Chapter 13 #2
“Elena.” He stops walking and looks at me and the look is not soft.
It is the look of a man who grew up learning to calibrate exactly how much force was acceptable and has spent his whole adult life keeping it behind glass.
“Men like that rely on women not making a scene. They count on it. And I have spent a significant portion of my life watching them get away with it because everyone around them was too polite to say what they were.”
I study him. “Private school?”
Something shifts at the edge of his mouth. “Boarding school. Four years. The kind where the worst ones had lawyers for fathers and the vocabulary to describe their behavior as high spirits.”
“Ah.” I resume walking. He falls back into step. “So you know the type well.”
“Intimately.”
“I grew up in foster care,” I say. “Three different homes by the time I was eighteen. Believe me, I know what the word prick means. I just usually had less legal recourse.”
He is quiet. The way someone goes quiet when a thing lands and they are letting it.
“How old?” he asks.
“Eight. When I went in.” I keep my eyes on the pavement. “My parents died in a car crash. Nadia and I went together at first, which was the only good part. Then she aged out four years before me. After that I was on my own in the last house.”
“Was it bad? The houses?”
“One was fine. One was terrible. One was just sad.” I shrug. “At sixteen I moved in with Nadia. She saved me without making it feel like saving.”
He stops walking again.
We are under a streetlamp, the city moving around us like water around stone. He looks at me and his expression is the same one he had in the bar when he told the guy to back off.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what.”
“Pity me. I can feel it coming.”
“It’s not pity.”
“What is it then.”
“Anger,” he says. “On your behalf.”
That stops something in my chest. I look at him properly, reading his face the way you read something you thought you understood until the light changed.
He means it. There is no head tilt, no quiet recalibration to accommodate a fragile person.
He just looks the way he always looks, direct and controlled with something hard at the edges, and it occurs to me that this is the first time I have told any version of this and not felt the immediate need to wrap it in a joke or reassure the other person that I’m actually fine, no really, please stop looking at me like that.
“Oh,” I say.
We walk another block. He does not fill the silence with platitudes or careful apologies or any of the things people usually reach for when they don’t know what to do with someone else’s history.
He just walks beside me.
After a while I say, “Tell me one honest thing about you.”
He considers this seriously, which I appreciate. He is not a man who produces answers on demand just to fill space.
“I haven’t slept well in three years,” he says. “I tell myself it’s work. It isn’t.”
I let that sit where it landed.
“Your wife,” I say.
“Yes.”
Not a confirmation. Not an elaboration. Just a word that holds an entire architecture of grief in it, and he carries it the way he carries everything, upright, measured, with no visible seams.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “Pity me.”
“It’s not pity.”
“What is it then.”
“Anger,” I say. “On your behalf.”
He smiles, and stops walking.
We are somewhere on a quieter block now, the noise of the bar a full world away. A yellow streetlamp turns everything amber. He turns toward me and I realize we are standing close.
“Elena,” he says, and my name in his mouth does something unreasonable to my pulse. “Here’s something honest. What happened between us was not nothing.”
“I know.”
“I’m not in a position to be casual about this.”
“I didn’t ask you to be casual.”
His gaze drops to my mouth, comes back to my eyes. Something in the drop is very deliberate and very slow and my nervous system would like to file a formal complaint about it.
“Can I kiss you,” he says.
I have been waiting for him to do exactly this since approximately the second day of my employment and I say yes so fast it’s almost embarrassing.
“Yes.”
He steps in and his hand comes up to the side of my face, thumb along my jaw, tilting me up. The kiss starts slow, almost careful, his mouth warm against mine. Then his lips part and the careful part ends and I stop thinking about anything at all.
He tastes like whiskey, smoky and clean, and underneath that something male and specifically him that goes straight to my bloodstream.
His other hand finds my waist, fingers spreading wide through the fabric of my dress, and I fist both hands in his jacket and pull him closer because there is no good reason not to.
He makes a low sound against my mouth that I feel as much as I hear and my knees register an opinion about it immediately.
By the time he pulls back I’m trembling. His forehead comes to rest against mine and for one breath neither of us moves.
“Elena,” he says, voice rough, “I can’t promise you easy.”
“Good,” I whisper. “Easy bores me.”
His laugh is quiet and pained and fond all at once.
He steps back, takes out his phone. “David. Sixty-Third and Lex.”
Three minutes later a black car glides to the curb. Patrick opens the back door. I get in. The leather is warm, the interior smells like cedar.
He leans down to the open door. “Take her home,” he says to David.
Her home. Singular. He is staying on this sidewalk.
I look at him. “You’re really putting me in a car alone.”
“Yes.”
“Cruel.”
“Responsible.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He holds the door, watching me with that face he has, the one that gives very little away while giving absolutely everything away.
“Say something real before you close that door,” I say.
He crouches so we’re level. The amber light catches the line of his jaw.
“I think about you constantly,” he says.
My entire chest does something it has no business doing on a public street.
“That’s significant,” I manage.
“Yes,” he says. “It is.”
He reaches for the door. I catch his wrist, lean in, and kiss him once, quick, decided. He goes still, then his hand comes up to the back of my neck and the quick kiss becomes a full, unhurried, deeply irresponsible one.
When I pull back his eyes are dark.
“Goodnight,” I say.
He closes the door. I give the driver my address and he pulls away with the composure of a man paid very well to have witnessed nothing.
I face forward. Press two fingers to my mouth. Watch Manhattan go liquid past the window.
Patrick Aldera thinks about me constantly.
I think about that the entire way home.