No One Knows Us Here(62)

He kissed me on the forehead and then on the lips. When I kissed him back, he started to move again.

I responded with a little moan. You love him, I told myself. My eyelids fluttered closed. It wasn’t working. My hands roamed up and down Leo’s back. He had a good body. I could work with that. Pretend he’s Sam, the little voice inside my head told me. My body tensed up at that suggestion, causing Leo to stop again. Okay, okay—my mind buzzed, desperately searching for a way through this. Pretend he’s Steele.

Fine. I could do that. Steele and I, we’d had some good times together. I hadn’t had to fake anything with him. Usually we were both drunk. He had his own brand of charm. Pretend you’re running your hand over Steele’s back. Pretend you’re kissing Steele on the mouth. Pretend Steele is flipping you over to position you on top, that his hands are reaching up, that his fingers are the ones squeezing—

Leo shouted when he finished. His hands released my breasts, and his arms fell down to the mattress, spread out wide. I looked down at him, studied his face. His eyes were closed, his head lolled back, a huge smile still lingering on his lips.

I lifted myself off him and was about to excuse myself to the bathroom, but he pulled me next to him, into the crook of his arm. He ran a finger down my body, from my shoulder, down my side, up over my hip. I resisted the temptation to swat his hand away. Instead, I made another move to leave, but as soon as I started to roll away, he clasped my hip with his whole hand. “Stay another minute.” He kissed me on the mouth, like we had all the time in the world.

“I need to—”

“Shh. Just for a minute.” Leo petted my hair, talking. He told me about how love had eluded him, all these years. That was exactly how he put it: “Love has eluded me.” He planted a kiss on my head, his lips getting tangled up with my hair. “The thing is—what people don’t realize—is how hard it is for someone like me to meet people. Women, I mean.”

“I have a hard time believing that,” I managed to say. I ran my hand over his bare chest. It was completely bare—no hair at all. I wondered if he shaved it, or if he was naturally hairless, like one of those cats.

“Women these days,” he went on, “they have lives of their own. Careers. As they should! I’m not going to stop them. More power to them, you know.”

I said I did know.

“But it’s difficult. I have a career, they have a career—when do you ever see each other? When do you have time to fall in love?”

“I know.” My eyelids closed. I felt gross. Our bodies fused together with some sticky substance. Cold liquid dripped out between my legs. It was going to dry there, glue me shut. “You told me this, remember?”

“I know, I know,” Leo was saying. “But that’s what got me thinking—how I came up with this whole thing. What if I just eliminated that obstacle—”

“What obstacle?”

“The woman’s career.” Oh. Of course. That. “What if we didn’t have to worry about that? We could give this thing a real shot. No one really tries anymore—have you noticed that? They just move on from one person to the next. What if we agreed to stick it out for a year? What would happen then?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured. If I couldn’t get up and take a shower, maybe I could fall asleep.

Leo laughed and, in one swift movement, rolled on top of me, wedging one of his legs between mine. He kissed me on my mouth and then peppered my neck with little kisses. They felt like nibbles, creating the sensation of being devoured by tiny mandibles, of bugs crawling on my skin. Leo was writhing over me, and I felt him getting hard again. Surely it was too soon for that—

“We fell in love,” he said into my ear, his voice thick and urgent. “That’s what happened.”



On my car ride home, my Mirror began to pulse. I took it out of my purse and tapped on its screen. You have 1,835 new watchers, the notification read. I jolted upright, startled, convinced for a moment that he’d tricked me somehow, that I’d just put on a sex show for 1,835 strangers. I scanned through my recent activity, unsure of what I was even looking for. I never used Lookinglass aside from the messaging feature, when Leo wanted to communicate with me. I’d never even filled out my profile.

A few moments tapping around set my mind at ease. My new watchers seemed to fall into two camps. Most of them had names like Dvorjackie and Symphonee_Love. Music lovers. Or they went by something like Geeklord or Daemon Demon. Programming nerds, Leo Glass acolytes.

They had seen me at the symphony. That was all. I could handle that.





CHAPTER 19


It was the first sunny day we’d had in months. With the light hitting the windows, suddenly the grime of winter became visible. Dust and fingerprints. It surprised me, this filth. We’d hardly been around lately. I’d been spending so much time with Leo, and Wendy was busy at school and hanging out with Hannah. My poor apartment had the neglected look of a school shuttered for summer vacation.

I tied an actual apron around my waist and bustled around, dusting surfaces with an old T-shirt. I watered my Christmas cactus. All its blooms were gone now. The desiccated blossoms gathered in the dustpan. Light as air, bright red faded to rust. I crushed one to powder in my hands and tasted it with the tip of my tongue. It tasted like nothing at all.