Page 71 of Arseni

I told him things I wouldn’t write about in a journal.I told him things I wouldn’t tell a shrink.He knows more about me than I’ve admitted to my shower.

Words can’t describe how scared I was that it was all for nothing.

Or how scared I am,now, wondering if I made a mistake.

I feel naked.Exposed.More so than when Arseni strung me up.More than ever in my life.

“So.”He clears his throat.His nerves make my heart flutter.They give away everything that last night meant to him too.

He doesn’t go on.His mouth opens, and he looks like he has something he really wants to say, but it’s lodged in his throat.

“Yes?”I ask.

He closes his mouth and looks away.“Where do you think you’ll go when you leave here?”He turns back to me, but I’m certain that wasn’t what he was going to say.

I shrug, my pulse jumping just thinking about it.“I don’t know.”

I don’t want to even think about it.

“The cops probably?—”

“You know what I was thinking about today?”

He closes his mouth to let me go on.

“I was thinking about how you know every dirty secret about me, but I don’t know any of yours.”

He scratches the back of his head while considering that.“Uh, yeah you kinda do.”

“Like what?”I pick up my wine glass.I’m amazed at how relaxed my voice sounds.At the fact that I don’t spill my wine.It doesn’t even slosh around, despite my sweaty hand making the glass feel slick.

“Well, like I’m a soldier in the Russian mob, for one.”

I let out a soft chuckle.“As if all Las Vegas’s finest don’t know that as well.”

Laying his hands on his chair’s armrest, he shrugs.“What do you want to know?”

Everything.

Something.

Anything to make me feel less humiliated at my own confessions.

I take another sip of wine while I try to think of how to respond without him seeing how desperate I am.How horribly self-conscious.

His words from last night come back to me like a breath to the back of my neck, raising the hairs.

I do not give ashitabout your age.

I do not give ashitwho you’ve fucked or how old they were when you fucked them.

I don’t care that you were once my foster mother.

I don’t care that you think fucking me is wrong.

You are a woman, and I am a man.That’s it.Anything else is just filler.

I let his words comfort me.Let myself believe that they’re true.