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  It’s too sultry for sheets, and she makes room atop the covers. She changed into pajamas in my absence, the ones she wore the first night she slept over, tiny embroidered goldfish scattered across stormy blue-gray satin. I leave the candle to burn itself out, wrap her in my naked body once more and kiss her long neck.

  “So,” she sighs.

  “Yes?”

  “How did I do tonight? Driving?”

  “How did you do tonight? You were a natural.” I squeeze her tighter. “What other women are you hiding behind that novice act?”

  “I dunno. I didn’t even know about that one you just met.”

  “Well I like her. She’s welcome in this bed.” I slip her hair behind her ear and press my lips to her jaw. “Though perhaps not until I’ve had a chance to be conductor again, for a performance or two.”

  She goes still in my arms for few tight, thoughtful breaths. Her body’s cues are a mastered dialect to me now, and I wait patiently, knowing she’s choosing words.

  Soon enough, she frees herself to turn over. She blinks at my chin and rubs idly at my collarbone, assembling a thought.

  I smooth an errant lock. “Yes?”

  “I told you tonight, I don’t want to feel like your medication. Something you numb yourself with.”

  “And I agree.”

  “How do you feel about the opposite, about my treating you like…I dunno. A project. A patient.”

  “I’ve never thought that, about your intentions.”

  “No?”

  I kiss her nose. “You treat me like a friend. You soothe me when I’m upset but push me when I need pushing.”

  She softens. “Okay. I just don’t want you to wind up resenting me for putting you in all these positions to get upset.”

  “I could never resent you.”

  It’s a soft, kind lie. I resent her in tiny, sharp flashes, but only in moments of deep panic. Even in the midst of those pangs, I know my anger is misplaced. It’s me I resent, that I can’t move through this world the way other men can. I accept her invitations to remind myself of this fact, but to blame her would be cowardly.

  “I only want…” She trails off, not liking whatever words she found at the end of that sentence.

  “You only want what?”

  “I was going to say, I only want you to be happy. But that’s not entirely true. I want all this for myself too. To be able to see you, outside. Go places with you. Not that going to bed with you isn’t pretty wonderful, of course.”

  I kiss her for that, liking her guilty smile. “I know what you mean. I want those things too.”

  All at once she moves, slipping a bit farther down in my embrace so she can rest her cheek against my shoulder. “I think you’re very brave.”

  “Even when I’m shaking, breathing into my collar to keep from passing out?”

  “Especially then.”

  I press my lips to the crown of her head. You’ll see me shaking soon enough. I glance at the ceiling, imagining the roof above, standing there with Caroly and fumbling through those words that must be said.

  “What are you thinking about?” She reads my signals as easily as I do hers.

  “About going out.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “Let’s just go to the usual café. Nice and close.”

  “Sure.” If she stays over tomorrow night we’ll likely do the same on Sunday, before she has to head home to her flat. I’ll kiss her goodbye, wave as she turns the corner. Let her think I’m going home as well, but I’ll unfold my careful directions and map and set out for Gobelins again. Back at my quest, lest I give her any more cause for doubt. Lest I let the prize go unclaimed for too long and allow some other man to prove himself worthier in my stead.

  I picture my hutch, lined with its watches and clocks and other wind-up treasures.

  They glitter like liquor bottles, I realize. I hide inside them as an alcoholic might, numbing and procrastinating and telling myself tomorrow.

  Always tomorrow, I’ll be a better man.

  But I’ve let tomorrows gather like bricks, three years’ worth. If I keep going that way, I’ll wake some morning and find this garret stacked dark and tight and airless as a crypt, no room for Caroly, no room for anything but me and that cabinet. Give it enough time and no one will come knocking anymore. Or if they do, my walls will have grown too thick to hear.

  My heart is thumping, my mouth dry. Caroly stirs from the edge of sleep. “Everything okay?”

  “I’ll be back.”

  I let her go and leave the bed, finding my pants and yanking them up my legs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I don’t know. Not far. Just to the pavement.”

  She sits up. “Really?”

  “Yes. I won’t even be five minutes.”

  A long pause as I pull a shirt over my head.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ll be right here.”

  My legs are already weak as I stride through the living room, fingers clumsy as I unlock the door. I grab my keys from their hook and pocket them.

  The hall tile is cool under my bare feet, the carpet on the stairs worn and gritty, the railing smooth in my grip. The air seems to grow thin as I descend, an alpine climb in reverse. More tile as I reach the ground floor, and that dreaded rectangular slice of street at the end of the corridor is growing closer, closer. Through the first door and past the postboxes. Usually they trigger me, with their tiny knobs and hinges, miniscule windows. Come back inside, they say. You like it inside.

  But I think, Fuck you all.

