“Who’s the girl with Talent Ridge? What does their relationship mean?”
He bursts through the double crash bar emergency exit doors and says, “I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”
A wall of cool ocean air welcomes us outside. The metal door crashes shut with a clatter, leaving Talent and me alone on a fire escape balcony. A retractable ladder hangs off the side, and dim yellow emergency lights secured to the building cascade shadows across our faces. The hum of the ocean and the echo of a faraway ship’s horn are the only sounds besides the tempo of my heartbeat in my ears.
The night is unmoving, special, and still like it’s stopped all commotion to give us uninterrupted time alone. The dark knows that it’s the only thing allowed to witness our joining. Anything else would exploit it.
We stand face-to-face, fighting the invisible but powerful tether between us, just to study each other. Talent’s eyes look black in this light, and his long lashes brush against the top of his cheeks when he dares to blink. His lower lids are tinged with sleeplessness the color of a light bruise. And the hum of freckles across his nose and cheeks should be counted and kissed one by one.
“Fuck it,” he whispers. “I’m done staying away from you.”
Talent slides his hand around the back of my neck and pulls me forward. His fingers dig into my hair, and he tugs my head back. I gasp, securing a breath before his lips crash into mine—and who needs to breathe anymore, anyway?
This should have been our first kiss.
This should have been the only kiss of my life.
He holds me as close as he can and urges my mouth open to rob whatever breath I may have left in my lungs. His top lip slides along mine, and his bottom presses against the curve between my chin and lip. A blast of warm effervescence detonates from deep within me and explodes, carrying away with it every feeling of betrayal, hurt, and loneliness I’ve ever faced in a cloud of debris that stretches for the atmosphere.
I’m left bare until Talent’s kiss and fiery embrace pour into the lifelong-sized crater the eruption left behind, and for the first time in my life, I know what the privilege of belonging feels like.
Circling my arms around his shoulders, I lift onto the tips of my toes and surrender to the flames, deepening the connection. Concentrating on the texture of his kiss, I’m amazed by how supple his lips are, the consoling scent of whisky on this breath, and heat of his tongue. Talent isn’t forceful, but caressing. Our tongues touch, but not in the vulgar way I’m used to.
When my lungs feel like they might burst, I tilt my head back and inhale the salty air, but I don’t let go. Talent presses soothing kisses along the side of my face before resting his forehead against mine and smiling with his eyes closed.
“I’ve thought about doing that for a while,” he says.
“We’ve kissed before,” I correct him. I sweep my fingers through the short hair at the nape of his neck.
“No, we haven’t. Not like that.” Talent shakes his head and opens his eyes. A chill drifts up my spine and I shiver, but it’s not from the outside temperature. Talent holds me at arm’s length and asks if I’m cold. Hesitantly, he asks, “Do you want to go back inside?”
“No.” I’ll eventually return to my spot at the bar to watch over Camilla, but I can afford a few stolen minutes with Talent while I have him. Who knows when we’ll be this close again?
Talent shrugs off his blazer and drapes it over my shoulders. I don’t correct his assumption that I’m cold because his jacket is nearly as warm as his mouth, and I’d like to soak in every degree of warmth before the open air carries it away. To go home with traces of his cologne on my skin and in my hair will make the memory of our kiss better.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
“I saw the bleeding girl from the grocery store,” he says. “She’s the one in the black dress, right?”
“That’s her,” I say with a short laugh. I’m not shocked he noticed her. To be seen is Camilla’s only job here tonight, and if she caught Talent’s eyes, I could only imagine what she’s doing to everyone else at the gala.
Inez will be pleased.
I step away from Talent to stand in front of the rail overlooking the rocky beach and ocean below. White-capped waves crash onto the shore, stretching for the sand beyond the rocks before it’s dragged back to do it all over again at the moon’s command.
“Don’t disappear on me now, Lydia,” Talent says. He stands directly behind me as if to hold me back in case I run.
“What’s the point? It’s not like we’d ever work out, let alone be allowed to be together.” Like the ocean waves, I can’t make it over the rocks to the sand before I’m dragged back to the abyss where I belong.
He leans back on the railing beside me. “What the fuck do you mean, we wouldn’t be allowed? Who’s going to stop us?”
“Don’t be dense, Talent. There’s no point in trying,” I say, exasperated. He inhales a lungful of air, no doubt to force-feed me bullshit about making our own decisions. We’re adults, after all. But neither one of us belongs to ourselves. He’s a slave to the city, and I’m the property of a redheaded Italian woman who’s hard-pressed not to let me out of her sight.
“Do I need to spell this out for you to understand? I’m a prostitute. I have sex with men for money. That man you walked past when you got off the elevator is only one of my regular clients. Another dozen are downstairs with their wives. I fuck a different man every single day of the week, and I’m booked for months. Does that sound like someone you want to spend any amount of time with?”
The fall back to reality is agony, and my heart hangs in purgatory—trapped between a dream and the truth. I wipe the tear that falls from my eye away with the tips of my fingers and stare at it, amazed that they exist outside the confines of my bedroom. When is the last time someone saw me cry? When my mom died.
Talent’s knuckles turn white as he grips the railing, and he swallows hard. The muscles in his jaw clench. “Do you think you’re the only one who sells themselves?”
“No,” I say. “Inez’s operation has a wide reach. Camilla and I aren’t the only whores you’ve seen tonight.”
He nods toward the fire escape doors. “Every person here is a slut. You sell your body; we sell our souls. At least you’re honest about it.”
I sigh. “Talent…”
“What you do is fucked-up. I don’t know how to ask you to stop or if you even can stop. All I know is that when you walked into my office that night, it was the first time I didn’t feel so fucking alone. People constantly surround me and they pull me in a hundred different directions, but none of it is genuine. But the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew it was different.”
“It wasn’t different. I didn’t go to your office with good intentions. I had a motive.”
He sweeps the next river of tears that fall from my eyes away with the pad of his thumb and sticks it into his mouth before he says, “You might have when you arrived, but I saw the look on your face before you left. Something changed.”
Everything changed.
I haven’t been the same since.