I should tell you up front: I'm recording this. You can't tell, because that's the whole point of a port like mine — it sits behind the ear and just listens, the way I'm listening to you breathe right now, in the dark, in this stupid romantic lighthouse, while you undo the top button of my shirt like it's the most important decision you've ever made.
It's worth money, your hesitation. That's what I came for. The market pays best for the things people can't fake — the half-second where your hand stops at my collar because you genuinely don't know if I want this, because you can't ping me and ask, because the only way you have to learn anything about me is the old slow way, with your eyes and your hands and your guessing.
"Cold?" you ask, when I shiver. You can't feel what I feel. You have to watch for it. There's a tenderness in that watching that I am going to package and sell to strangers, and I hate how the hatred itself feels good, low in my stomach, a second pulse.
The second button. Your knuckle drags warm down my sternum. The window won't close all the way and the cold leaks across the floor and finds my feet, which are always cold, and you've already noticed — you've already pulled the wool blanket over them without being asked. I want to tell you to stop being like this because it's making the recording too valuable and me too complicit.
You turn me. You find the three moles on my shoulder blade and keep coming back to them like a man checking a constellation against a map he half-remembers. Your mouth there. The salt-damp of the sheet under my cheek. The foghorn drags its long low note across the water and I'm cataloguing all of it — the candle-smell, the absence of any neural hum between us, that loud dizzy silence where the shortcut used to be — and I'm thinking: this will sell, this will sell, this will —
Your watch is against my spine. The little analog watch you wear ironically. And under it, pressed against my back where your scarred wrist rests — warmth. Not skin warmth. The specific low warmth I know better than my own name. The warmth of a port drawing power.
I go still.
Your wrist scar is supposed to be dead tissue. A decommissioned port, you told me at the door, deliberately left to atrophy — that was practically your sermon. Skin and guesswork is enough. You don't miss the shortcut. And I believed you the way I believe most things I want to sell.
"You stopped," you say, into my shoulder. You don't lift your head. "Your breathing changed."
"Did you read that," I ask, "or did you feel it?"
A pause that costs both of us something. Then, very quietly, against the moles: "I noticed your port at the door. Behind your ear. The live one."
The room tilts. I'm not the spy in your tender little fairy tale. I'm the talent. This is your listing — *An Authentic Analog Night, fully sensory, the real unrepeatable thing* — and I walked in carrying a camera you clocked in four seconds, and you let me, because an unwitting co-star is the only honest kind. You weren't being seduced. You were getting coverage. Two angles on the same theft. The mark was filming the thief.
I should be furious. Instead I'm laughing, helpless, my face in the salt sheet, because we are two people who swore off the shortcut and built an entire night out of lying about it, and the cruelty is so symmetrical it's almost a kindness.
"When," I say. "When did you turn it off." Because your wrist is cool now. Sometime in the dark you stopped recording. I felt the warmth go.
You lift your head. In the candlelight I can see you doing the math and not liking the answer. "I don't know," you say, and you mean it, and that's the horror and the gift of it — you can't check. Neither can I. The one fact that matters between us is the one we've made unverifiable. Somewhere between the second button and the three moles, one of us, maybe both of us, quietly stopped performing, and there's no log to consult, no shortcut, only your hand still open against my back and my whole stupid traitor heart going off behind a wall you can't read.
So. I should tell you up front: I was never the only one with a secret.
Ask me again if I'm cold.
