He’d touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had ever touched me that way. He’d touched me with… reverence. He’s gotten this expression on his face like, like he was in church or something. He’d kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he’d been saying all along, “Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God,” and I’d felt a warmness like slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and sweet and delicious.
He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I knew they’d never go on over my wings, and they were so beautiful.
“This one will look really good on you,” he said, holding up a Heidi dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I’d never wear that dress in front of anyone but him. I couldn’t, my wings would stick out a mile.
I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for—the rest of my life spent hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.
I’d been out in the world for only a few years, and I had barely touched it, moving in silence and stealth, watching and not being seen, but oh, I had loved it, I realized. I’d thought I’d hated it, but I’d loved it. Loved the people and their dialogue and their clothes and their mysterious errands and the shops full of goods and every shopper hunting for something for someone, every one of them part of a story that I would never be part of, but I could be next to the stories and that was enough.
I was going to live in an attic again.
I started to cry.
He came to me. he put his arms around me. He nuzzled my throat and licked up the tears as they slid past my chin. “Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”
He took off my jacket and my sweater, peeled down my jeans and my panties, and ran his fingertips over me, stroking me until I quietened.
He touched me reverently still, his breath hot on my skin. No one had ever touched me like that. He said, “I can fix you.”