Free Curio Vignettes 05 Exposure by Cara McKenna Page B

later, she with a new charm for her bracelet and I with an offer of sporadic employment, doing the thing I love best.
    Well, the thing I love best aside from seducing Caroly.
    The wage I’ll make from the antique shop is a fraction of what I commanded as a prostitute. But I have much in savings, and I’ll earn enough to feel I’m contributing. Far more worrisome than the pay cut is that the job will demand I walk ten blocks to the shop, several days a week. That’s ten blocks outside my miniscule comfort zone, but a pretty enough commute, with walk signals at most of the street crossings.
    “You’ll be getting paid to do exposure therapy,” Caroly had suggested as we marked up a map with colored pens. You’d think we were negotiating a route into darkest uncharted Africa, not a two-kilometer stroll through the only city I’ve called home. She’s right though. The prospect of enjoying so many new mechanical challenges will ease the way there, and the promise of seeing Caroly when I return home will make the return trip bearable. As much as it scares me, I’m eager to look back a year from now and see just how much more manageable the journey might feel.
    I’ve said goodbye to my clients over the past month and a half, all beloved acquaintances, welcomed visitors to my lonely realm. Yet as my world’s grown bigger, I’ve found there’s no room for them in it. The monogamy I never thought I valued has grown magnetically attractive and changed my priorities. As much as I’ve cherished the years I spent with those women, their company enabled me. It fed my bank account but also my crippling anxiety, and a time has come when I finally prefer to feel frightened and alive rather than safe and numb.
    I lace my fingers with Caroly’s. “You did very well driving.” She’d been as nervous as I’ve ever seen her…save perhaps for the evening she first turned up on my threshold.
    “I did, didn’t I? It’s been so long, I wondered if I’d remember how. Thank goodness the French drive on the right. Otherwise I’d probably have drifted into the other lane out of habit and gotten us killed. But we made it.”
    “We did.”
    “I’ll be our chauffeur if you’ll translate. Provençal may as well be Esperanto, to my ears.”
    Caroly is American, and after living in Paris for two and a half years her French is strong, if inelegant. She has a keen eye for anything artistic, a thousand names for the color blue, but no ear for languages. I speak French of course, and English and Portuguese and Spanish as well, and passable Italian. These are the ways in which a shut-in does his world traveling, through language and music and books and recipes. Provençal is a blend of dialects, but I spoke well enough to make myself understood at the market.
    She thumps our linked hands against my thigh. “I think it’s wine time. I bet we could both use a glass.”
    “Agreed.”
    We rise and head for the kitchen. We selected several bottles at the store, and she chooses the Clairette de Die.
    “Something bubbly, to celebrate surviving the journey,” she declares.
    I inspect the cabinets, finding no flutes but a couple of brandy snifters. “These will have to do.” I set them on the scrubbed-pine table and take the bottle from Caroly, ending her spirited struggle with the cork. I wrap it in the hem of my shirt and twist it free with a mighty pop. The spray wets my shirt and the floor, but Caroly catches most of the eruption with the glasses.
    “I guess that was a bumpier ride than I realized.” She finds a cloth to mop the spill while I rinse my shirt, and we meet at the table and hold up our glasses.
    “To Provence,” she says.
    “This wine is from the Rhone.”
    “Whatever. To France.”
    And we toast, the fizz teasing my tongue.
    After a sip and an admiring sigh she says, “We toast a lot. Like, every single night.”
    “There is much to celebrate.”
    “And we drink a lot.”
    “There is much to drink.”
    She