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Letting me choose.
That might be the most disarming thing he’s done all morning.
“I like eggs and bacon,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “Take a seat.”
“I’m not putting the whip away.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
“I still don’t trust you.”
“I know that, too.”
I stand there for another moment, egg drying on my face, the whip still in my hand, my heart doing something complicated in my chest that I refuse to examine because if I examine it I might have to admit that some part of me — some stupid, traitorous, deeply broken part of me — wants this to be real. Wants him to actually be different. Wants breakfast and orange juice and the kind of normal morning that doesn’t involve knives and terror and waking up screaming.
“Just hold off on whipping my cock for a while,” Wraith says. “Okay?”
I feel something pull at the corner of my mouth. Not quite a smile. Not yet. But something adjacent to it.
“No promises.”
Chapter Eleven
Wraith
“No promises.”
I turn back to the stove so she doesn’t see whatever just happened to my face.
I crack the eggs into the bowl. Four of them, because she’s always eaten more than you’d expect for someone her size, and because doing something with my hands is the only way I know how to occupy the part of my brain that’s currently doing things I have not authorized it to do. I whisk. I find a pan. The bacon is already going, low heat, a slow process to get it just the way she likes it — crisp but not cremated — and I don’t ask myself how I know that. I just know it.
The apartment is quiet. Just the hiss of bacon fat, the scratch of a fork against a ceramic bowl, the distant sound of the town waking up outside the window.
Behind me, she doesn’t move. I can feel her watching. The whip is still in her lap, probably. She’s not going to put it down. I wouldn’t.
I plate the eggs. The bacon. I pour the orange juice into the rooster mug because it’s the only thing that’s not a novelty cup and I put it in front of her and sit down with my plate, and we eat.
That’s it. For a minute, that’s the whole thing.
The eggs are good. The bacon is good. No, better than good because it’s fucking bacon and ‘good’ is just the fucking floor for something so perfect. The orange juice is genuinely excellent, which is something I want her to know but am not going to say because I want her to say it. The morning light falls in flat gold lines across the table. Her braid is destroyed and there is dried egg in her hair and she’s sitting there in her oversized t-shirt and sleep shorts with the whip across her thighs and she is eating my eggs with the focused, grudging efficiency of a person who is hungry and has decided that basic biological need outranks symbolic defiance.
I watch her for a second.
Just a second. Just long enough.
There’s something happening in my chest that I don’t have a name for. I know attraction — I’ve always been attracted to her, that pull hasn’t dimmed an inch, which is information I’ve been carrying around like a live grenade since the moment she clocked me with her phone.
But this is different.
It’s not the grenade. It’s something else. Something quieter. More structural. Like a shift somewhere deep in the architecture of whoever the fuck I am.
It lives below my ribs.
