MaraSandros
"Second door past the terrace. Thirty meters behind you."
My husband says it the way he reads depth off a chart. Flat. Located. He doesn't lower his voice, because he's already calculated that nobody in range is listening, and he is never wrong about that.
"Take the lace off. Bring it to me."
Then he turns back to his drink.
That's the part that takes me apart. Not the order, the arithmetic under it. He doesn't wait to see whether I'll do it. He solved me weeks ago, on a screen I wasn't supposed to know about.
So I make him wait.
Thirty meters there. Thirty meters back. Four hundred people, a string quartet, and a dress I chose this morning the way other people choose a weapon.
When I put it in his hand, his fist closes, and for one second, one, the man who has never mislaid a decimal in his life cannot make his sentence arrive.
"Good." Into his breast pocket. He never looks down.
I step into the corner he's made of the room, close enough that the party goes somewhere else, and I ask him very politely whether there's anything else he needs.
"There is," he says, and his fingers slip through the slit of my dress.
That is when a man from the other side of my life walks up and says my brother's name, completely unaware that I am coming apart in his hands, under my dress, three feet from his face.
My husband doesn't stop.
Paired Song: Fever - Peggy Lee
He maps the ocean floor for a living.
He has spent four months mapping me.
He found something down there that a criminal ring will burn a coastline to recover, and I am the only other person alive who can find it. So he offered me a wedding ring, a locked gate, and one hundred and forty two days.
I was priced into a ledger before I ever met him. I have talked my way out of every room I've ever been trapped in.
This one has cameras in it.
He calls it protection. He thinks he is the safest room I have ever been locked inside.
I know exactly what he is. That's the problem.