  Fuck you and all the times you’ve witnessed my paralysis at this very threshold. Fuck you and every check slipped between your cold brass lips to keep me here.

  The front door handle is cold in my sweaty palm but it turns. It turns and I pull, and Paris spills in from the street, its sounds and smells and its breezes, a living, breathing beast, jaws as wide as the sky.

  The warm granite steps are under my soles, then the brick and pebbles of the pavement. I stand before sixteen Rue des Toits Rouges and jam my shaky hands in my pockets.

  Motorbikes and taxis fly past, shuttling simple people to simple places.

  A Friday night. I used to go places on Friday nights, fancying myself a simple person. I used to drink and laugh and loiter on thick summer evenings like this one, and count myself lucky to bring a woman home. I took cabs then, to quell my anxiety, and smoked like a foundry. But my mother had been alive still, and visiting her kept me outside, in regular circulation. My refusal to ride the Métro and need to stand with my back to the wall were quirks to my social circle—to me too—not symptoms of a disorder. My curious hobbies were merely that, not yet vices to self-medicate with.

  He’s eccentric, my friends said.

  The beautiful are forgiven their shortcomings too easily. My looks brought me attention and the odd modeling job, kept my sheets warm and my ego stroked. I didn’t depend on my beauty then, as I do now. Now it means income and groceries, the simplest of errands run by my admirers so I needn’t suffer.

  I draw my hands from my pockets, open and close my fingers, feel the grass between the bricks tickling my feet. My body is sore in the most private places and the seam of my trousers caresses my naked sex. There’s sky above me for miles, a jungle of streets stretching in every direction.

  Two young women, clearly drunk, are swaying down the pavement toward me, and I move to the stoop’s bottommost step to give them room. My heart pounds as they near, as it does whenever another human is about to cross my path.

  “Salut,” says one brightly, not seeming to notice my bare feet, my pale face, the way my hand trembles as I raise it in a little wave.

  “Salut.”

  Her friend giggles, tugging her more quickly down the street.

  My heart still thuds but I smile to myself, remembering how it felt to be this man. To leave girls giddy from
having mustered the courage to even address me, as if I were someone special.

  Someday they’ll even pay for the chance to fuck you, I want to tell that man. Don’t let them. The ones who coddle you now will pity you in time. They’ll pull the shades down and you’ll tell yourself it’s safer that way. It’s better. Don’t believe it. Wait for the one who presses your face to the glass. The one who makes your heart pound so hard, in so many unexpected ways.

  I sigh, surprised to find I can take a deep breath. I gulp another, another. I glance at the sky, beyond the haloes of the streetlights. The moon is elsewhere but perhaps I’ll see it soon, see it from the roof where it can’t hide, Caroly’s hand in my clammy one.

  My gaze drops to the windows of the tenement across the street, the building a twin of my own, only in tan brick, not red. There’s a human shape in one frame, silhouetted by a flickering, unseen television. Perhaps he’s watching me in turn. He backs away from the window and disappears into the private shadows of his own little realm.

  You could leave too, I think.

  He could be outside, smelling summer’s heat in every vehicle and body that passes, feel it rising from the street, hear the urban pulse in the music of far-off clubs and thumping from cars.

  I feel it all, hear it, smell it, taste it, everything beautiful and ugly and vital that feeds this city. It feeds on me too. I feel bare naked out here, skinned and split open, but I feel.

  I let the city drink from me a minute longer, then turn and mount the steps on watery legs. No threats leer at my back as I unlock the foyer’s inner door, only promises of what lies upstairs beckoning me. A soft body in my bed, soft lips ready with soft, sleepy questions about my absence. I mount the steps two at a time, as eager as I am anxious. Four flights, but five soon, perhaps next week.

  Five flights, all the way to the roof, her hand in mine. And I’ll tell her, with all of Paris watching.

  About Cara McKenna

  Cara McKenna writes smart erotica: a little dark, a little funny, definitely sexy and always emotional. She lives north of Boston with her extremely good-natured and permissive husband. When she’s not trapped inside her own head, Cara can usually be found in the kitchen, the coffee shop or the nearest duck-filled pond.

  Cara welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.

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  Also by Cara McKenna

  Backwoods

  Brazen

  Convenient Strangers

  Coercion

  Curio

  Dirty Thirty

  Don’t Call Her Angel

  Getaway

  Ruin Me

  Shivaree

  Skin Game

  Willing Victim

  Print books by Cara McKenna

  Lessons in Letting Go anthology

  Off Limits anthology

  Stray Hearts anthology

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Reversal

  ISBN 9781419942259

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Reversal Copyright © 2012 Cara McKenna

  Edited by Kelli Collins

  Cover design by Caitlin Fry

  Photos: Yuri Acurs/Shutterstock.com

  Electronic book publication October 2012

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