Page 84 of Dark Billionaire Predator

He gets up. Showers—in my bathroom, with my soap, the domestic intrusion that I've stopped noticing and started needing. I hear the water through the wall and lie in bed and think about last night and the thing I didn't ask and the jacket hanging by the door that I will not examine when he leaves.

Coffee. Two cups. He makes it now—knows where the filters are, knows the ratio, knows which cup is mine and which is his and when did we get assigned cups? The blue one is his. The white one is mine. Nobody decided this. It just happened, the way mornings happen, the way rhythms form between two bodies that keep choosing proximity.

He drinks his coffee. I drink mine. The kitchen is small and we stand on opposite sides of the counter and the distance is three feet and the silence is comfortable and this—this ordinary, unperformable, desperately fragile thing—is the most intimate act we've committed.

More intimate than sex. More intimate than bruises. More intimate than his confession in the car about twelve dead men. This—the coffee, the counter, the morning light, the nothing-happening—this is the thing that can't be faked.

He leaves. I go to work.

The day passes. I do my job—present, attentive, professional. The machinery runs. But beneath it, the processing continues. Not about last night—I've sealed that door and I'm leaving it sealed, at least for now. About something else. About the shape of what we're becoming and whether that shape can survive outside the controlled environments we've built for it.

His church. My apartment. His car. My bed. The texting, the phone calls, the stolen moments in foyers and parking lots and the back seats of cars. Our entire relationship exists in containers—private, enclosed, separated from the world by walls and locks and the secrecy that has been part of the architecture from the first night.

What are we in public? What are we in daylight? What are we when there's no tablecloth to hide under and no darkness to dissolve into and no door to lock behind us?

I don't know. We've never tried.

At three, between appointments, my phone buzzes.

Benedict:Are you free tomorrow night?

Friday. I'm free—no crisis center, no commitments, the empty Friday evening of a woman whose social life has contracted to a single point.

Yes.

I want to take you somewhere.

Where?

Out.

The word sits on the screen.Out.Three letters that carry the weight of everything we haven't done. We haven't been out. Haven't sat across from each other in a restaurant or walked down a street together or existed in any space where other people could see us and draw conclusions. We've been creatures of the dark—nocturnal, hidden, conducting our relationship in the spaces between our visible lives.

Out where?

Does it matter?

I think about it. No. It doesn't matter where. What matters is the where, being public, being visible, being a place where Benedict Ambrose and Lucy Anderson sit together and the world is allowed to see.

No. It doesn't matter.

I'll pick you up at eight.

***

Friday night. Eight o'clock. I've changed clothes three times, which is something I haven't done since I was twenty-two and going on dates with men who didn't stalk me for three weeks before introducing themselves. The absurdity of the situation—a woman who has had this man's mouth on her throat, his fingers on her thigh, his confession of twelve murders in her ear, agonizing over whether to wear the black blouse or the gray one—is not lost on me.

I choose the black. Jeans. Boots. No scarf—the bruise is gone, the throat is bare, and whatever marks he's left on me are hidden under clothes in places only he knows about. I look in the mirror and see a woman going on a date, and the ordinarinessof the image is so incongruous with the reality of the man she's going with that I almost laugh.

The deadbolts turn. The door opens. He's in my hallway—dark jacket, dark shirt, the clothes of a man who dresses well without appearing to try. His hair is pushed back. He's shaved. He smells different—not the cold stone and steel of the church but something warmer, deliberate. He put on cologne. Benedict Ambrose, who carries a knife in his jacket and has killed twelve men, put on cologne to take me to dinner.

"Hi," I say.

He looks at me. The assessment—quick, thorough, the catalog of details that he performs on every person in every room. But then something else. Something softer. His eyes moving over my face, my hair, the bare throat, the black blouse, and settling into an expression that isn't assessment at all. That's just looking. Just seeing a woman and wanting to keep seeing her.

"You look—" He stops. Starts again. "I was going to say something charming. I had it prepared. But you look—" He shakes his head. "Let's go."

The car. He drives. We head downtown—not toward Gowanus, not toward any of our established coordinates. South, then east, into a part of the city I don't associate with him.