Page 40 of Where the Snakes Sleep

I close the door.

The house feels unusually silent afterward.

It has always been quiet. I prefer it that way. Even as a child, sound exhausted me when it had no purpose, and adulthood has given me enough control over my surroundings that very little in this house happens without intention. My animals create their own small ecosystem of muted sound—the almost imperceptible hum of environmental controls, water circulating through enclosures, the occasional scrape of scale against bark or glass—but none of it resembles human noise.

Ryan resembles human noise.

He fills rooms.

Even when nervous, perhaps especially when nervous, he speaks to occupy silence before it can ask anything of him. He mutters commentary under his breath, makes faces without apparently realizing he is doing so, asks a question, and then begins answering it himself if I take longer than three seconds to respond.

The thought almost makes me smile.

When I return to the library in order to clean up the evidence of our night together, Raja has shifted higher into the branches. Only a portion of his body remains visible beneath the enclosure lighting, black-edged scales disappearing into artificial foliage with an elegance that makes something so large seem insubstantial.

My attention falls on the sofa and the multiple drying wet spots across it. A cushion lies on the floor where Ryan kicked it sometime during the evening.

I should have it cleaned.

Instead, I pick up the fallen cushion and return it to its place.

My forearm stings. Four narrow red scratches extend from just below my elbow toward my wrist, angry against my skin; others mark my shoulders and upper back.

Ryan proposed the arrangement himself, which is better than anything I could have engineered. No expectations. No relationship. No promises. Sex when mutually desired, and nothing beyond it that might resemble obligation.

He believes these terms protect him, and perhaps they do, but he doesn’t understand that he’s given me a reason to become familiar without having to ask permission for familiarity itself.

I do not need to persuade him to accept my help tomorrow.

I do not need to push him toward dependence.

That was the error.

I had mistaken isolation for vulnerability and vulnerability for a desire to be rescued.

Ryan does not want rescue.

He wants autonomy so fiercely that he will make his own life substantially more difficult merely to prove no one else owns a piece of it.

And if that’s what he wants, I can accommodate that.

If he comes here because he wants sex, he comes voluntarily. If he remains afterward for a drink, conversation occurs voluntarily. If conversation becomes a meal, if meals become routine, if eventually walking through my doors becomes as unremarkable to him as walking through his own—then I will not have forced anything.

People reveal themselves through routine far more reliably than through interrogation.

Sooner or later, Ryan will speak about Alberte without being prompted. He will complain about something he has discovered in the cottage. He will ask what I know. He might even invite me inside himself.

Yes.

This is better.

I need to stop trying to make Ryan need me and instead let him want me. Want is much easier to mistake for freedom.

I collect the wineglasses from the table, almost out the door of the library, before my gaze once again returns to the sofa.

Ryan sat there perhaps forty minutes ago, looking at me as though he had simultaneously discovered something he wanted desperately and something he feared might destroy him.

Learning what waited beneath his clothing didn’t change the fact that I had wanted my mouth on him from the first moment his face flushed beneath my attention.