Page 20 of The Intimacy of Skin

Price released me, turning around to busy himself with the meal he was making like nothing happened, as if he hadn’t just rocked my world with something as simple as a sentence.

We sat in equal silence, Price cooking up a storm while I watched.

I hadn’t seen him fully immerse himself like this before.

Everything he did was practiced, his movements on autopilot as muscle memory led him.

I couldn’t deny my attraction when I caught glimpses of his side profile.

His face was etched with concentration, a lightness to his features I’d never seen before.

Working with him was easy enough. Since I had taken over a small percentage of his usual workload, he was able to focus on the staff more. It was rare that we were alone together.

Price spoke up again after a while, his hands focused on cutting the dough he’d prepared into thin, uniform strips. I still wasn’t sure what he was making. “Did you go there to work?”

“What?”

“Were you going to sell your body tonight, Crew?”

I blinked a few times, willing my temper to stay down. My immediate reaction was to fight and argue and ask him why he had such little faith in me. I pushed it all away, though, when I thought about how it might’ve looked from his point of view.

“No,” I answered plainly.

He never stopped slicing, his attention solely on the dough. “Why were you there, then?”

Defensiveness was an ugly thing. It crawled up my throat, burning on its way out of my mouth. “You wanna keep me in check? Make sure I stick to our deal? Be my guest. But you better be prepared to answer the same question because you were there, too.”

He slowly added the strips of dough—noodles, from what I could tell—into a pot of boiling water. A curt nod was his only response for a beat, the sound of simmering food from a separate pan filling the silence.

“You’re right,” he began. “I was there, too. Thank fuck I was. I wasn’t there to pick anyone up, though. I just wanted it to stop, and I had wrongly hoped driving around my usual places would help.”

I tilted my head, watching the back of his as he worked. “Wanted what to stop?”

Price’s shoulders tensed slightly before dropping lower than before.

He rolled his long sleeves up, revealing beautifully tanned skin covered with ink I admired from afar.

“My head.” A long, defeated sigh left him as he stirred the pot on the stove.

“My head is a mess, Crew. I don’t want to admit that, but I will. ”

“Oh.” I shrank inside of myself, wanting to hide from my earlier miscalculation.

“Yeah.”

The silence that followed felt awkward. I made it that way. I didn’t answer Price’s question, unsure of how to respond without telling him I was the same. No one knew just how fucked up my head was, not even Willow.

Price’s confession shocked me, as I was sure he could tell.

He always seemed so put together and stubborn.

Price was a man who stuck to his guns more often than not, seemingly unmovable even during the shittiest windstorm.

I’d seen him stressed out because of work, yet he always figured it out.

Everyone seemed to count on Price to find a solution, so to hear him sound dejected and admit to weakness was startling.

The brain was humanity’s greatest curse, something I never thought he could be affected by.

Knowing that he, too, could fall victim to it chipped away another piece of my guarded heart. Not for the first time, I found myself looking at him with interest. I was curious about his mind and what was weighing so heavily on it that he’d chosen a street corner to try and alleviate it.

Almost like me.

But nothing like me.

Price would never deserve punishment like I do.

A plate was set in front of me, startling me out of my thoughts. Price looked at me with a guarded expression on his face, something I could easily spot if only because it was my default.

What sat before me was a meal unlike any I’d ever seen before.

Perfectly uniform noodles twirled around themselves on a mound of sauce.

I could see flecks of spice in it, a tantalizing scent lifting to my tender nose.

Vegetables sat neatly amongst the sauce, ones I hadn’t realized existed in the fridge.

The cut on them was also perfect, like each slice was methodically cut the same size, down to the millimeter. Tomatoes, spring onions, and a hint of carrot danced around thin shavings of cheese.

My mouth watered as I ate with my eyes. My stomach growled deep and low, echoing in the silent space around me. I internally cringed when I realized Price was still staring at me. “Let’s eat at the table,” I suggested.

The sorry excuse for a dining table Willow and I used was small. When Price sank onto one of the two shitty chairs, it creaked under his weight. I followed suit, knowing the chair I chose would do the same.

