I have to let a silence hang until I can force the words out. “I don’t know if that’s true. I think he just cares about me being the version of me he wants me to be. The version he created, rather than the version I am becoming.”
Lips touch my spine between my shoulder blades. “And I care about you, who you were and who you are and who you’re becoming. All of you.”
“I know.”
His hand tugs at my arm, and I roll to my back. He’s levered over me, staring down at me with too-bright eyes. Knowing eyes. A gaze full of understanding and compassion and hurt and love. Yes, love. I see it there, though neither of us will speak of it outright. “But for all that, there’s still something there between you and Caleb, something you can’t deny and can’t ignore. And I can’t have you until you’ve seen that through.”
“I hate how right you are, so much of the time,” I say.
“Me too,” he says.
“I don’t know what it is, between Caleb and me. I wish I did, so I could be done with it.”
“Me too,” he says again. “But until there’s an end between you and Caleb, there can’t be a beginning between you and me.”
The silence quavering between us then is rife with pain. This hurts. Worse than anything I’ve ever felt, this hurts. My throat closes, and my eyes sting. It’s hard to breathe for the weight of pain in my chest. For the weight of the good-bye swinging like a thousand-pound pendulum between us.
I have nothing else to say. No more words. I leave Logan’s bed and his room, and I take a shower. I take my time, scrubbing every inch of my body carefully. I don’t want to. Even now, I want his scent on me. I want to be marked by him on the outside the way he’s marked me on the inside.
My dress has been laid neatly on the bed, along with my undergarments, and my shoes are on the floor near them. Logan is nowhere to be seen. I dress carefully, smoothing the worst of the wrinkles out of the dress as best I can. My hair is still wet, because Logan doesn’t own a hair dryer, and my hair is thick. I braid it and tie off the end. Slip on my shoes.
And yet, when I look in the floor-to-ceiling mirror in Logan’s closet, I see only Isabel. Despite the familiar clothes, I do not see Madame X. I see me. I see a person. A woman becoming her own individual. I inhale deeply, run my hands over the bell curve of my hips, exhale, and then go in search of Logan.
I find him in his backyard, pacing in troubled circles, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer. Cocoa lies on the ground near the door, chin on her paws, watching him, thick brown tail thumping the flagstones.
He halts, and his eyes rake over me. “You are so beautiful, Isabel.”
“You’ve already seen me in this dress, Logan,” I point out.
He shrugs. “Doesn’t make you any less gorgeous than the first time I saw you in it.”
I try another breath, but my lungs don’t seem to want to inflate all the way. “I should go.”
A long inhalation of the cigarette, causing the orange tip to flare bright. “I know.” Smoke trickles out of his nostrils. “I’ll take you.”
The drive back through the pink-to-gold light of dawn is silent. The radio is off. Logan does not speak and neither do I.
He pulls up directly in front of Caleb’s tower. Finally, he looks at me. “You know how to find me. I will wait, Isabel.”
“For how long?” I ask, wanting to look away from his indigo gaze and finding myself unable to do so.
“Until you tell me to stop waiting.”
TEN
I stand alone in the middle of the lobby of your tower. The reception desk is fully staffed: two older white men, a striking young black woman with a shaved scalp, and a Hispanic man of indeterminate age, which means probably about thirty. They all glance at me, notice me, and then return to their work, but the black woman makes a very brief phone call. Which means they know who I am and have alerted Len, most likely.
Indeed, it is Len who appears from the bank of elevators, expression inscrutable, aged, weathered, hardened features cast in stone. He does not greet me, doesn’t say a single word. Merely gestures at the elevators. I nod and accompany him onto the elevator marked Private.
The ride up is long.
“Len,” I say, curiosity getting the better of me. “How old are you?”
“Forty-nine, ma’am.”
“What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
A very thick silence as Len stares down at me. “I would say it’s probably impossible to pinpoint one single thing. I’m not a good person, and I never have been.”
“Indulge me.”
An outbreath, blown between pursed lips, eyes cast to the roof of the elevator car. A moment of thought, in which Len looks nearly human. “I fought in the first Desert Storm. Marine Recon. We caught this insurgent, me and two guys from my unit. We holed up in a little hut near the Kuwaiti border and tortured the unholy fuck out of the poor bastard. He knew where some high-ranking Iraqi military generals were hiding, and we were told to get the intel by any means possible. So we did.”
“What kind of torture?” I cannot help asking.
“Why would you want to know this shit, Madame X?”