Leona
Leona tucked her secrets away in the empty spaces of her body, anywhere she could keep her faults to herself and far from the eyes of others. These faults were merely trivial quirks that she sought to hide from others, as she had carefully curated a persona for herself and she would surely be condemned to her own self-loathing if any funny detail were to puncture such an image.
She kept the crumbs of her turkey-on-rye in the slight gaps in between her whitened teeth as she told her coworkers, with a shrug, a smirk, and the reflection of the fluorescent office lights sparkling in her eyes, that sheād given up meat six years ago. She kept all forty-one of her years on the soft slope of skin that connected the tip of her nose to her lips, as it was just out of the reach of the two men who she allowed to proclaim themselves upon her mouth, one much more enjoyable to her than the other. She kept her simple midwestern hometown in the space between her shoulder blades, pale and angular, as it was only visible to those she left behind her.
She kept her lover in between her fingers because she knew her fiancĆ©e wouldnāt look too closely at her whereabouts when he held her hand in his.
To Leona, her fiancƩe could be best described as sufficient. His name was Pat, and he was everything that she told herself she wanted in a partner. He was successful, a lawyer who took absolute pleasure in his work. He was shapely and dressed sensibly for a man of his age and profession. He treated her as cordially as he had on the day they had first met. He was wealthy and he kept to himself. He was respectable. There was no reason, to Leona, that someone of her caliber should search for satisfaction elsewhere. It was easy enough to ensnare her mind in a companionship which she deemed to be logical and suitable for her kind, but she could not keep her body or her heart from straying far from her engagement.
She stashed the name of her lover on her lips, beneath a practical shade of lipstick. It was a name given to her by a man who found his strength in the juxtaposition between his softness and his toughness and in her childlike fantasies, he was some sort of hero, a knight who saved the princess from the bestial form of the utter boredom of the life she thought she wanted for so long.Ā
Leona escaped to Manhattan from her plain upbringing, years of her life which simply did not fit her lofty desire for luxury. She was a pristine businesswoman and here in her city, there was no one to contradict her current livelihood with her personal history, or perhaps there wasnāt until she met him.
Casey was unlike any man Leona had ever met in New York. He was unabashedly passionate and he wore his hair long and his shirts only partially buttoned. His eyes reflected the sunlight that poured over a forest somewhere Leona had left behind her long ago. He was fire to the icy business woman, and a stark contrast to her trite fiancƩe. The two had spent many fervent, sweat-drenched nights of intensity, enforced by their time spent apart, but while the two were separated by daylight or perhaps by reason, Leona pondered a certain strangeness that haunted her for days after Casey left the smell of his cologne and pheromones wafting through the air, flooding her sense of smell. She could recall something about the familiar stranger, akin to remembering the melody of a song but forgetting the lyrics. She could feel the life she had composed for herself unravelling at a maddeningly slow pace because she knew something about this man was unsuitable to her, but she did not know what, so she asked herself the same question over and over: who is Casey?