Chapter 4: Her Ground

I did not take the key to the laundromat.

I took it to the foreman's office and put it in the drawer where he keeps lost lighters, and I went back to my line.

At six, when the first light came gray through the dock windows, I clocked out for my break.

I did not go to the lunchroom.

I walked down the long corridor to the cold storage room at the far end.

The masa is kept there in fifty-pound sacks, stacked to the ceiling on steel racks.

The door was heavy and sweated frost.

I held it open with my hip and looked back down the corridor.

Aurelio was standing at the other end of it, under a buzzing tube light, with his coat over his arm.

He had not gone to the bus stop.

I had known, when I clocked out, that he wouldn't have.

I had watched the security camera over the dock all night, and a shape had stood in the shadow of the dumpster for three hours.

"Come here," I said.

He walked down the corridor slowly.

I let him in and pulled the door shut behind us.

The cold closed around us, thirty-eight degrees, smelling of lime and wet paper.

One bulb in a cage hung from the ceiling and threw the sacks into soft white shadows.

I stood with my back against the shelf and he stood in front of me, not touching me, his chest going up and down.

"I have terms," I said.

"Tell me."

"You don't talk."

I put my hands flat on his chest.

"You do what I say. You don't say one word about Sunday, and you don't say anything to make this a thing it isn't. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he said.

"I said you don't talk."

His mouth closed, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.

I took his wrists, one in each hand, and walked him backward two steps until his shoulders met the steel rack.

I lifted his hands and wrapped his fingers around the cold bar above his head.

"Keep them there."

He gripped the bar, and his knuckles went pale.

I stood and looked at him, a forty-one-year-old man in a white shirt and silk tie with his arms raised like a boy waiting to be searched.

I had never done this before.

Every time before, he had been the one to give the orders, in the dark, in a low voice, with his hands in my hair.

I had loved it.

This was different, and I knew it.

I felt powerful in a way that frightened me, and I did not stop.

I started at the tie.

I pulled it loose and let it hang.

Then I opened his shirt button by button from the collar down, slowly, with my cold fingers, and laid it open.

His chest was broad and dark-haired, with an old white scar low on the left ribs.