Page 42 of Ruthless Daddy
I typed:
Pietro. Come back.
I hit send.
He was at the door in twenty minutes. I counted every second. I spent the first three walking the perimeter of the apartment, as if I could prep the room to look more like a crime scene and less like the inside of my head. I wiped down the counter, threw my dirty clothes in the hamper, ran a brush through my hair. I changed shirts three times and settled on black, tight at the wrists, because it looked like armor. I didn’t want him to see the inside of me yet.
When he knocked, I didn’t answer right away. I listened. I heard him shift his weight, probably leaning on the doorframe, maybe arms folded. He waited, patient. When I finally opened,he was exactly where I pictured: both feet planted, hands empty, eyes on mine. He didn’t say anything, just waited for me to speak first.
“Hi,” I said.
His face did something. The corner of his mouth twitched, not a smile, just a small breaking of the surface. “Hi,” he echoed, quieter.
I stepped back. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t want to, yet. I just stood aside, and he walked in, as if we had done this a hundred times before.
He had a leather folder under his arm. He set it on the kitchen table, careful, and then looked back at me. “You haven’t eaten.”
I bristled. “How do you know that?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Just a feeling. I also feel like it’s been a big night for you.”
I was so hungry I’d forgotten. “I’m fine,” I said, on reflex, but he’d already gone to the fridge and pulled out the bread, the cheese, the butter. He moved with that deliberate efficiency, not fast but never wasted: knife in one hand, bread in the other, working the blade with the casual violence of someone who’d handled sharp things forever.
I sat at the table, hands in my lap, and watched him make the sandwich. He put it on a plate, cut it into triangles, and set it in front of me.
“Eat,” he said.
He didn’t sit until I took a bite. When I did, the taste was better than I expected: rich, sharp, comforting. I ate two triangles in a row before I remembered he was there. When I looked up, he was sitting across from me, hands folded on the table, watching with a kind of intensity that was almost embarrassing.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Are you going to stare the whole time?”
“Maybe.” He didn’t blink.
I ate another triangle. It was easier to do things when he told me to. This fact was unsettling, but also a relief. Like I could turn off a part of my brain and just follow instructions. When the sandwich was gone, he pushed a glass of water toward me and watched me drink half of it.
Only then did he open the folder.
Inside was an arsenal. Not of weapons, but of paper: a stack of typed pages, a thin black notebook, a set of index cards, a printed reading list, even a small pink gel pen. Everything was arranged with clinical neatness, nothing out of place, no creased corners. I could smell the new paper and the faint edge of the printer toner.
He turned the folder toward me, letting me see everything.
“What is all this?” I asked, trying not to betray how much I wanted to grab it all and run.
“It’s the contract kit,” he said, as if this was obvious. “If you want to do this, we do it right.”
He pointed to the top document. “This is the template. Terms, boundaries, rights, responsibilities. I made it myself.”
He slid the black notebook out. “This is for you. You write anything you need—questions, reminders, whatever. I don’t read it unless you say I can.”
He tapped the index cards. “Safeword sheet. You fill it out, you keep a copy. I memorize it. You can change it whenever you want.”
The reading list was next. “Stuff to look at, if you want more detail. I annotated which parts I think are bullshit, which parts are useful.”
At the bottom, a soft-covered journal. Pale blue, almost like a child’s diary. I ran my finger over the cover. It was soft, velvety, not the kind of thing I would have picked for myself.
I looked up at him, trying to calibrate. “Did you . . . have this ready already?”
He shook his head. “Marco helped me put it together. We’ve been talking. He’s good at logistics. I’m better at follow-through.”
