Working Stiff(104)
Rox set her phone back on the nightstand. The screen shone blue light at the bedroom’s dark ceiling. “Yeah. Look, we need to talk.”
“Yes. We do.” The covers moved on her chest and legs as he rolled toward her.
She sat up in the bed and rested her arms on her bent knees. “I want a safe word. When you’re done, when you are going to ghost on me, I need you to say the safe word to me. Maybe, ‘It’s time,’ or ‘This has been fun.’”
“That’s not what a safe word is for. A safe word means to stop.”
“I need to know when you’ve stopped. I won’t ask you any questions. I’ll just say okay, and that’s it. No pressure. No third degree. But I need to know. I need to know that you’re gone. I can’t be trying to get ahold of you, and you passing through my fingers like a ghost. All right?”
“I don’t want this to end,” he said, his deep voice rolling out of the darkness. In the dim light from her phone screen, she could just see blackness filling the hollows of his eyes and one side of his face. The bandage on his left cheek was a white splotch in the night.
“Yes, you do,” she said. “I understand that. I’ve always known that about you. I knew what I was getting into when I kissed you that first time. I knew what I was getting into the second that I threw those fake rings over the side of the deck. I won’t pry. I won’t interrogate you afterward. I just need a signal. That’s all I want. I want you to say, ‘This has been fun,’ so I’ll know.”
Cash sat up and scooted back to lean against the tufted headboard of the bed. “You don’t believe that I’m not going to ghost you, as you say.”
“You always do, Cash. I’m not special. I’m just the next girl in line.”
“I’m not the one who’s going to leave,” he said.
“Cash, I know you.”
“I need to tell you something.”
Her phone’s screen winked off, and darkness folded around them. “We’ve been friends for three years. Anything that you haven’t told me by now isn’t important.”
“Yes, it is. I don’t talk about this.”
“Do Arthur and Maxence know?”
“They saw the aftermath. No one else here knows about it.”
A sound like Velcro ripping apart whispered through the dark.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Our first time, out on the deck, we stayed out there in the dark because I had taken the bandage off my face before you came out. I couldn’t find it to stick it back on. I couldn’t walk through the lit house.”
“Is the wound—” she chewed her tongue, searching for a non-stupid word, “—closed?”
“It’s scarred over.”
“Then it’s just a scar.”
“It’s on my face.”
“Yeah. So?”
“It’s quite bad.”
“I’m quite sure that I won’t care.”
“Someone as beautiful as you are will find it repulsive.”
“I don’t even know where to start with that. I know that I won’t find you ‘repulsive.’ What a horrible word. A little scar is not going to chase me off.”
“It’s not little.”
The air in the room began to gray. Outside, the horizon must be turning dark red and blue, the beginnings of sunrise.
His wooden blinds wouldn’t keep out the sunlight. In just a few more minutes, she would be able to see what he meant.
“The scar doesn’t matter.” she said.
He paused, and Rox held her breath.
He finally said, “In the accident, glass went through my cheek, ripping skin and muscle. The surgeons couldn’t do anything yet, but I’ll have some work done on it soon.”
“What kind of work?”
“Plastic surgery. Fillers. Dermabrasion. Laser resurfacing. It will reduce how visible it is.”
Rox leaned toward him in the wisps of morning light. “It sounds like you know a lot about that.”
He was silent for a moment in the quiet darkness. “Yes.”
“You knew a lot about the work that Josie has had done, too.”
A whisper in the air sounded like he had sighed. “Yes.”
“Can you tell if I’ve had plastic surgery or not?”
A puff of air escaped his lips in a laugh. “If you have, it was done brilliantly. I think you were born absolutely beautiful.”
She chuckled because she hadn’t had any plastic surgery. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
Cash paused. A few streaks of light from the pale glimmerings of dawn touched the auburn in his hair and the point of his chin, but a strip of darkness lay across his cheek. “No, I don’t.”