Page 17 of Beautiful Savage
The memory breaks through the automatic protocols. The performance habits, the careful arrangements, all the ways I've learned to be looked at dissolve under Papa's old instruction.
I let everything drop. The arranged shoulders, the careful tilt of my chin, all the small adjustments that make me palatable. My body settles into its natural state: morning-tired, uncombed, real. No pretense. No careful angles. Just me in my worn sleep shirt with Papa's lesson finally taking hold after twenty years.
He doesn't look away.
If anything, his gaze intensifies. Like the dropping of pretense is what he's been waiting for. The discipline that's held him rigid wavers. I can see it in the slight tension around his eyes, the way his jaw tightens as if he's fighting himself even as he continues to look.
We hold each other's gaze across twenty feet of worn floorboards. The wordless exchange stretches. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks.
A minute passes. The morning light shifts slightly, catching dust motes in the air between us. Still we look. His gray eyes stay steady on mine, not sliding away, not dropping to safer territory. The sustained attention makes my pulse race in my throat. I can see the effort this costs him, the way his hand grips the edge of the windowsill, knuckles white with tension.
My body wants to perform again. To arch slightly, to wet my lips, to give him something worth looking at. But I hold Papa's lesson close. Stay still. Let him find me. Don't pose.
Ninety seconds. The city wakes below us, distant traffic and morning sounds, but the apartment holds us in this strange suspended moment. I can see him clearly now in a way thedays of not-looking prevented. The scar across the bridge of his nose that has faded to silver. His jaw needs shaving. There's something raw in his expression, like staying still while looking at me is an active battle he's fighting and slowly losing.
Two minutes.
Two full minutes of sustained eye contact, completely wordless, without either of us breaking. My thighs press together involuntarily, my body responding to the weight of being seen, really seen, for the first time since the conservatory. Not the pretty ballet teacher. Not the demure daughter. Just me, all pretense dropped, while he looks and looks, like a man who's been rationing himself for far too long.
The exchange doesn't end with either of us looking away. It simply completes, like a piece of music reaching its natural conclusion. The air shifts. A delivery truck rumbles past outside. The spell releases us simultaneously.
He pushes off the wall slowly, his face already composing back into operational calm, though I catch the slight tremor in his hand. He doesn't acknowledge what just happened. Doesn't speak. Just returns to his routine as if two minutes of wordless connection didn't just crack something open between us.
I look back at my book, the words blurring on the page. My hands tremble slightly as I turn a page I haven't read.
He washes his face at the sink. But there's something different in how he moves. Less automatic, more considered. Like he's having to think about each action, forcing his body back into familiar patterns after letting his discipline slip.
At the door, he pauses. Just a heartbeat longer than usual. His hand on the handle, his back to me, something unfinished in his posture. Then he opens the door and leaves without turning around.
The click of the closing door releases something in my chest.
I sit at the desk for several minutes after he leaves, my body still humming from sustained contact that involved no touching at all. The apartment feels different. Charged, like the air before lightning.
Finally I rise and walk to the kitchen counter, sagging against it as the realization settles into my bones: the captivity stopped being the question days ago. Maybe it never was. The real question is my own appetite. What I want, what I've always wanted, what I've been hiding behind locked doors and careful smiles.
The dancer in red on La Sirena's floor, claiming three hundred eyes. The choreography in my Receipts folder, rehearsed but never performed. The way my body responded to him watching me, the dampness between my thighs I can't pretend away. These aren't symptoms of captivity. They're who I've always been.
I'm taking authority over this hunger that's lived in me since the conservatory. No more hiding it, no more pretending it doesn't exist. The exhibitionist need, the desire to be witnessed, I'm going to own it completely.
I finish the last segment of orange, let the sweetness linger on my tongue.
Now I know what I need to do. Not escape, not resist, not pretend. I need to take control of my own hunger, make him look at me again. But this time on my terms.
The woman in red had the right idea. It's time to stop rehearsing and start performing. Time to claim my own appetite and make him witness every second of it.
He looked at me like he was starving. Now I'm going to give him a feast.
8 - Gunner
Seven-thirty PM. Security office. The monitor reflects my face. I’ve been sitting here all day but haven’t learned a thing because I can’t get my mind off Daphne’s face, her body, her expression. The way she looked right back at me.
Usually I have to pay women to look at me without flinching, but she never stops looking. And never flinches, not even when I grabbed her in the alley and hauled her up to the apartment like a sack of potatoes, and chucked her on the bed.
She never flinches. Never looks away. Never asks difficult questions.
The inner monitor shows the Hallstein file, cross-referenced personnel logs against the dock breach. But I can't concentrate.
I save the file. Lock the drawer with the small key. Stand from the desk.
