“Why Cinderella?” I hear myself ask.
“Well... you showed up, all belle of the ball, mysterious and sexy as hell. Everyone wanted to know who you were. You left in such a rush, you all but left a glass slipper behind. You wouldn’t tell me your name. And that dress?” He lets out a deep breath and shakes his head, as if overcome. “That dress. Jesus.” He shrugs. “Seemed like a fairy tale to me.”
“I see.” I move away, stride to the window, and I feel his gaze on me as I walk.
Do my hips always sway so much when I walk? Do my thighs always brush so deliciously against each other with each step?
I watch a man and his wife walk hand-in-hand together, thirteen stories down. I cannot think to invent a story for them. I can almost see myself down there, walking hand in hand with a blond man. Neither of us talks. We just walk, fingers twined, moving in sync. I don’t know where we go, the blond man and I. It doesn’t matter; we’re just going, and we’re going together.
I shake my head, turn around—freeze, gasp. He’s there, somehow behind me and I didn’t hear him move or sense his presence. Scotch left on the table, hands loose at his sides. Indigo eyes knowing. Seeing. Piercing.
“Who are you, X?” Voice like a bow drawn across a cello string, the lowest, deepest, most soulful note. Caressing me, shivering my bones, making my skin pebble, just his voice. It’s like a touch, somehow intimate.
How do I answer? I feel tightness in my throat. “I don’t know.” My capacity to lie is snared and discarded by the openness in his eyes.
“You don’t know who you are?” Disbelief.
I find myself defensive. “And who are you, Logan Ryder? How would you answer such a question?”
He blinks slowly, stuffs both hands in his hip pockets, gazes at me for a long moment. “I am Logan Ryder. I’m an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and a philanthropist. Unmarried and unattached. A semireformed troublemaker.”
“That’swhatyou are, Logan. Notwhoyou are.” I press my back to the window, needing space.
When he’s close, I can’t breathe, but not from panic. From something else. A chest-tightening anticipation. Memory. Fear of what I might do if he presses in again, the way he did in the bathroom. I have no control when he’s near. He short-circuits me, and I am unnerved.
“I was born in San Diego. Grew up poor. Surfer kid. Spent my days on the beach, on the waves. Skipped more school than I attended.” His eyes are distant, seeing the past. “Got into trouble. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Did some bad shit... saw friends die, and I realized I had to get out of that life or I’d end up either dead or in jail. Seemed to me at the time that the only way out for someone like me was to join the army. So I spent the next four years wearing army green. Never saw combat, but I did get plenty of training in how to work hard and party hard. Got my GED, so at least some good came of it.”
“That’s your past, not who you are.” My palms are flat against the cool glass.
“It’s more than anyone else knows about me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah... oh.” He smirks. “I’m getting to the part that starts to define who I am. After I phased out of the army, I was bored shitless. Had some money saved and nothing to do. Bummed around a bit, started getting into trouble again. I’ve got a knack for trouble, you see. It follows me, and I follow it. We’re very closely intertwined, trouble and me. I met this guy at a bar in St. Louis. He was a private security contractor. Talked a good game, got me to sign up for a tour in the desert. One tour as adefense contractor turned to two, turned to three. Good money, bad shit.” He shrugs. “Got out after the third, took my money and ran. I’d seen enough. Done enough. So I took what I had, bought a bar in Chicago, redesigned it, rebranded and restaffed it. Sold it. Did it again. Made good money, discovered I had a good head for that kind of thing. And I liked getting my hands dirty, ripping the places apart and rebuilding them. Then I had this investment opportunity... over here, in Manhattan. A big money investment, big risk, big return. It... didn’t pan out. Let’s just say that and leave it there.”
I sense a major plot hole. “You’re skipping something, Logan.”
He nods. “Yes, I am. That’s a story I’m not interested in telling just yet. It’s a big part of who I am, but it’s still hard to talk about. Still sort of learning how to move past it, you could say.”
“But you ask me who I am. Not so easy to answer, is it?”
He merely shrugs, a Gallic lift of one shoulder. “Yes. Is it fair to ask a question I find difficult to answer myself? Sure. Of course. But how you answer that question, it tells me something. You, for instance, didn’t answer at all. You merely turned the question back around on me. You’re defensive. Private. Impossible to know. Who are you, X?” His eyes are deep, and sharp. “Make me an answer. Something. Anything.”
I’m not supposed to talk about me. It’s never been said outright, out loud. It’s an unspoken rule. Don’t talk about myself.
But how can I not? He’s looking at me, lookingintome, eyes like the deepest seas, turbulent and roiling and fraught with chasms of such impenetrable depths I could get lost and crushed and devoured.
“I am Madame X.” It’s an answer, isn’t it?
“More.” A quiet demand. A command.
“I... I don’t know.” I turn away, desperate, rest my forehead against the glass and fog it with my breath. “You should go.”
“I have fifty minutes left, X.”
Ten minutes? That’s all that’s passed? An eternity, stretched thin and twisted into a loop, all within the space of six hundred seconds.
“Tell me one fact about yourself. It doesn’t have to be embarrassing, or a secret. Just... anything.”
