Do not mount the U.S. Marshal.
His bicep brushes mine and I immediately forget how doors work. Or numbers. Or words. I nod like someone who understands electronics and not like someone who’s imagining licking his collarbone.
He looks at me. Studies my face like he’s trying to read something written in a language he doesn’t quite speak.
“You okay?”
No. I’m two inches from pressing myself into you like a needy housecat and I don’t know what that says about my mental health.
“Fine,” I say. “Just tired.”
He doesn’t look convinced. But he lets it go.
That night I put the plant on the windowsill and stare at it. Maybe if I watch it long enough, it’ll tell me who I’m allowed to be now.
Day six, I accidentally commit joy.
I don’t mean to. Haven’t laughed since before the restaurant, before Dario, before any of this. Laughing feels like something that belongs to Stevie Reeves, and Stevie Reeves is supposed to be dead.
But Saul’s telling me about the hotel breakfast buffet, about powdered eggs that look like “sadness in solid form” and awaffle iron that waged “personal war” against him, and the laugh escapes before I can catch it.
Bright and sudden and completely beyond my control.
His faceunlocks.Like I’ve just input the right code and suddenly there’s this other version of him standing in front of me.
The almost-smile becomes a real one. Full, unguarded, transforming him into someone younger and softer and so beautiful my heart jerks, yanked off course.
“There she is,” he says quietly.
I don’t know what that means. Don’t know what he sees when he looks at me. But for a second, I feel like myself again.
Then the moment passes and I remember that myself is someone I’m not allowed to be anymore, and the laugh fades, and we go back to talking about nothing important.
But I catch him looking at me differently for the rest of the day.
Like I’m something precious. Like I’m real.
That night it hits me that Dario hasn’t crossed my mind in hours.
Cue the guilt tsunami. Full-body, stomach-drop, traitorousbitchguilt. Like I cheated on a ghost with a houseplant and a man who installs curtain rods.
I sit on the edge of my bed, my new bed, Beth’s bed, and try to conjure his face. Dark eyes. Dark hair. The way he moved, controlled and dangerous.
But the details are fuzzy. Like a photograph left in the sun too long.
I should be holding onto him. Should be keeping him clear in my mind, sharp-edged and permanent.
Instead, I’m thinking about Saul’s forearms while he drilled curtain brackets. Saul’s voice saying there she is. Saul’s tonguedoing unspeakable things to a walnut cookie while his eyes tracked my mouth.
I don’t know what that makes me. A traitor. A survivor. A woman transferring all her unresolved need onto the nearest man who treats her gently.
I don’t know who I’m becoming.
But she’s horny, soft, and dangerously close to believing she’s allowed to exist.
Day seven.
Last day.
