Chapter Eleven: The Chance Encounter

[Pa****]

I told her before sunset.
“I’ll be gone for a while,” I said in the hall, where the light falls thin and honest. “I work nights. The house is yours until I’m back.”
She watched my face instead of the door. “When?”
“When I return,” I said. “You won’t be locked in. You also won’t be forgotten.”
The cat wove around her ankles like a blessing she didn’t trust. She nodded anyway. No promise to stay. No threat to run. Just the weight of being left with something that wasn’t hers yesterday.
I left the master bedroom door open behind me. The choice could breathe.
Vegas wears its night like perfume—too much, too sweet, everywhere. I took the long way to work out of habit, past the kind of places where the city pretends at comfort: a strip of late diners, a coffee shop that keeps its lights low to make secrets easier, a laundromat that never sleeps.
I stopped for a coffee I didn’t need. The barista called people “love” as if it cost her nothing. When it was my turn she didn’t say it. She set the cup down with both hands like an offering and said, “You look like you’re leaving.”
“Eventually,” I said.
She smiled without warmth. “Everyone is.”
I moved aside. That’s when I felt the attention—small, precise, not the hungry stare I’ve learned to ignore. A woman at the end of the counter had a book open and wasn’t reading it. She held herself like a dancer who’d traded mirrors for windows. Polished. presentable. Not untouched by the desert, but not hollowed out by it either.
Her eyes lifted once, met mine, and returned to the page as if to keep the moment from spilling.
“That’s a good one,” I said, nodding to the cover I couldn’t quite see.
She tipped it just enough. A field guide to desert plants—practical beauty. Survival disguised as tenderness.
“You live here long?” she asked, as if the question were about the book.
“Too long,” I said. “Not long enough.”
That earned a real smile—small, careful, like a door on a chain. “I’m Marisol,” she said, and the name fit her: sun and thorn together.
“Nice to meet you, Marisol.”
She smoothed the page with her palm. “You don’t talk like men who stay.”
“I’m not staying.”
“That’s what I thought.” She glanced at my cup. “So what are you doing?”
“Finishing something.”
She studied me, not coy, not bold—just intent. “And what happens to people who find you in the middle of it?”
“They decide whether to walk with me for a while,” I said. “Or they don’t.”
Her breath hitched the way a dancer pauses before the turn. “How long is ‘a while’?”
“Three to six months,” I said. “Long enough to matter. Short enough to be honest.”
She closed the book then, fingers still marking the page. “Honesty is rare,” she said. “Almost as rare as discipline.”
“Both are cheaper than regret.”
That made her laugh—quiet, like a secret cracking open. “You sound like a man with rules.”
“I am.”
She didn’t ask what they were. She didn’t flirt. She only sat a little straighter, as if a spine she’d kept hidden had found its use.
“I close up three nights a week,” she said. “Sometimes I walk the long way home.”
I let her hold the silence until it pressed.
“Then the long way is where I’ll be.”
Her lips parted, but no words followed. Just that small, careful smile again—less guarded now, the chain slipping loose from the door.
We didn’t exchange numbers. We didn’t make promises. When she left, she tucked the book beneath her arm and moved with a careful economy I recognized—someone who has never asked for permission to want.
She paused at the door, looking back just once. Not to check if I was watching, but to make sure I’d seen her as she was.
I had.
When I returned, the house was quiet in the right way. The master bedroom door was still open. The bed looked slept in, not barricaded. In the kitchen, the counter was clean, the knife dry, the cloth folded where it belonged.
Seraphine appeared at the end of the hall, hair tied back with a piece of ribbon that hadn’t been there before—borrowed from the closet, perhaps. Earned, not stolen.
“You came back,” she said, as though testing whether the words could be true in this place.
“I said I would.”
She looked past me into the night, then back at my hands, as if measuring whether I carried someone else’s scent home. The cat slipped between us, brushing her calf, then mine, knitting the space with its silent acceptance.
“I left the door open,” she said. It was half confession, half challenge.
“I know,” I said. “You left it open, and you stayed. That’s two good choices in one night.”
She absorbed that, slow. Then: “Are there more coming?”
“Perhaps.” I thought of sun and thorn, of a book on desert names. “The desert is generous when it decides you’ve waited long enough.”
She didn’t ask who. She didn’t ask when. She stepped aside so I could pass, as if the house itself had taught her how to make room without giving ground.
The night settled around us—heavy, whole, ours. Somewhere beyond the fence, the city kept promising what it never meant to keep. In here, the rules were simple, the choices real, and the season had begun to gather its own.

Edited September 25 by PapiVegas