Chapter 8
Katerina
It was a disaster. I’d burned the first tray of koulourakia.
Me.
I don’t burn things. I’ve timed an oven by the smell since I can remember, and that morning I stood three feet from it thinking about a man’s mouth and let a whole tray go to coal, and I scraped them into the bin before he came in so he wouldn’t see.
I hated that I’d done that, and I hated more that the reason I’d done it was him.
He’d stopped.
I’d given him the kiss the first time, a week ago, climbed him like a fence and then told him to leave.
Fine. But last night he’d had me—my fist in his shirt, my breath in his mouth, my whole body up on its toes saying yes before my brain had time to kick in—and he was the one who had pulled back.
He uncurled his hand off my waist, like he was setting down a hot pan, and he opened the space back up between us.
I’d watched him pull back and it had not looked like relief. It had looked like pain. Like he wanted me so badly it hurt. I didn’t understand it.
So I made a decision. I’d decided he didn’t want me, because that was the version that kept my walls up.
And then—of course—when he came in this morning at four exactly and he’d looked at me—one look, before the grin, before any of the noise—it was not with the look of a man who didn’t want me.
He wanted me. I wanted him.
So what on earth was going on?
I thought of Despina. Why are you so terrible to a man who likes you.
I thought of her hand on mine, warm, pinning.
I thought, with a flat fury that had nowhere to go, that she’d been right, the old woman, she’d been right in the church basement and she’d be unbearable about it if she ever found out, and I would die before I gave her the satisfaction.
Because I liked him. That was the fact at the bottom of all of it, and I’d stopped being able to lie about it. I liked the grinning broken-nosed idiot who’d put my father’s name back on my glass in my father’s green and never once asked me to thank him for it.
And now I was doing it. The thing he did.
I’d caught myself three times since four o’clock cataloging him—the forearms when he pushed his sleeves up, the muscle moving under the ink, the way he set a fifty-pound sack down without a grunt and then turned and found me with that look.
I was inventorying him the way he’d been inventorying me for months, and I knew exactly how it felt to be on the receiving end of it, and I couldn’t stop.
My eyes kept going to him. My eyes had opinions now.
I aimed them at the dough and they came back.
“You want these proofed warm or cool?” he asked. He had a tray of tsoureki braids and he was holding them away from his body like they might go off.
“Warm. Rack by the oven, not on it.” Sharp. Sharper than the question needed. I heard it come out sharp and didn’t soften it, because cold was the only tool I had left that worked, and even that was failing.
“Warm rack. Got it, boss.”
He went and did it. Didn’t push. He never pushed anymore. It kind of made me mad. He was good at taking my crap. Another reason I really liked him.
“You missed the eggwash on the third one,” I said.
“I’ll get it.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“And then I always get it.” He glanced back, and there it was, the corner of a grin, but careful, dialed down, watching me like I was a thing that might bolt.
That was new too. He used to grin at me like a man flooding a room with light to see what it caught.
Now he grinned at me like a man holding a door open and waiting, and the waiting was somehow worse, the waiting got under my skin in a way the flooding never had.
Just say it, I thought, with a heat that surprised me. Just say you wanted to, last night, just say it so I can throw it back at you, just give me something to push against, you coward, you monster, you—
He didn’t say it.
Instead, he fixed the eggwash. He moved through my kitchen carefully, folding himself small, minding the corners, thoughtful and gentle.
We opened, we served, we kept the customers busy.
It was our dance, and we did it for hours, until he came for the bench scraper.
Without knowing, I reached for the same drawer and we arrived.
We stood there a half-second too long, his arm warm an inch from mine, and I felt the want come up through me like dawn coming up over a valley, slow and unstoppable and warming everything it touched, low in my belly, a thrum, a pull, and I hated it and I leaned into it the smallest fraction before I caught myself and stepped back.
“Drawer’s yours,” I said.
