What I Wanted

Tell me exactly what you want, Saoirse, and I will give you that instead.

I stood in the middle of my living room, between the man on the rug and the man in the silver mask, and I felt the sentence land inside me.

I had not been asked that question before.

I want to say that clearly, because I know how it sounds a woman my age, a woman who had been a grown person in the world for a decade, a woman who had dated and slept with and cohabited with men across a whole adult life. I know how it sounds to say nobody had ever asked me what I wanted. But I am telling you the honest sentence, the one I have turned over many times, and the honest sentence is: nobody had ever asked me to name it first, all of it, and then waited to be told.

I named it.

"I want him to watch," I said.

"I know," the Verdict Killer said. Low. Level. Through the slit beneath the silver chin. "Tell me the rest."

"I want him to see what he was never allowed to see."

"Which is what."

"Me. All of me. The part he never got. The part I kept."

"And my part."

"Whatever I ask you to do. Exactly that. No more, no less. I am going to ask you for things. I need you to do exactly what I ask."

"Yes."

No argument. No correction. No checking if I was sure. Just the one word, given back.

I felt something I had not felt in three years. I felt believed.

I turned toward Derek.

He was still on the rug. He had not moved from where he had knelt when the Verdict Killer told him to kneel. His face was the face of a man watching a sentence he did not yet understand being written in a language he had never bothered to learn.

"Stay there, Derek," I said.

I had never, in three years, told Derek to stay anywhere.

He stayed.

I crossed to the coffee table.

The pink box was where I had left it. The small brass clasp. I undid it with my thumb the same thumb that had undone it in the dark for two years, with the fan running, with the door locked and I took out what was mine. I held it in my hand. The weight of it against my palm was familiar. Almost embarrassingly familiar. The only part of this room, tonight, that had been mine before I walked in.

I did not put it down.

I walked to the armchair where the Verdict Killer was sitting.

I stood in front of him.

The silver of the upper mask caught the light. His bare hands rested loose on his knees. His shoulders did not move. He was letting me decide every next thing, and the room was so quiet I could hear my own pulse in my jaw.

"Stand up," I said.

He stood.

He was taller than I remembered standing this close to. My eyes came to the base of the silver chin. I could feel the warm air from his breath through the slit of the mask at the top of my forehead.

I reached up.

I put my fingertips on the edge of the silver chin.

The metal was warmer than I expected. A body-warm silver, tarnished at the edges, the specific kind of warm that tells you an object has been against skin for long enough that the skin has begun to answer it back.

"May I," I said.

One word from him. Low. Certain.

"Yes."

I lifted.

The Bauta was made for this. I did not know, at the time, the specific history of the object — I knew only that the chin piece hinged, separated from the upper face cleanly, on a seam that had been engineered, four hundred years before I was born, to do exactly this. The silver eye mask stayed in place. The forehead stayed in place. Everything above the upper lip remained silver.

What the mask gave me was a mouth.

A jaw. The base of a throat. A shadow of collarbone above the collar of a dark shirt I had not bothered to register until now.

His mouth was beautiful.

I am going to say that plainly, because I have had three years to think about it, and the word I keep coming back to is beautiful. A full lower lip. An upper lip with a clean, deliberate line. A shape I had not been prepared for because I had been prepared, in some small back room of my imagination, to find something about a killer’s mouth that would give him away. Something hard. Something mean.

His mouth was a mouth. Human. Soft at the center. The most dangerous thing in the room.

He spoke first. Low. The voice I knew from the slit, but closer now. Unintermediated. Warmer.

"Breathe, Saoirse."

I hadn’t been.

I breathed.

A whole breath. The first whole breath, I think, since 6:00 PM.

His mouth moved. A small shape I could not yet read. Then, lower, closer:

"You first. Tell me, and I’ll follow."

"Kiss me," I said.

He bent. Unhurried. The silver of the upper mask came close enough that I could see my own face reflected in the polished curve above the almond slits, small and pale and looking up at him, and then his mouth was on mine.

Soft at first.

Not a test he did not need to test. A greeting. A confirmation. The warm shape of his lower lip pressed once, slowly, against my upper one, and held. I felt it in my chest before I felt it in my mouth. Some internal piece of me I had been carrying taut for three years loosened a thread.

I opened my mouth.

He answered. Slow. Still unhurried. His tongue touched mine once, carefully, and I made a sound I did not mean to make small, breathed out through my nose and I felt the warm shape of his mouth smile against mine. Not a performance. A private small pleasure at the sound he had just pulled out of me. He kissed me again, deeper, and this time his hand came up to the side of my jaw, his thumb resting light against my cheekbone, his palm cool against the side of my neck.

His thumb moved. A slow circle at the hinge of my jaw. Once. Twice.

I felt it travel down the inside of my arm like heat running through a wire.

I understood, with a small clear shock, that I had never been kissed like this before. Not like this. Not with a man whose whole attention was organized around the specific response of my body reading it, waiting for it, matching it. Derek had kissed me to begin things. This was a kiss that was a whole thing by itself.

When he lifted his mouth from mine he was slightly out of breath.

So was I.

"More," I said.

"Tell me where."

"Here."

I tilted my head. The long line of my neck. His mouth moved down from my jaw slow, warm, open and when he reached the tendon at the side of my throat I felt my knees remember, briefly, that they were mine to stand on. His breath was hot against the skin under my ear. He dragged his mouth, careful, down to the place where my neck met my shoulder.

He did not bite. I had expected him to bite. A man in a silver mask with a reputation like his, I had expected teeth.

He did not use them.

He used his lips and the warm flat of his tongue, and when he reached the hollow above my collarbone he opened his mouth and set it there gentle, precise and I felt the suction of it and the warmth of his breath and the small exact pressure of his lower lip, and my hips moved forward without my permission.

Once. A small involuntary press of my body into his.

He felt it. He did not remark on it. He simply moved his hand from the side of my neck down to the small of my back and held me there not pulling, not pushing, just letting my body know that if it wanted to be closer, he was there and then his mouth was at the other side of my throat and the whole warm weight of him was against my front and I could feel, through the fabric of his shirt and mine, the steady heat of his chest.

"Lower," I said.