Chapter 11: Blast Door

He let go of the knot.

"Then don't ask me again," he said into my hair. "Not unless you mean it."

When I woke up, I counted to a hundred, and the room was empty.

There was a glass of water on the nightstand and a note in block capitals.

EAT SOMETHING.

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed with the blindfold in my lap and thought about my mother.

She left when I was twelve.

She ran off with a married man who sang in the choir two pews in front of us, and our whole town watched her go.

For years after, women in the grocery store looked at me like they were checking for it.

The wanting. Whatever was wrong with her that might be wrong with me.

By fourteen I'd decided nobody in that town would ever see me wanting anything.

So when a masked man in a dark gallery asked my name, I didn't give it.

And I made sure I'd never have his face to carry around either.

If I never saw him, he could never be in the grocery store.

He could never be at the end of my hall.

I didn't ask again.

Not in September, when Beckett left a box of good German charcoal outside my door without a note.

Not in October, when he failed Blaire's midterm in front of the whole class and passed mine without a word.

Not on the nights Master called at eight and said my name was pup and I said yes.

By the first Friday in November, I almost had myself believing it.

The Academy's fall gala was at the Coldhouse, an old cold-storage warehouse on the river that the Coburn Foundation had turned into a gallery.

Brick walls. Iron hooks still hanging from the ceiling. Champagne on every surface.

One of my drawings was on the main wall.

The line of a man's side, armpit to hip.

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