Chapter 11 #2
The reaction is immediate and total. Heat floods my face. My pulse spikes. My stomach drops and my skin tightens and something at the base of my spine liquefies, and the sensation is so overwhelming that I grip the edge of the table to keep my hands from shaking.
I hate it. I hate that two syllables from this man can bypass every defence I've built and land somewhere I didn't know was exposed.
I do not look at him. I stare at the tablecloth. The white linen blurs.
"Don't," I say. My voice is quiet. Stripped. "Don't say that to me in public."
"Why?"
Because I'll fall apart. Because I am already falling apart. Because the suit fits perfectly and the tie is centered and my captor just praised me for sitting quietly and not ordering my own food, and I liked it, and the liking is a freefall that has no bottom.
"Because I asked you not to."
He studies me. The grey eyes are steady, and in the candlelight they carry a warmth that I do not trust because warmth from this man is never accidental.
"Understood," he says. And then, quieter: "For now."
* * *
The food is extraordinary. I eat it without tasting it, which is a crime against the chef and against the langoustine, which did not die to be ignored by a man in the middle of an emotional crisis.
Kazimir eats. He speaks. He discusses a Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate that he has no intention of attending because he owns better examples than anything the public collection holds, and the arrogance of this statement is so absolute it circles back around to factual.
We discuss Rothko's late period. We argue about Hockney's iPad paintings---he considers them a degradation; I consider them brave.
We disagree about Basquiat's draftsmanship, which he calls intuitive and I call surgical.
He talks to me like an equal. This is the cruelest thing he has done since the hand-washing, because it shows me the shape of a life I could have---conversations about art with a man who sees paint the way I do, who can identify a dead brushstroke at twenty paces---and it hangs that life in front of me inside a cage I didn't ask to enter.
Between the fourth and fifth courses, Kazimir's phone vibrates against the tablecloth. He glances at the screen. His expression does not change, but the quality of his stillness shifts---a tightening, a contraction, the subtle reassessment of a man who has received information he does not want.
"Excuse me," he says. He sets his napkin on the table. He stands. "I will be a moment."
He walks toward the back of the restaurant. He rounds a corner. He disappears.
I am alone.
The restaurant continues around me---conversations, laughter, the clink of crystal. The waiter refills my water glass without being asked. The candle on the table flickers. Kazimir's napkin rests on the tablecloth in a precise fold that even his absence maintains.
And then I see it.
The door. Fifteen feet from my table. Matte black. Unmarked. The same door I walked through twenty minutes ago with his hand on my back.
Beyond it: a Georgian street in Mayfair, taxis, the Tube, a city of nine million people, anonymous and vast and full of places to disappear.
I am wearing shoes. For the first time in weeks. I have a suit that makes me look like I belong in this postcode. I have no phone, but I have legs, and I have spent my entire life being the person who could walk into any room and walk out with something that wasn't mine.
I could reach that door in five seconds. I could be on the street in ten. I could disappear into Soho and resurface under a new name in a city Kazimir hasn't thought to look.
I am a forger. I build identities for a living. Walking away from one is the thing I was born to do.
I stand up.
The napkin slides from my lap. My legs are steady. The shoes are solid on the floor---grounded, stable, the shoes of a man who can walk anywhere he wants. The door is fifteen feet away. The waiter is occupied. No one is watching me. The cage is open.
I take one step toward the door.
And I stop.
Because the door is not freedom. The door is Shoreditch.
The door is the squat with the damp walls and the stolen pigments and the Rothko forgery for a buyer in Monaco who was Kazimir's agent all along.
The door is Killian's shadow and the family's dismissal and the long, grinding loneliness of being the smartest person in every room and having no one who knows it.
And here---the cage, the captor, the man who spanked me and held me and said good boy in a voice that rewired my nervous system---here, I am seen.
Here, my hands matter. Here, there is a studio with north light and lapis lazuli and a man who critiques my brushstrokes with the precision of someone who understands exactly what my hands are capable of and will not allow them to be anything less.
The door is fifteen feet away. Freedom is on the other side of it. And freedom looks like the loneliest colour I know: a flat, featureless grey with no warmth and no depth and no one standing in it who gives a damn whether I live or die.
I sit down.
I pick up my napkin. I place it in my lap. I pick up my water glass and drink.
Kazimir returns. He rounds the corner and walks to the table with the measured stride of a man who has concluded his business and is resuming his evening. He sits. He takes his napkin. He signals the waiter for the next course.
He does not ask where I was. He does not check the door. He does not scan the room for signs of disruption.
He looks at me. The grey eyes hold mine across the candlelight, and in them I see a knowledge so total it renders language unnecessary.
He knows I stood up. He knows I saw the door.
He knows I calculated the distance and the odds and the shape of the life on the other side, and he knows I sat back down.
He picks up his wine. He takes a sip. He sets the glass down with the quiet precision of a man placing the final piece in a puzzle he has been assembling for weeks.
"The lamb is exceptional tonight," he says.
I pick up my fork. "Yes," I say. "It is."
My throat is tight. My hands are steady.
The tie he straightened sits centred against my chest, and I can still feel the ghost of his fingers at the knot, and the cage is closed, and I closed it, and the worst part---the part that will keep me awake long after the car returns us to the penthouse and Yuri locks the door and the north light waits in the studio for morning---is that I do not want it open.
* * *
Later, back at the penthouse, Kazimir leads me not to my quarters but to his study. The same study from last night---the leather chair, the desk lamp, the dark walls. He sits on the edge of the desk.
"Come here," he says.
I cross the room. He reaches out. His fingers find my face---the angle of my cheekbone, the line of my jaw---and he traces the bone structure the way he examined the portrait I painted. Clinical. Precise. His thumb traces the line of my jaw.
"Did I hurt you?" The question is quiet. It refers to last night---all of last night---and the weight of it sits between us.
"No," I say.
"Good." He lowers his hand. He stands, and before I can process the movement, he pulls me close. Not for sex or control. Just to hold me. His arms around my back, my face against his chest, his hand on the back of my head.
I am rigid at first. The suit between us, the aftereffects of the restaurant still vibrating through me, the knowledge that I was supposed to leave him tonight and didn't. All of it makes my body resist.
But he doesn't move. He doesn't demand anything. He simply holds, and after a moment that stretches long enough to feel like surrender, my body relaxes against his. My forehead finds the hollow of his collarbone.
My hands find his back.
We stand like that in the dark study, and it is not sex. It is not violence. It is the only thing that terrifies me more than both.