The Walk Home

My phone died at 1:47 in the morning, somewhere between the bar on Calle Ocho and the corner where the streetlights stop working. I remember the exact time because I looked at it one last time, saw the red battery icon blink, and thought, very clearly: Walter is going to kill me.

He wasn't, of course. Walter has never raised his voice at me once in the eight months we've been together. That was exactly the problem.

I'm Sophie. I'm twenty-four, I work as a home caregiver, and I spend my days being patient and careful and responsible for other people. Maybe that's why, when my coworker Lucía had her birthday drinks that Friday, I let myself be the opposite for one night. Two glasses of wine became four. Midnight became one-thirty. And when the girls started arguing about splitting a cab, I waved them off, said my place was only fifteen minutes away, and walked out into the dark in my fitted black leather mini skirt and white sneakers like I was invincible.

There was one rule Walter had asked me for, back when we first sat at his kitchen table and talked, honestly and for hours, about what I wanted from him. I had told him, cheeks on fire, that I needed someone to hold me accountable. That I wanted a firm hand, real consequences, and someone who cared enough to give them. He had listened to every word without laughing. Then he had taken a pencil, the flat kind carpenters use, and written three rules on the back of a lumber receipt. The first one said: Never walk home alone after midnight. Call me. Any hour.

Underneath, he had written two words. Yellow means slow down. Red means everything stops. He made me say them back to him, out loud, before he would agree to anything.

That receipt is still pinned to the corkboard by his workshop door.

I made it home, obviously. Nothing happened. A dog barked at me from behind a fence and a car slowed down beside me for a few terrible seconds before it drove away, and I walked the last three blocks with my keys between my fingers and my heart in my throat. I let myself into his little house with the spare key, kicked off my sneakers, and saw the light on in the kitchen.

He was sitting at the table in a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up, his reading glasses folded beside a cold cup of coffee and his phone face up in front of him. Walter is sixty-two, broad through the shoulders from forty years of building things, with a close silver beard and steady gray-blue eyes that see everything. He didn't get up. He just looked at me.

“It's two-fifteen,” he said quietly.

“I know. I'm sorry. My phone died, I—”

“Lucía texted me at one-thirty.” He turned his phone so I could see it. Is Sophie home yet? She wouldn't wait for the cab. “I've called you eleven times, Sophie.”

The way he said my full name made my stomach drop. I stood there in my cream knit sweater, my leather mini skirt, my sheer black stockings, smelling like wine and cold night air, and every excuse I'd rehearsed on the walk evaporated.

“I was fine,” I tried. “It's fifteen minutes. Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened.” He nodded slowly, as if he were measuring a board twice before cutting it. “Do you know what I was doing at one-forty? I was putting my shoes on to go drive the streets looking for you. I was thinking about the corner on Fifth where the lights are out. I was thinking about what I would say to your mother.”

That landed somewhere deep. My eyes stung. “I didn't think—”

“No. You didn't.” He stood then, and came around the table, and stopped close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him. His hand came up and brushed a strand of blonde hair off my face, so gently it almost made it worse. “What's rule number one?”

“Never walk home alone after midnight,” I whispered. “Call you. Any hour.”

“And did you?”

“No, sir.”

He was quiet for a long moment. That was the thing about Walter. He never decided anything while he was upset. He let it settle, like sawdust in a sunbeam, and then he decided, and once he had decided, it was done.

“Here's what's going to happen,” he said. “You're going to drink a big glass of water, because you'll thank me tomorrow. Then you're going to walk into the workshop and wait for me by the bench. And then we're going to settle this, properly, so that neither of us is still carrying it in the morning.”

My mouth went dry. In eight months I had been over his knee a handful of times, for small things: being late, skipping lunch on a double shift, swearing at a driver in traffic. Each time on the couch, each time with his hand. He had never once said the word workshop.

“And Sophie.” He tipped my chin up with one knuckle. “If it's ever too much?”

“Yellow to slow down,” I said. “Red to stop.”

“Good girl.” His thumb brushed my jaw. “Water. Then the workshop.”

I drank the whole glass with my back to him, and my hands were shaking just enough that I had to use both of them.

The workshop smelled the way it always did, of cedar shavings and linseed oil and the faint sweetness of the wood stove that he keeps lit until November. A single hanging bulb lit up the long workbench he had built himself, its top worn smooth and pale from years of use, fresh curls of shavings still scattered across one end. His tools hung on the pegboard above it in perfect rows.

I had stood in this room a hundred times, handing him clamps, drinking coffee on the stool while he worked. I had never stood in it like this, waiting.

I heard the door click shut behind me, and then his footsteps on the plank floor, unhurried, the way he did everything.

He didn't say anything at first. He stopped beside the bench, unbuttoned the cuff of his henley and rolled the sleeve up past his elbow, one neat fold at a time, the way he does before a job he means to do properly. Then the other one. I watched his forearms, and those big rough hands that had built every piece of furniture in this house, and my whole body went hot and cold at the same time.

“Why the workshop?” I whispered.

“Because the couch is for small things,” Walter said. “And tonight wasn't small.”

“Walter, I—”

“Hands flat on the bench, sweetheart.”

I turned. I placed my palms on the cool, smooth wood. I felt the hem of my leather mini skirt shift against the back of my thighs, and I heard him step in close behind me.

Then nothing. Just the crackle of the stove and my own heartbeat roaring in my ears.

His hand settled on the small of my back, warm and heavy and perfectly still.

“Before we start,” he said, his voice low and steady, “I want you to tell me exactly what you were thinking, walking down Fifth Street alone at two in the morning. And then I want your color.”

I opened my mouth to answer. And behind me I heard him take one slow, deep breath, the kind he takes right before he starts a cut, when he won't stop until the job is done.

To be continued… The full chapter, uncensored and with exclusive images, continues on Fanvue: Read what happens next on Fanvue →