With a deep breath, I finally answered Price’s question. It had hung in the air long enough, and I was still no closer to an appropriate response than I was earlier. “I didn’t go to the corner for work. ”

He nodded, twirling a fork into the pasta on his plate. “As you’ve said.”

I almost didn’t want to ruin the beauty that sat in front of me. Price plated the pasta like it was about to be used in a photo for a magazine. Stabbing into it felt wrong, but I did it anyway so I could shove food into my mouth as soon as I finished speaking.

In the tiniest, quietest voice I could muster, I mumbled, “I’m a mess, too. I thought if I went there, pretended like I was allowed to exist somewhere familiar, that I’d feel better.”

I didn’t wait for his response, filling my mouth with food instead. An explosion of flavors caught on my tongue as a groan unwillingly escaped me.

“Is it good?” Price laughed.

My eyes rolled to the back of my head as I nodded vigorously. “Holy fuck, it’s amazing. Y’all don’t cook this shit at work.”

He shook his head with a smirk. “No, we don’t. I don’t cook our menu when I’m not there.”

“Dude, this is the best fucking spaghetti I’ve ever had.” I shoveled in another mouthful, torn between savoring it and devouring it all in one go.

A slight wince flashed across Price’s face as he swallowed a bite. “It’s not just spaghetti.” He shook his head. “Well, maybe it is. Depends on who you ask. It’s tagliatelle with a ragu-esque sauce mixed with some fried veggies, topped with grated cheese I found in the fridge.”

Wow. That was a lot of words that meant a whole bunch of nothing to my minuscule knowledge of food. “That’s really cool. I’ll never call it spaghetti again. You make me feel like I shouldn’t even be eating it.”

He laughed again, a sharp, shocked one that ended with a growly clearing of his throat. I wanted to hear it again. And again. And again. Fuck, his laugh was mesmerizing.

After a few more mouthfuls and many, many agreeing moans from me, Price looked up from his plate.

His brows were pinched as if he was picking through words inside his mind.

“At the risk of sounding like an uncouth man, it’s been a while since I’ve gone this long without picking someone up—one-night stand or otherwise.

It’s… one less distraction I have in my arsenal. ”

I slowed my eating as I listened. I nodded in understanding, taking my time to find the right words as well.

“I haven’t had a break this long since I was maybe seventeen.

I am uncouth, so I can say that.” Price chuckled at that, the sound more than music to my ears.

The vibrations it carried settled something in my chest. It was like his laughter fit inside of me.

Close to me. The sound belonged on my skin, right against me.

I shook my head, trying to get my bearings. “I’m not used to it. I’m a prostitute. That’s what I do. I guess I don’t adjust well to change.” Nor do I adjust well when I can’t get punished.

No, that wasn’t true. Being a whore wasn’t a punishment. It was my choice; it was my decision. It’s what I wanted.

I had to want it.

I didn’t have a choice but to want it.

“Am I right in saying our agreement has been a bit difficult for both of us?” Price tipped a glass of water against his lips, drinking it slowly.

I shrugged and busied myself with grabbing our empty plates, rushing them to the kitchen. “You could say that, sure. I’ll be fine once I start back up. Just need to find new areas, I guess.”

The plates clanked against each other as I set them in the sink. When I turned around, Price had wandered over to the deteriorating sofa Willow and I refused to part with. Price was looking at me with a pinched face, something I couldn’t recognize settling in the amber of his eyes.

I wasn’t sure what to do. Where to go. We had only agreed on dinner, but now dinner was finished, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted him to go.

When Price left, I was sure to succumb to the man in my head. The ruler of my actions and emotions that demanded bloodshed. It had become so routine now that the act didn’t usually bother me, but tonight, I didn’t have the willpower.

Cutting was the easy part. All I had to do was glide the blade and let it sink as deep as the voice told me to. I went where it led me, sliced as many times as it said I deserved. No thought was necessary, only wallowing in the rightness of the action.

I craved the hurt. Needed the distraction and burn. I’ve seen blogs or posts on the internet from others who claim it stops hurting after a while.

I call bullshit. It hurts no matter how often you do it. How long it had been a part of your life. I depended on that pain, the searing hot relief that made my hands shake and my vision blur.

The day my body stopped reacting would be the day I knew I’d no longer make it.