I shake my head, turn around—freeze, gasp. He’s there, somehow behind me and I didn’t hear him move or sense his presence. Scotch left on the table, hands loose at his sides. Indigo eyes knowing. Seeing. Piercing.
“Who are you, X?” Voice like a bow drawn across a cello string, the lowest, deepest, most soulful note. Caressing me, shivering my bones, making my skin pebble, just his voice. It’s like a touch, somehow intimate.
How do I answer? I feel tightness in my throat. “I don’t know.” My capacity to lie is snared and discarded by the openness in his eyes.
“You don’t know who you are?” Disbelief.
I find myself defensive. “And who are you, Logan Ryder? How would you answer such a question?”
He blinks slowly, stuffs both hands in his hip pockets, gazes at me for a long moment. “I am Logan Ryder. I’m an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and a philanthropist. Unmarried and unattached. A semireformed troublemaker.”
“That’s what you are, Logan. Not who you are.” I press my back to the window, needing space.
When he’s close, I can’t breathe, but not from panic. From something else. A chest-tightening anticipation. Memory. Fear of what I might do if he presses in again, the way he did in the bathroom. I have no control when he’s near. He short-circuits me, and I am unnerved.
“I was born in San Diego. Grew up poor. Surfer kid. Spent my days on the beach, on the waves. Skipped more school than I attended.” His eyes are distant, seeing the past. “Got into trouble. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Did some bad shit . . . saw friends die, and I realized I had to get out of that life or I’d end up either dead or in jail. Seemed to me at the time that the only way out for someone like me was to join the army. So I spent the next four years wearing army green. Never saw combat, but I did get plenty of training in how to work hard and party hard. Got my GED, so at least some good came of it.”
“That’s your past, not who you are.” My palms are flat against the cool glass.
“It’s more than anyone else knows about me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah . . . oh.” He smirks. “I’m getting to the part that starts to define who I am. After I phased out of the army, I was bored shitless. Had some money saved and nothing to do. Bummed around a bit, started getting into trouble again. I’ve got a knack for trouble, you see. It follows me, and I follow it. We’re very closely intertwined, trouble and me. I met this guy at a bar in St. Louis. He was a private security contractor. Talked a good game, got me to sign up for a tour in the desert. One tour as a defense contractor turned to two, turned to three. Good money, bad shit.” He shrugs. “Got out after the third, took my money and ran. I’d seen enough. Done enough. So I took what I had, bought a bar in Chicago, redesigned it, rebranded and restaffed it. Sold it. Did it again. Made good money, discovered I had a good head for that kind of thing. And I liked getting my hands dirty, ripping the places apart and rebuilding them. Then I had this investment opportunity . . . over here, in Manhattan. A big money investment, big risk, big return. It . . . didn’t pan out. Let’s just say that and leave it there.”
I sense a major plot hole. “You’re skipping something, Logan.”
He nods. “Yes, I am. That’s a story I’m not interested in telling just yet. It’s a big part of who I am, but it’s still hard to talk about. Still sort of learning how to move past it, you could say.”
“But you ask me who I am. Not so easy to answer, is it?”
He merely shrugs, a Gallic lift of one shoulder. “Is it fair to ask a question I find difficult to answer myself? No. Of course not. But how you answer that question, it tells me something. You, for instance, didn’t answer at all. You merely turned the question back around on me. You’re defensive. Private. Impossible to know. Who are you, X?” His eyes are deep, and sharp. “Make me an answer. Something. Anything.”
I’m not supposed to talk about me. It’s never been said outright, out loud. It’s an unspoken rule. Don’t talk about myself.
But how can I not? He’s looking at me, looking into me, eyes like the deepest seas, turbulent and roiling and fraught with chasms of such impenetrable depths I could get lost and crushed and devoured.
“I am Madame X.” It’s an answer, isn’t it?
“More.” A quiet demand. A command.
“I . . . I don’t know.” I turn away, desperate, rest my forehead against the glass and fog it with my breath. “You should go.”
“I have fifty minutes left, X.”
Ten minutes? That’s all that’s passed? An eternity, stretched thin and twisted into a loop, all within the space of six hundred seconds.
“Tell me one fact about yourself. It doesn’t have to be embarrassing, or a secret. Just . . . anything.”
“Why?” I whisper it.
This should be a simple conversation, but it isn’t, and even the why of that is beyond me. He confounds me, sets all I know of how my life works upon its head.
“Because I’m curious. I want to know.”
“I’m Spanish.”
He’s too close. Leaning in. Breath on my ear. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“What happened? With the investment?” Why the hell am I asking him this?
He laughs. “Right for the jugular. It was . . . complicated. Certain elements of the deal weren’t exactly legal. I knew it, but I thought I’d gone through enough layers to keep myself clean, you might say. But . . . I got betrayed.”
“So you’re a criminal.”
“Once upon a time, yes. Semireformed, remember. All of my current business endeavors are entirely legal.”
“You don’t seem the type.”
“Which type?”
“To be a criminal.”
“I came to a point where I had to reinvent myself.” He’s still so close I can hear him swallow, hear his breath.
He still smells faintly of cinnamon gum, but that scent is overpowered by scotch. I don’t know what he did with his gum; a strange detail to notice. He’s not touching me, though. Just standing in my space.
Why am I not pushing him away?
“Reinvention of one’s self is difficult,” I say.
“Yes. It is.” His finger now, index finger, on my chin. Just touching. Not turning me to him, just touching. “Why did you have to reinvent yourself, X?”
“Because I . . . got lost.” It is the shape of the truth, if lacking in substance.
“You’re leaving something out, X.”
“Yes, I am.”
“How about your real name?”
“I told you already. My name is Madame X.”
“That’s not even Spanish.” There’s a smile in his words, though I don’t look at him to see it. I can hear it, and it is blinding enough in its beauty, even heard but unseen.
I let out a long, slow breath. “It’s the only name I have.”
I sense the smile fade. My eyes change their focus, and now I can see his reflection in the window glass. His eyes are searching, a strand of golden hair across his eye. The corners of his eyes are crinkled, as if from long hours squinting in the sun. His skin is weathered, leathery. Rugged. He is beautiful, but hard and sharp, threat seeping from his pores. Yet somehow utterly gentle. So powerful, so sure of his capacity to eliminate any threat to himself that he need not posture. A tiger in the jungle that knows he is king.
“X. Why X?”
My eyes go, of their own will, to the painting on the wall. He turns away from me, and I sigh in relief. But I trail after him to stand beside him in front of Portrait of Madame X. He examines it. We stare at it in silence for a long, long time. I, remembering. He, perhaps, seeking clues. He will find none in the brushstrokes, nor in the composition, nor in the subject, nor in the use of color, the black and the white and the browns, not in the arch of her neck or the sharpness of her nose, the paleness of her skin or the drape of her hand. The only clues lie within me.