Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Luca
The roof door sticks the way it always sticks. I shoulder it open and the cold finds my face before anything else.
Six floors up, the wind off the lake comes down Loomis like it has somewhere to be. My thigh hates the stairs. My shoulder hates the cold. I let both of them hate me and walk to the low wall on the south side, where the tar paper is patched in a square that doesn't match the rest.
I light a cigarette and watch the smoke go sideways.
I know what it's like when a child gets hurt while a parent watches.
I said that out loud. To a woman I've known less than a day. I said it and then I walked out of my own apartment because the next breath would have had Elena's name in it.
The roof is the only place in this building that's mine.
The apartment is set dressing. The roof is where I come when the inside of my head gets too loud and I need the cold to put a hand on the back of my neck and hold me still.
Six years of roofs. Naples. Palermo. A flat in Catania with a view of nothing. This one. Same job every time.
The cigarette burns down fast in the wind. I crush it under my boot and don't light another.
I don't care what people think of me. That's been true so long I stopped noticing it was a rule.
The men I work with read the tattoos, the quiet and arrange themselves accordingly.
Megan reads me as a man who pays in cash on time and doesn't waste her morning with conversation. Fine. All of it fine.
Gemma reads me as the kind of man her husband used to bring home, and that — for a reason I don't have a name for — I can't fucking sit with.
I take out my phone. Thumb the screen until Megan's number comes up. She picks up on the third ring, no hello, because that's how we do this.
"Tomorrow," I say. "And the rest of the week. Breakfast and dinner."
"For three?"
"For three."
A pause. I hear a kettle behind her, the small clatter of a spoon.
"All right."
"I'll pay you for the week now," I say. "Cash. In the envelope by the salt."
"Luca." Her voice changes a quarter inch. Not soft. Megan doesn't do soft. Careful. "You want me there as Megan, or you want me there to watch them?"
I think about it longer than I should. The wind moves through the gap in my coat and finds the exit wound. The shoulder pulls the way it always pulls.
"As Megan," I say. "Cook. Don't ask her anything. If she asks you something, answer short."
"Fine."
"And — bring the good bread. The one from the place on Halsted. Not the supermarket shit."
A small sound. Almost a laugh from her. Almost. "Now I know it's serious."
"Goddamn it, Megan."
"I'll bring the bread."
She hangs up first. I stand with the phone in my hand and look at the dark glass and don't see myself in it, just the orange dot of a streetlight reflected back.
I tell myself I paid her for the week because the kid needs to eat. That's true. It's also not the whole sentence.
The whole sentence is that I don't want Gemma standing in my kitchen at seven in the morning with nothing in the fridge a child can eat, deciding what kind of man I am off an empty shelf.
The locks turn under my hand and the door swings in.
I freeze in the frame.
The TV is on. Some kid's song with too many bells. Gemma has Nina by both hands and she's spinning her, slow, the kid's feet leaving the floor in a small arc.
Gemma's hair is loose. It moves with the spin, a half-second behind the rest of her. Her head is tipped back and she's laughing.
She's beautiful. That's the word and I don't want it.
The song hits a chorus. Nina shrieks. Gemma swings her one more turn and sets her down, both hands on the kid's shoulders to steady her, laughing at the wobble — and then her eyes come up and find me.
The laugh goes out of her face. Not all at once. In pieces. The mouth first. Then the eyes.
The hair is the last thing to settle.
I should have knocked which is a ridiculous thought since it's my apartment. I don't knock at my own door. But she didn't know I was at the door and now her face has gone sad again.
I take a step in and shut the door behind me with my heel. The deadbolt clicks. Her shoulders move a quarter inch up.
"Don't stop on my account," I say. The voice comes out rougher than I meant. I clear my throat. "Keep going."
"We were just — " She lifts her hand off Nina's shoulder, then puts it back, like she didn't know what to do with it in the air. "Nina found the TV."
"It's a TV. It's for finding."
"I didn't know if — "
"Gemma."
She stops.
"It's fine," I say. "All of it. You can turn the fucking thing on. Sit on the couch. Spin the kid around. I don't care."
The word care lands wrong in my own ear. I do care. I'm standing in the door of my own apartment unable to feel my hands because I came up the stairs, walked in and a woman was laughing in my kitchen.
Nina is watching me. Both small hands have gone to the front of Gemma's leg and she's tucked herself there, half behind, the way kids do when a stranger comes in a room. I hate that I did that.
Gemma
Three days have passed.
Three days of him in and out at hours that don't belong to a normal person. Three days of the door clicking open while I pretend to be asleep, of him standing in his own kitchen like a guest who hasn't decided whether to stay.
He hasn't looked at me straight on since the dancing. Since Nina laughed and I laughed and he came through the door like he'd walked into the wrong apartment.
Now he's back. Coat still on. Cold coming off him in a wave I feel from the couch. Nina's tucked under my arm, and the TV is on low, some cartoon about a rabbit who wants to be a chef.
"Hey," I say.
He nods. One nod. He pulls the coat off and hangs it on the back of the door.
I look at Nina, her eyes are heavy, and the rabbit is explaining how to whisk eggs.
"Luca."
He stops at the counter. Doesn't turn all the way. "Yeah."
I point at Nina. Then I point down the hall at the bedroom.
