Logan?
They do feel stolen, indeed, but no less precious for that.
Hands, on my shoulders, pulling me back. Fingers that know me, fingers that have peeled away all my layers, night after night, and have known me in the darkness and known me in the light.
I still do not turn away, do not look away, even as I retreat into the shadows around the waiting car.
The interior is cool, and silent.
Dark.
Logan stands in a pool of pale light, framed, illuminated. He watches me and does not blink.
I watch, still, even when Len closes the door, and I must watch through tinted glass.
A low, powerful growl of the engine, and then Logan is behind me, still watching, growing smaller.
A long, deep, fraught silence, as the car returns me to the familiar glass-and-steel canyons, echoing with the ceaseless life of night in this city.
• • •
When you speak, your voice strikes chords within me, hammers on the strings of a piano. My entire being hums, and I must turn, must look. Must meet your eyes like darkness of a moonless night.
“You are Madame X, and you . . . are . . . mine.” Your fingers pinch my chin, tilt my head to look at you. “Say it, X.”
The words feel pulled out of me, drawn out, ensnared and tangled up and plucked out of the snarl of conflict within me:
“I am Madame X, and I am yours.”
SEVENTEEN
You do not speak, not until we’ve returned to the high-rise, to the thirteenth floor.
“Why did you leave, X?” Your voice is like thunder in the distance.
“You left first.” I stand at my window, dressed still in my plain jeans, my comfortable T-shirt, cotton underwear and sports bra, my ballet flats.
“So you ran away with another man?” An accusation.
“Yes.” You will not hear any denials from me.
“After all I’ve done for you, after all we have shared, you find it so easy to abandon me like so much trash?” You sound almost human, almost hurt.
“All we have shared?” I put a palm to the cool glass, finding a tiny measure of inner peace at the soothing, familiar view of the cars passing to and fro, the buildings rising black and reflecting shadows and faint light. “What do we share, Caleb? I am nothing but a possession to you. You use me as you see fit, and expect me to stay put and merely wait for you.”