Exposed (Madame X, #2)(53)

Silence between us then, equal parts awkward and comfortable.

After a time I cannot measure, you stand up, drain the glass, set it on the table. “I have much yet to do today. So if there is nothing else, I need a shower. You are, of course, welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

It cannot be that simple. That easy. There is so much I want to say, but I don’t know how. Nothing fits. None of the puzzle pieces click properly. I feel panic at the sight of you walking away so easily.

“Wait.” I stand. Take careful steps across the thick rug and halt behind you, mere inches from the rippling plateau of muscle that is your back. Watch you breathe. Watch your shoulders rise gently and fall subtly with each breath. “Tell me the story, Caleb. How you found me.”

“I thought you’d be past that by now.” You do not turn around. Your hands clench into fists.

Early-morning sun blazes through the eastward-facing windows, bathing us in brilliant yellow light. Dust motes dance in the gleaming spears of sunshine.

“I’ll never be past that, Caleb. I need to hear it.” What I do not say, a truth I do not dare utter, is that I doubt you.

I doubt the truth of the story. I wonder if, perhaps, it is just that: a story. A fiction you fabricated in order to bind me to you. But I have to hear it, one more time.

As Isabel.

You move with slow, lithe steps to a window. Rest a forearm against the frame, and your forehead against your arm. “It was late. Past midnight, I believe. It was raining, and had been for hours. The whole world was wet.”

A flash of olfactory memory hits me: wetness, damp concrete, the smell of rain. I choke on the remembered scent.

“The sidewalks glistened in the streetlights,” you continue, “and I have this very specific memory of the way the stoplights looked on the wet pavement of the road, red circles, yellow circles, green circles. I remember the way my shoes sounded, clicking dully on the pavement. I was alone on the sidewalk, which is rare in New York, even at midnight. But it was October, so the rain was cold, and it was windy. The kind of weather you didn’t go out in unless you had to. The wind was so strong it would turn your umbrella inside out. It had done it to mine, and I’d stuffed it into a trash can. I was so wet. I’d been walking for blocks in the pouring rain. Funny thing is, I don’t remember why I was out. Where I was going, where I was coming from, or why. I was absentminded. Just trying to get home as quickly as possible. I would have walked right past you. I almost did. I don’t help the homeless as a rule. Not because I am too important, or because I’m too cheap, or any of that. But because I know from experience any help I give them will only go to more drugs, more alcohol, more gambling. I cannot help everyone in the city. When I first began making real money, I tried. I think everyone who first moves to New York tries to help the beggars. It’s a rite of passage to becoming a New Yorker, I think. Eventually, you have to learn that you cannot spend all your money tipping the homeless. Especially when many of them aren’t really even homeless, but merely too lazy to work. I know this, as well, from personal experience. I know their addictions. I know their predilection for destructive substances.”

“You’re wandering off topic, Caleb,” I say.

You sigh. Make a fist and tap your knuckles against the glass in a rhythmic pattern: tap-tap—taptaptap—tap-tap—taptaptap. You are still staring out the window, head cradled against your forearm.

“Indeed I am.”

You lapse into silence, into stillness.

When you speak again, your voice is slow and cadenced. “You were lying on the sidewalk, facedown. Wearing that blue dress. Curled up in a ball, in the rain. Just lying there, so still. I walked past you, and then something made me stop, I still don’t know what. I turned around. Looked at you. Really saw you. I’ve walked past a thousand homeless men and women and not really seen them. But I saw you. I saw your hair, thick and black and so long. Wet and matted and sticky with blood. I saw that. The blood. Maybe that’s what stopped me. You were bleeding. Not homeless, but hurt. Curled up, but you were trying to move. Trying to crawl. I turned back, and you reached out a hand, tried to drag yourself across the sidewalk. Your fingernails had been ripped off from dragging yourself like that for who knows how long. Your fingers were shredded. Your toes, too. Bloody from crawling across the ground, bleeding. Alone. Cold and wet. Dying.”

You pause, and I see us in the reflection. Your face in profile, high cheekbones, square jaw, brownbrownbrown eyes like fragments of deepest space, black hair swept back and damp with sweat, a single strand curling on your forehead as if placed there by an artist. My profile is very similar: dark skin, olive-caramel, black eyebrows, black hair. Exotic features, wide, almond-shaped eyes darker even than yours, not truly black, which is biologically impossible, but so fiercely darkly brown as to appear so except under direct illumination. The sun is in my eyes now, so the brown is almost visible. My hair is braided, the queue hanging over my right shoulder onto the dove-gray fabric of my dress.

You breathe in, continue. “You looked at me. ‘Ayudame,’ you said. ‘Ayudame.’”

A bolt of something hot and sharp and hard and excruciating hits me. “‘Help me.’”

I slump forward against the window, leaning against it beside you.

You look at me in our reflection, surprise on your features. “You remember?”