11. Chapter Eleven Carmelo
Chapter Eleven: Carmelo
She hasn't slept in three days.
I can see it from the apartment window before I even cross the street and head into the restaurant.
The way she moves through the dining room tonight is off by a fraction.
Half a beat behind her usual rhythm. Her turns are wider, her plate grip adjusted, compensating.
She's running on caffeine and willpower and the last of whatever the pills are still doing in her system. The cracks are starting to show.
She called Linda's phone again this morning.
I know because the cloned line logged it.
Eleven seconds. She hung up before the voicemail kicked in.
That's six calls and two texts in five days with no response.
She hasn't panicked yet, but the pill bottle on her nightstand has two, maybe three left, and when they're gone, the real countdown starts.
Danila called an hour ago. The handler assigned to Grace's file hasn't flagged anything yet.
The Marinos' next scheduled check-in isn't for twenty-two days, so the silence is still within normal parameters.
But the Bratva's supply chain contacts are reporting increased activity from the placement network's logistics arm.
Vehicles moving. Safe houses being swept.
The Harrisons' restructuring is putting pressure on the whole system, and the system is responding by tightening, pulling inward, securing assets.
"You have weeks, not months to get her to safety, if that," Danila said. "Whatever you're planning with her, plan faster."
I'm not planning anything. That's the problem.
I killed the Marinos, I cut the supply, and now I'm sitting in a restaurant eating pork shoulder and watching a woman fall apart in slow motion.
I don't have a plan for what comes next because the plan was always just be there, and being there isn't a strategy. It's a hope dressed up as intention.
She comes to my table at six fifteen. Coffee, pork shoulder.
The circles under her eyes are darker than yesterday.
Her skin has a grayish cast that wasn't there a week ago.
Her tapping is faster at baseline, the idle rhythm that used to be slow and spaced now running at double speed against whatever surface her finger finds.
"You look tired," I frown as I take a sip of my coffee.
She blinks. "I'm fine."
"You're not."
Her finger taps the edge of my plate. Fast. "Since when do you talk in full sentences?"
"Since you stopped sleeping."
She stares at me. Her mouth opens, closes.
Something moves across her face that I can't read, and I can read everyone.
It's not anger. It's not surprise. It's the expression of a woman who has been holding herself together with both hands and someone just noticed the effort, and she doesn't know whether to be grateful or furious.
"How do you know I'm not sleeping?" she asks.
Because I watch your lights from across the street.
Because I've tracked the time they go off every night for weeks, and for the last three nights they've stayed on past two AM.
Because your bedroom window faces the street and I can see the blue glow of your phone screen through the curtain at three in the morning.
Because I know you better than anyone alive and you don't know I exist outside this restaurant and walking you home. You have no idea who I am.
"Your hands," I say. "They're shaking."
She looks down. Her left hand is on the coffee pot, and there's a fine tremor running through her fingers. She pulls the hand back and puts it in her apron pocket.
"Bad week," she says. "Can I get you anything else?"
"Stay."
"I'm working."
"After."
She looks at me. The tapping in her apron pocket is rapid. "After what?"
"After your shift. Stay with me."
She cocks her head to the side. I can see her mulling it over, deciding what it means. Stay with me. Not at the restaurant. Not on the walk home. With me.
"Okay," she says.
She closes at ten forty-five. Javi left early, something about his sister's boyfriend and a family emergency that sounded manufactured to give Grace the closing shift alone.
She doesn't seem to mind. She moves through the routine on autopilot.
Mop, register, locks, lights. The restaurant goes dark in sections.
I'm at the bar when she finishes. She comes out of the kitchen with her jacket and her bag, and she walks straight to me and stands between my knees where I'm sitting on the barstool and puts her hands on my chest.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"You said stay."
"I did."
"Where?"
"Your place."
She picks up her bag and walks to the door without looking back. I follow.
Three blocks. She doesn't walk beside me this time.
She walks ahead, fast, her stride purposeful, and I match her pace two steps behind because she's leading and I'm following and the reversal of every dynamic we've had is happening on a Tuesday night on a cold street in South Philadelphia and I let it happen.