He looks at me like I've grown a second head.
I do it again, slower. Nina. Hallway. The bedroom door at the end of it. Two clean little points of my finger, in case he missed it the first time.
"I got it the first time," he says. Flat. Almost bored.
I blink. Okay. Maybe the man has a thing with hand gestures. Or maybe he just doesn't like being pointed at, which, fair.
"Right," I say. "Sorry."
I kiss the top of Nina's head. "Two minutes, baby. I'll be right back."
"Is the rabbit gonna burn the eggs?"
"Probably."
"I'll watch for you."
"Good plan."
I get up. I walk past him in the kitchen. The bedroom is dark. I leave the lamp off because I want this fast. I want to say the thing and come back out, put Nina to bed and have the door between us.
I stop in the middle of the floor. I open my mouth to start the sentence in my head one more time so it comes out right.
I turn.
He's there.
Not in the doorway. Right behind me. Close enough that when I turn my hands go up on instinct, both of them, flat on his chest, and the heat of him comes through his shirt and into my palms before my brain catches up to where they are.
I make a small sound I don't mean to make.
His chest is solid. He's a wall I just walked into. I can feel his heart through the cotton, steady, not fast, and that almost makes it worse because mine is doing a sprint.
I look up.
He's looking down at my hands. Not at me. At my hands on him.
"What are you doing?" I say. It comes out thinner than I want.
He drags his eyes up to mine. There's a beat where he doesn't answer. He's gone very still in the way he does when something has landed on him and he doesn't know yet what it is.
"I thought you'd keep walking," he says. "So we could close the door. The kid wouldn't hear."
Oh.
Oh.
I take my hands off him like the shirt is hot. My fingers tingle where they touched. I step back, and I step back again, until the backs of my knees find the corner of the bed and I'm not going anywhere without sitting down, which I will not do.
"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, of course. Sorry. Sorry. I didn't —"
"Stop."
I stop.
He reaches behind him without looking and pushes the door. It clicks. The hallway light goes away. There's only the bar of yellow under the door and the streetlight through the blind, cutting a stripe across his jaw.
I press my palms flat together in front of me so I don't do anything else stupid with them. The print of him is still on them, like I held something hot too long.
"I wanted to tell you something," I say.
He waits. He doesn't move. The streetlight stripe on his jaw shifts when he breathes.
"I thought about it. The Wisconsin thing.
Going to my mom's." My hands are still pressed together in front of me like I'm praying, which is not the impression I want to give a man who looks at me like that.
I drop them to my sides. "I'll stay. Until you figure out what they want from me. Until it's safe."
He tilts his head.
Just a little. To the side. Slow.
It's the thing men do in movies right before the smirk, right before the line. He doesn't smirk. He doesn't deliver a line. He looks at me like he's reading the small print on something, and the quiet stretches long enough that I hear the radiator knock twice.
"That wasn't something you had to decide," he says.
"What?"
"You weren't leaving either way."
A laugh comes up out of me before I can stop it. It's not the right kind of laugh. It's too high, too fast, the kind that escapes when you've been holding your breath for three days.
"Okay," I say. "Okay, this is becoming hilarious."
"Is it?"
"Kind of, yeah. I came in here ready to be — I had a whole thing. I was going to be gracious. I was going to thank you. I was going to say I'd stay, like I was doing you a favour."
"You weren't doing me a favour."
"I'm getting that."
He takes a step.
It's one step. The room is small and he was already too close, so one step puts him at the foot of the bed with me, and I have to lift my chin to keep my eyes on his.
"That's the fucking truth of it," he says. His voice has dropped into something rougher than before, like the cold is still in his throat. "You try to leave, Gemma, I'd come after you. I'd find you, and I'd bring you back."
"Wow."
"What."
"Nothing. Just — wow." A real laugh this time, breathless. My pulse is doing whatever it wants now and I'm running on whatever's left in the tank after three days of bad sleep. "You say it like that. Like you'd what, tie me up to keep me put?"
The second it leaves my mouth I want it back.
He doesn't move. He doesn't blink. He looks at me the way he looked at my hands on his chest a minute ago, careful, like he's choosing whether to pick something up or leave it where it fell.
His hand comes up.
Two fingers and a thumb under my chin. Lifting. Not hard. Just enough that I can't drop my eyes from his even if I wanted to, and I want to, badly, because what's on his face now is not what I've seen on it before.
"The only reason I'd tie you up," he says, quiet, in that flat way he has, "would be for the fucking pleasure of it."
His thumb is under the point of my chin. The pads of his fingers are warm. He smells like cigarette.
"Oh," I say.
It's all I've got.
He doesn't let go. He doesn't move closer either.
He just holds me there a beat longer, his eyes on mine, and I feel the heat go down my throat and into my chest and lower, and lower, and I would honestly prefer if I'd peed myself, because that I could explain.
That I could write off as fear, as three days of adrenaline, as a body that's been on red alert since the diner and finally let go.
This isn't that.
I know what this is.
I know because I haven't felt it in so long the shape of it is unfamiliar in my own body, like a key I forgot I had. Wet. Slow. Low.
His thumb shifts. A small pressure, and then gone. He lets my chin go.
He steps back. Just one step, but the air comes back into the room and I take a breath like I've been under water.