we stand in a room of white walls. white not as bone but as the blankness of a page that waits, the color of beginnings. the white so bright and undisturbed it looks like an absense, the endless paleness of it opening into something else. it is a room, or the belly of the whale, where silence hums until it is no longer proper to call it silence. in other stories, with other men, the walls would be softer, the white sterilized like the color of hospitals, the voices would be too loud — but this is not it. the room is but a room, there is little light from a window, and the veil of it pinpoints specks of dust like swirling stars.
a man sits behind a desk, i stand in front of it. there is something to his eye like a touch of iron, a sharpness most would probably dislike, which makes him too clever for his own good, which makes me smile. it is the most feline attempt at it, only a hidden thing at the corner of my lips, but he catches it with the same fierceness he catches everything else, like there is a hunger in him that exists only for this.
𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐲𝐬 : ❛ you don't scare me ❜, in a voice straining under the weight of itself. his exhaustion sits under his eyes, two shadows like two wounds, the dark line of his jaw set angrily as if there is something unsaid he still holds under his teeth & now it lingers as question mark, a hook to the tender side of the skin.
& 𝐢 𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫 : ❛ well, detective, i am not trying to ❜, he stares, which is an euphemism, there is that sharpness again when he looks at me & i see it as he sees it, my silhouette against the light, white against white, a story yet to be written. his hand grasps at his pen & i pretend i do not notice the eargerness of it, like a dog on a scent.