At her door, she unlocks it without turning around. She walks inside. She leaves the door open behind her. I step through and close it and lock it. Her apartment is dark and small and smells like her shampoo and some incense shit in a bowl on the hallway table.
She drops her bag on the kitchen counter. Her jacket goes on the chair. She turns to me and the apartment is so small that there's four feet between us and the only light is the streetlamp coming through the window and the green glow of the microwave clock.
"I haven't slept in three days," she says.
"I know."
"I don't know why. The pills aren't working the way they used to. Or something is changing. I keep having these..." She stops. She is tapping the counter beside her hip, fast. "It doesn't matter."
"Tell me."
"Flashes. Images. Things I can't explain. Feelings that don't belong to me. Or they do belong to me, but I don't know where they come from." She laughs, but it comes out strangled. "I sound insane."
"You don't."
"I called my foster mother six times this week. She hasn't called back. She always calls back about the pills. Always. And now she's not, and I'm running out, and I can't sleep, and I'm seeing things that aren't there, and the only thing that makes any of it quiet is..."
She stops again. Her eyes are on mine.
"Is what?" I ask.
"You."
She crosses the four feet. Her hands are on my chest again, flat, pressing into the fabric of my shirt, and she's looking up at me, her gray-blue eyes are bloodshot and exhausted and completely certain.
"When you're at the restaurant, when you're at your table, when I can feel you in the room, everything is quieter. The tapping slows down. The flashes don't come. It's just you and the pork shoulder and the thirty percent tip and the way you say my name, and all the noise just… stops."
Her hands slide up my chest to my neck. Her fingers curl into the fabric of my collar.
She's pulling herself up and I'm letting her.
My hands find her hips and lift her and she wraps her legs around my waist and the height difference disappears.
Her face is level with mine. Her forehead touches my forehead.
Her breathing is fast and shallow, and I can feel her heartbeat through her ribs against my chest.
"I need you to make it quiet," she says. "Please."
I carry her to the bed.
The apartment is twelve steps from the kitchen to the bedroom.
Twelve steps with her legs around my waist and her hands in my collar and her mouth finding mine in the dark.
The kiss is desperate, not the exploratory heat from the doorstep, it’s sloppy and messy and wet, every time she pulls back, I want more of her need.
This is a woman who hasn't slept in three days asking a man she barely knows to give her body something besides fear.
I put her down on the bed. She pulls me down with her.
My weight settles over her, and I brace on my forearms because I'm twice her size and I could crush her if I'm not careful.
Her body is small underneath mine, narrow shoulders, thin wrists, the bones in her hips pressing against my stomach.
She pulls at my shirt, and I sit back and pull it over my head, her hands are on my chest immediately, fingers spread across the tattoos, tracing the saints, tracing the ink.
"Off," she says, pulling at her own shirt. I help her and it comes over her head. She's in a plain black bra and her skin is olive-warm in the streetlight. Her collarbone is pronounced and her ribs show when she breathes and she's the most devastating thing I've ever seen.
Fucking deadly and beautiful and broken.
I kiss her neck. The freckle below her ear. The hollow of her throat. She arches into me and her hands find the back of my head and her fingers scrape across my buzz cut and the friction of her nails on my scalp makes me groan against her collarbone.
Her bra comes off. My mouth goes lower. She gasps when my lips close around her nipple, her back lifting off the mattress, her hands gripping my shoulders.
I take my time. I learn her body with my mouth.
She’s a fucking work of art and I’ll be damned if I fuck up one moment of having her undone for me like this.
Her work pants come off. Her underwear is plain cotton, white and practical, I pull them down her legs and she kicks them off. Now she's naked under me and her body is trembling. Her finger is tapping the mattress beside her hip, fast, rapid, and I stop.
I put my hand over hers. My palm covers her entire hand. The tapping stops under my weight.
"Look at me," I say.
She looks at me.
"If you want to stop, we stop."
"I don't want to stop."
"At any point. For any reason."
"Carmelo. I don't want to stop."