Page 17 of Glass

Nothing.

I can't pull up his face. I can't pull up his scent. I can't pull up a single piece of him. He existed. I was here two Thursdays ago and I know I was here because my assistant blocks the evening. I had a scene. I don't remember any of it. I don't remember the cab home. I don't remember his build, his voice, whether I used the paddle or the crop. I don't remember if he thanked me.

The man before him I also don't remember.

I reach up. My hand, I notice, is not quite steady. I wasn't aware of it being unsteady. I put two fingers against the bite on my pec. The skin around it is hot and puffy, already scabbing at the edges. The ridges of his teeth are visible at the rim of the mark. It's an ugly bite. It looks like exactly what it is: a man in rut took his mouth to my chest and meant it.

I trace the edge of it.

The feeling is.

I try for a word. There isn't one. I'm quiet. Suddenly, completely quiet in my own head, for the first time since I can remember. The narration I usually run over the top of my life isn't running. There's just my fingertips on a bite on my own skin, the low amber light, and a big sleeping kid a foot away.

Not my throat.

The thought comes from some underneath part of me.

He didn't go for my throat. A rutting alpha should have gone for the throat. That's what my reading of alpha rut biology says, what a decade of this club says, what every pamphlet every new member gets tells you to expect. He didn't. He went for my chest. Something in him skipped the throat. I heard him do it. I felt him do it. His face was at the hollow of my throat and his mouth was moving, and then he passed, he went down, and his teeth found my pec.

I don't know what to do with this. I'm not filing it because I'm not filing anything tonight. It just sits on the bed with me, next to the non-answer about why I'm still here, next to the watch reading four forty-four, next to the memory that keeps coming back from different angles like a tide going out and coming back in a slightly different place:

Nobody looks at me. You looked at me.

I don't repeat it in my head on purpose. It comes back on its own.

Teddy stirs.

His hand on the sheet curls once, opens. His breathing changes. I watch his eyes open behind the mask. I can tell by the shift, the way a person who was looking at nothing starts looking at a specific thing. He blinks. Does a slow check of where he is. His eyes find mine.

He stops.

He doesn't move. For a long second I think he's going to cry again. He won't. I don't know how I know that, but I know. Then his mouth opens slightly behind the mask and what comes out, soft, wrecked from last night, cracked at the edges:

"Hi."

My voice, when I answer him, is lower than I expect.

"Hi."

He blinks. His eyes drop to my bare shoulder, my bare chest, the bite on my pec, and go soft in a way I can see behind the mask. An expression I have never received in this room. Possibly not anywhere.

He says, even quieter: "You stayed."

Two words.

I don't have an answer for them. I have never stayed. I'm staying now. Teddy has named the thing that has been sitting on the bed with me for the last half hour, and there is no way to un-name it, and I can't answer it directly.

I find something sideways to say.

"The knot took an hour to release."

True. Not an answer to what he said.

Teddy smiles. I can see the corner of his mouth under the mask. Small. Tired.

"Okay."

He doesn't press. He doesn't ask me why I'm still in the bed six hours after the knot released, or why my cab is gone, or why I cleaned up with club soap and climbed back in beside him without getting dressed. He's being careful with the air between us. I haven't been received this carefully in a very long time. Possibly ever.