“Thanks.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. He’d felt it too. I knew he’d felt it. I could taste the kiss, could feel him on my lips. What was wrong with him, what was wrong with me, why did I feel like this, like a wire pulled too tight, like a kettle just before it screams—
The bell went
Cold came in with it. I looked up out of reflex, half a greeting loaded, and the greeting died, because I didn’t know her.
A woman, late twenties, mid-brown hair grown out into something that looked accidental and elegant, a thrifted coat, the kind of stillness I knew from my own mirror—and Tonio, beside me, went tight.
I felt it more than saw it. The big easy body of him locked up for half a beat, the grin gone flat the way it goes flat when he’s lying, and I clocked it the way I clock everything, and I thought: here’s another one.
She said she was here to taste for her wedding. I had a feeling it wasn’t the whole truth. Tonio had made an excuse—something about baseball?—and had headed into the office, leaving me out here alone with her.
“We’re not really open for tasting,” I said, which was a lie, the cases were full, but I say it to people I haven’t measured yet. “What do you want?”
“Cannoli.” She said it like a woman who’d been thinking about cannoli for a while. “My name’s Angela.”
She held out her hand and I took it.
“Katerina.”
“Pietro said your cannoli were the best in the city. I didn’t believe him.
He oversells.” She came up to the case and looked down at them, and there was a hunger in the look that wasn’t performed — a real, slightly underweight hunger, the kind I knew, the kind that’s the result of skipped meals and not discipline. “Two.”
I boxed two. She paid swiftly, exact change, counted out fast, a woman used to making money last. She bit into one standing right there at the counter, no plate, and her eyes closed for a second, and that part was real too. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t lying about the cannoli.
“God,” she said, with her mouth full. “Okay. He didn’t oversell.”
“For the wedding?” I said. Flat. Watching her.
“For the wedding.” She wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth with her thumb. “I’m supposed to be deciding if you cater the dessert table. Two hundred and forty people. The family’s at war over lilies, and there’s no way we choose the cannoli without kicking off some kind of major conflict.”
I leaned on my own counter, arms crossed, and let the silence do a little work, the way Despina taught me without meaning to, and watched her not fill it.
She didn’t fill it. She just ate the cannolo and looked at me with grey-green eyes that had shadows under them no sleep would fix, and I thought, you’re like me, and right behind it, and you’re like them.
“You know Tonio, don’t you? You’re his people.” I said.
Same thing I’d said to the three guys. Not a question. “Whatever flavor of them you all are. You’ve got the lean, you’ve got the look, you’ve got it all. So.” I uncrossed my arms. “You’re working something. What is it?”
For the first time she smiled, and it changed her face, made it the face it would’ve been if the last couple years had gone differently. “He said you’d be like this.”
“Did he?”
“He said you’d work me out, and that you’d connect me to him.He also said you’d hate that I came.” She set the half-eaten cannolo down on its paper. There was mischief in her eyes. “He was right three times over.”
The door clicked, and Tonio re-entered. The woman glanced over at him, his whole big body radiating a nervousness I’d never seen on him, and she gave him a small flat look that said I’ve got this, and to my surprise he took it.
He went. Went to the old woman in the window seat, started in on her about her hip, and left the two of us alone at the counter.
“I can’t tell you everything,” she said.
Quiet. Precise. No apology in it. “I want to be straight with you about that up front. So. I won’t say everything.
Here’s what I’ll say. I work for them. I’m not muscle and I’m not a threat to you.
What I do is money—I trace it, I read it, I find the shape of things in the margins.
I’m good at it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and it cost me my whole life once, and I’d do it again.
” She picked the cannolo back up. “And I am here for the cannoli. If you don’t get the contract it’s a crime, and I’ll say so. ”
She reached into her coat and took out a folded sheet of paper, and she put it on the counter and turned it so I could read it, and my stomach dropped, because I knew it.
It was a copy of one of the buyout offers.
The letterhead with the company name I’d torn the original of and thrown in the bin and torn again.
The number on it that was an insult, the number under it that was a worse insult, the polite paragraph at the bottom about neighborhood revitalization that meant sell or we make you.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.