Page 49 of Savage Daddy
She looked at the pen. She looked at the saint. She picked up the pen.
And of course—of course—she treated it like a flour order.
She wrote KATAIFI at the top first, in capitals, hard small letters, pressing so the pen near tore the cloth-thin paper, and under it in smaller hand:stops everything. Anytime. No earning. No explaining.She underlined it twice. Then she sat back and looked at me like a woman who has opened the negotiation and intends to win it.
“Rules,” she said. “We start with rules, because rules are the part that affects me and I want them tight. Read me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.”
“I love you,” I said, before I could stop it.
It just came out, the way the true things come out of her when she’s tired, except I wasn’t tired, I was just done holding it, and it landed in the middle of the table between the bread and the contract and the saint’s gold eye, and Katerina went very still, the pen frozen, her color coming up.
“Read me the rules,” she said, thick, and I let her have the out, the way she lets me have mine, and I read.
“Eat,” I said. “You eat what I put in front of you, all of it, no leaving the crust.”
“Fine. The crust thing is petty.”
“The crust thing stays.”
“Fine.” She wrote it.
“Sleep.”
And there we went to war.
“Define it,” she said. “You can’t just write ‘sleep,’ that’s a child’s rule, that’s not a clause, that means nothing. How much. When. Under what conditions. You write ‘sleep’ and I’ll be asleep at the bench for nineteen minutes and tell you I kept the rule.”
“You will not, because the rule is six hours.”
“Six is unrealistic.”
“Five, then.”
“On a wedding week? With two hundred and forty covers?”
“On a wedding week we revisit it. But we can’t go much lower than five, because I’ve watched you do three and go gray and nearly hit the deck, and I’m not watching that again, Katerina, I mean it.” I’d dropped the play out of it without deciding to, gone to the steel, and she heard it. “Four is the floor. We can argue the ceiling. We don’t argue the floor.”
She argued the wording for ten minutes anyway, and somewhere in the middle of it I started laughing, because she was negotiating the right to be cared for the way other people negotiate a mortgage, fierce and meticulous and missing the whole forest for one extremely well-defended tree, and the laughing was so warm and so helpless that she stopped, and looked at me, and the corner of her mouth went up—not a smile, the near-smile, the standing ovation—and she said, “What?”
“You,” I said. “You’re going to lawyer me into making you rest.”
“Someone has to advocate for me,” she said, with a smile.
We went on.
“Be kind to yourself,” I said, and she made a face, and I said, “It stays, it’s the whole reason for the rest of it,” and she wrote it.
“No working past the shake.” That one she wrote without a fight, because she’d felt the shake, she knew the shake, she’d nearly gone down into it on a Tuesday.
“Daddy picks your underwear,” I said, and watched her go scarlet, and watched her write it, and the writing of it with her own hand under the saint’s eye undid me a little.
“Daddy can see you naked whenever he wants.” She wrote that one slow, and looked up at me when she’d finished, and there was heat in it now, the green dress and the gold light and the want banked behind her eyes.
“Daily check-ins.” She wrote it.
Then the limits, and these I made her lead, because the limits are hers, the limits are the door she keeps. “What’s never,” I said. “Tell me what’s never, and it goes in ink, and never means never.”
“No humiliation,” she said at once, flat, certain. “I run my whole life. You don’t make me small to make me small. You make me small to let me rest. Not the same thing.”
