Page 47 of Property of Thrasher
That startled a smile out of her, small but unhidden. “Okay.”
She turned for the door, then looked back like the thought pulled her spine. “Your daughter,” she said. “Does she know you cook?”
“She knows everything she needs to which does mean she knows I cook,” I explained vaguely. “Goodnight, Melody.”
“Goodnight, Enzo.”
The metal push bar took her in. The rectangle of light from the back hall cut across the concrete for a second and then was gone. I stood there long enough for a mosquito to find the inside of my elbow and then long enough again to slap it and smear it off on my jeans. Then I got on the bike and started it up, the rumble loud in the quiet, and I let the night take me back the way I came.
On the road, I thought about the way her body softened under my hands once she believed me. I thought about the rules I keep and the way they keep me.
I didn’t apologize to the dark or to the pines or to myself for the line I drew. I didn’t feel sorry when the house took me back in its normal comfort as the keys hit the bowl with a sound that tells you that you made it home.
I didn’t feel clean, either. I felt like a man who’d handled a fragile thing with hands that were used to rough work and managed not to break it, this time. But I would, wouldn’t I? In time.
Inside, I set her glass in the sink and rinsed it so the wine wouldn’t sour in the cup. Sure, she wasn’t exactly twenty-one, although I thought she was a little older until I looked up her employee file. She had a maturity to her, life experience aged her. She wanted wine, I wouldn’t hold her back. I put the leftover pasta in the fridge even though I’d probably eat it cold at midnight. I stood at the window and watched nothing. The trees made the slow, old sound trees make when they remember wind.
If she texted, I’d answer. If she didn’t, I’d let it be.
I pulled my cut off the chair back and hung it where it belonged. Then I sat on the couch where we’d been and laid my head back and closed my eyes. Her weight wasn’t there anymore, but the impression of it was. I didn’t hold onto much. This, though, I’ll keep that for a minute.
Sleep came the way it always does when you don’t force it—after you stop looking at the clock and after you stop naming the thoughts. I drifted into a calm slumber that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while, maybe not ever.
13
MELODY
I didn’t sleep much after he left me. It wasn’t the kind of awake that comes from caffeine or noise. It was the quiet awake, the kind where your body obeys the dark but your mind keeps the lights on.
Every time I rolled over, the sheet rasped against my skin and I remembered the couch at his place, the slow orbit of his hands on my back, the way his mouth had turned careful when my breath hitched. Gentle but firm.
He was both, and that confused me.
Back home, “firm” meant a door that shut from the outside and a key you didn’t possess to escape. It meant rules shaped by someone else’s palm. It meant being told the right kind of love didn’t need your consent, it was destined and expected to be accepted without question.
With Thrasher, firm was blunt talk and a hand that steadied, not a hand that pinned. He drew lines like a man who trusted himself to hold them. He’d told me exactly what he didn’t do—“I don’t let women I fuck sleep over”—like a warning sign posted at the edge of a cliff. No apology, just the statement.
And still, on that couch, when my head found his chest and my eyes started to fall shut, his arm tightened instead of lifting me off. He’d taken me home after giving me, giving us a little time together. Because that’s how he did it. Because rules were how he kept himself from being someone he didn’t want to be.
I somehow respected this even though I didn’t like being away from him. All of this was new to me of course I wanted to be around him more.
And then there was his daughter. Elaina. Twenty-three. A few years older than me. That fact sat in me like a little stone: not jagged, not smooth, just weighty. I tried it on from different angles. If I met Elaina, would she see a kid? Would she see a threat? Would she see a girl who could have been in the desk beside her in biology, passing notes about a teacher’s coffee breath while learning about frogs? I didn’t even know what I saw when I looked in the mirror half the time. A woman. A girl. A body with new knowledge and old fear. A person somewhere between what I ran from and what I ran toward.
I could list a hundred reasons this would never work. The age gap, the club was his focus how did I fit in, the way my past had teeth, the way his present had brothers and business I didn’t need to get tangled up in. And still, when I closed my eyes, what I saw wasn’t red flags so much as a night road curving through trees, the world going quiet under the bike, the kind of quiet that made room for breath. Maybe it wouldn’t work and I’d end up with one more lesson written on my skin. Maybe it would be the best thing in my whole, small life. I didn’t have to decide at three in the morning, wrapped in a thin hotel blanket with the hallway ice machine coughing every hour. I only had to keep listening to myself.
I didn’t text him the next day. I told myself it was because I wanted proof that I wasn’t already bending my shape to fit his life. Because I needed to know I could want something without sprinting toward it until I skinned my knees.
So I did what any stubborn woman should do: put my hair in a knot, clocked in, and let the laundry room fill up my hands. Whites first, sheets, then towels. It was all so I could chase the small satisfaction of stacks that matched. The washers clunked and spun like tired drums. Steam slicked the back of my neck. When I fed a sheet through the press and it came out crisp and obedient, I thought of other kinds of heat, the warm press of his mouth, the way he’d asked, “Okay?” even once he already knew my answer.
Lyric passed by in the hall with a half case of bottled water under one arm and shot me a look that was half question, half grin. I lifted one shoulder in reply. She didn’t stop; we both had jobs and we both understood not every conversation fits into a ten-minute break by the ice machine.
Later, she’d corner me and I’d tell her something true without telling her everything. For now, I smoothed another pillowcase and tried not to jump when a bike revved somewhere out front.
Not every tailpipe belonged to him. Not every sound was for me.
By midafternoon, I’d recentered myself a dozen times. It was like learning a new posture: shoulders back, chin level, heart where it belonged in my chest. I caught the new girls whispering near the linen cart—something about “the one with the braid” and “Tiny’s girl’s cousin.” I didn’t turn to show them my face. Let them guess. Let them make up a story. I already had enough real ones. I thought one of them was the girl from the party. The one I called a bitch. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but it was a hunch.
At six I clocked out and took a long shower. Even with the uneven water pressure I stood there until the spray went from warm to scald to a sudden yelp of cold, and I made a rule for myself: if he wanted me, he could find me.
