Chapter 8: The Morning After
The buzz was a angry wasp trapped under his pillow. Leonid groaned, swatting blindly until his fingers closed around the cold, hard rectangle of his phone. The screen blazed to life—a reminder for his double shift at the restaurant. 10 AM. The neon strip above his bed was dead, defeated by the grey morning light seeping through the blinds.
He turned his head. Jennie was there, a warm weight against his side. Her black hair fanned across his chest, one small hand splayed possessively over his heart. In sleep, her face was a composition of absolute peace. The fierce intelligence, the calculating precision he sometimes glimpsed—all of it was smoothed away. She looked young. Innocent. The poetry from last night—“He strangles her with her own hair”—felt like a bad dream, a dissonant fragment from a different reality.
He watched the faint pulse in her throat. His own heart thudded against her palm. A strange protectiveness welled in him, thick and urgent. He bent his head, pressing his lips to the crown of her hair. She smelled like his soap and something deeper, uniquely her.
She stirred. A delicate sigh against his skin. Her eyelashes fluttered.
“Lenya?” she mumbled, the nickname slurred with sleep. Her voice was a soft hook in his chest.
“Yeah. It’s me. Go back to sleep.”
“Your shift.” Her eyes opened, dark and unfocused, then clearing as they found his. The tenderness in them was a physical warmth. It dissolved the last granules of unease.
“It’s just waiting tables. It’s nothing.” He began to extricate himself, but her arm tightened around him.
“Stay.” It wasn’t a whine. It was a quiet, yearning command.
He smiled, a rare, unguarded softening of his features. “I have to, milaya. Rent isn’t nothing.” He brushed a thumb over her bottom lip. “Stay here. Sleep. The room is yours. I’ll be back by four.”
He slipped from the bed, the chill of the room raising goosebumps on his skin. He dressed quickly in his waiter’s uniform—black trousers, a white shirt he’d have to iron at work. The motions were automatic. He focused on the mundane: finding a clean pair of socks, his lighter.
As he shrugged into his shirt, he glanced toward the bed. His reflection, and hers, were caught in the dark mirror of his window. She was curled on her side, watching him. Not with sleepy affection, but with a predator’s total, motionless focus. Her expression was blank, analytical, as if she were dissecting the mechanics of his movement, memorizing the topography of his back. It was a look of pure, impersonal observation. It stopped his breath.
He turned.
Jennie blinked. And just like that, the mask was back—soft, loving, a little sleepy. She smiled, hugging his pillow to her chest. “You’re staring.”
“You were staring,” he said, his voice quieter than he intended.
“I like watching you,” she said simply, no artifice in the statement. “You’re beautiful when you’re not thinking too hard. Now hurry. So you can hurry back.”
He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He had imagined it. The strange poetry, the intensity of her love—it was just her. Overwhelming, but hers. He finished buttoning his shirt, grabbed his keys and wallet.
At the door, he looked back. She had sat up, the sheet pooled around her waist. The morning light cut across her shoulders, her fragile collarbones, the small, perfect curves of her breasts. A bolt of pure, possessive desire shot through him, erasing every shadow of doubt.
“Four o’clock,” he repeated.
“I’ll be here,” she promised.
The door clicked shut. The sound of his footsteps faded down the hall.
Silence flooded the room, thick and sweet. Jennie closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of him, embedded in the sheets, clinging to the air. The ghost of him was everywhere. It was a cocoon.
But outside, the world was imperfect. A girl with a bouncing ponytail and a laugh like wind chimes was breathing in the same city air, thinking thoughts that might, in some distant, impossible future, include Leonid. A flaw in the canvas. A dissonant note.
She rose, moving with a liquid grace through the clutter of his life. She didn’t dress. She stood naked in the center of the room, feeling the gritty floor under her feet, and her mind began its methodical work. The botanical gardens. Yes. Overgrown, closed to the public, a ruin of glass and verdant rot. The soil would be soft from recent rains. She pictured it: the hothouse humidity, the heady perfume of decaying orchids, the way the fractured panes would cast prismatic knives of light across a still face.
Her phone, charging on his desk, lit up with a text. A notification from the student council group chat. Mia Chao had sent a photo of a proposed fundraiser flyer. “What do we think, team? Jennie, your eye for design is way better than mine! 😊”
Jennie picked up the phone. The screen’s glow painted her serene face. She studied the flyer. It was cluttered, inelegant. Amateurish.
Her thumbs typed a reply, her expression tender. “So cute, Mia! Love the energy. But let’s workshop it? I’m free later this afternoon—we could meet, just us girls, and perfect it. How about the old botanical gardens? It’s quiet there, and the greenhouse light is amazing for photos after.”
She sent it. A perfect lure. Helpful. Considerate. Isolated.
The three dots appeared almost immediately. Mia was eager. Flattered.
“OMG, yes! You’re the best, Jennie! Is 3pm okay? I have a chapter to read but I’ll blow it off lol.”
“3pm is perfect,” Jennie typed. “See you then. It’ll be fun.”
She placed the phone back on the desk. The plan was a calm, settled warmth in her stomach. She dressed slowly, folding his sheets with precise, military corners, plumping his pillow. She tidied the energy drink cans into a recycling bag, wiped the dust from his windowsill. She was carving order from his chaos, as she would carve silence from the noisy world.
By the time she left, locking his door with the spare key he’d given her, the room was a shrine. Neat. Waiting.
Her own apartment was a sterile, minimalist capsule across town, paid for by her family. Inside her walk-in closet, behind a false panel in the wall, was a toolkit. Not of weapons, but of instruments. Specialized things. Shrouds of polymer fabric that dissolved certain materials. A particular type of cord, strong and silken. Chemicals in unlabeled bottles. She selected a few items, placing them in the bottom of her expensive leather tote bag, covering them with a chiffon scarf and her tablet.
She had hours. She would go to the gardens early. To walk the paths. To select the perfect spot. To feel the quiet, broken only by the drip of water and the rustle of eager, doomed things growing in the dark.
As she hailed a taxi, she thought of Leonid, refilling water glasses, balancing trays on his broad palm. She thought of his hands on her later, smelling of soap and dishwater. She would kiss the weariness from his eyes. He would never know the work she did for him, the bloody tending of their garden.
The taxi pulled away from the curb. Jennie watched the city blur past, her reflection a calm ghost over the rushing landscape. Her phone rested in her lap. On the screen, a final text from Leonid, sent moments ago: “Thinking of you. Table six is a bastard.”
She smiled, a real one that touched her eyes. She typed back, “Be nice. I’m thinking of you too. Always.”