Chapter 4 #3
He was beautiful. Not in the way of models or actors, that flat dimension of veiny arms and symmetrical smiles, but in the way of the gunmetal Ferraris I used to see outside the Loop: tight lines, engineered aggression, a kind of raw grace that made your mouth dry and your hands itch.
He was so fucking beautiful it pissed me off.
The coat was black, tailored, and fell just long enough to look expensive in a way that was hard to put a number to.
The collar was turned up, not for style but because it was cold, and the cold made his face sharper, brought the bones to the front and set his eyes deeper in their sockets.
The eyes were black in the streetlight, the color of espresso before you stirred the crema in, but they were lit from behind, alive, and when he looked at me now it felt less like eye contact and more like stepping under a bright lamp at a crime scene.
The mouth was there, too. The mouth I’d spent an hour pretending not to think about.
It was a contradiction—soft, pink, resting almost gently, but anchored at both corners by the suggestion of something harder.
When he spoke, the lower lip caught for just a second on the top row of teeth, and I remembered how it had looked when he’d been smiling at the bar, that half-crooked thing that showed you all the secrets he wasn’t going to tell.
He waited. No hurry, no push. Said nothing more.
My heart pounded.
Why was danger always so compelling?
“We have them,” he said. Quiet. Careful. He spoke the way you spoke to an animal that you knew could outrun you if it decided to. “There were two of them. We have them both.”
I did not answer.
“We’re going to question them tonight.” A pause, a beat, the small attention of a man who was not going to fill the silence for me. “Do you want to be there? You have the right, if you choose.”
I shook my head. I did not trust my voice.
He absorbed it. He absorbed it the way he had absorbed the bite—without complaint, without commentary, like a man for whom an answer was an answer.
“All right,” he said.
He did not move.
He waited.
Then he said: “Tell me where you’re going. Let me make sure you get there safely.”
“No.”
The word came out of me hard. Harder than I had meant it. It came out hard because it was the only thing keeping the rest of me on the right side of the street, and I knew it, and he probably knew it, because he did not look surprised.
He looked at me.
He looked at me for a long moment, the way he had looked at me across the floor of the club, the way that had been the start of all of this. Then he did something I was not prepared for.
He said, “Please. Signorina. You are in danger, I know it. I know how it feels. Let my help you. I mean you no harm. I mean you nothing but good.”
He’d said please.
It landed in my chest like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.
He did not say it the way men said please when they were trying to talk a woman into something.
He did not say it the way men said please when they wanted you to know they were being patient with you.
He said it like a man who did not say please often, and who was therefore saying it without armor, and who was offering the word to me as a thing he meant.
He said it and then he stayed exactly where he was, hands still open, a few feet of cold sidewalk between us, and he waited.
I was going to ruin my life.
The thought arrived with great clarity. I was going to ruin my life.
I had ruined it once already, and now I was going to ruin it again, in a different direction, for a different reason, and the part of my brain that was responsible for not ruining my life—the analyst, the woman in the bun, the woman who had testified for thirty-one days—that part of my brain stood up out of her chair and held out a hand to me across a federal courtroom and I walked past her without looking.
I crossed the space between us.
I did not decide to do it. The deciding had been done somewhere lower than where decisions happened. After so many years of being careful, I had enough. I crossed the distance and I put my hands on the front of his coat, both of them, and I put my mouth on his.
He made a sound.
It was not loud. It was the sound a man made when something had been done to him that he had not been braced for, the small sharp intake at the back of the throat, and I felt the sound move through his chest and into my hands, and the heat in the base of my spine, the heat that I had been walking off for an hour, opened all the way up.
His mouth was warm.
That was the first thing. That was the thing I had not been prepared for.
His mouth was the warmest thing I had touched in six weeks.
His mouth was warmer than the gloves had been on my hands when Wendell had given them to me, warmer than the diner had been when I had stepped into it, warmer than any heat I had been able to find in a city that had been freezing me steadily for forty days.
His mouth tasted like the inside of a wool coat in winter— warm wool, salt, the faint clean bitterness of his soap, something darker under it I did not have a word for and would not later be able to reconstruct.
I felt my mouth open and his mouth open with it.
I felt his tongue, careful, careful, not pushing, just there, and the carefulness was worse than if he had grabbed me, because the carefulness meant he had thought about this, the carefulness meant he had been thinking about this since the booth.
His hand came up.
The hurt one. The one I had bitten. He brought it up to the back of my head, slow, and he cradled the back of my skull the way you would cradle something you had been waiting to hold, and the pressure of his palm against the bone of my head went down through me and pooled in my hips, and I made a sound I did not recognize.
I made a sound back.
Needier than his. Almost a word.
I was wet. I was already wet, I had been wet in the diner, I had been wet for an hour, but now I was wet in a way that was no longer something I could ignore, and his other hand had not yet come up to touch me anywhere else, and I knew, with the precision the analyst was famous for, that if his other hand came up I was not going to make it back out of this doorway.
I pushed him.
I pushed him hard. Both hands flat on his chest. He went back against the brick.
He let me push him—I could feel that he let me, I could feel the deliberate giving of his weight—and the wool of his coat was warm under my palms and his eyes were on me, dark, and his mouth was open, and the line of his jaw was exactly the line I had been trying not to think about, and I pushed off him like pushing off a wall in a swimming pool, and I ran.
I ran the way I had walked away from him in the alley.
I did not look back.