DEAL WITH THE DEVIL #3
“No. No, you're really not selling. You're just standing there being terrifying and hoping I sign out of exhaustion.”
“Is it working?”
“Don't.”
“I asked a question.”
“I know what you asked.”
“Anything softer would be a lie, and I am trying, in this room, with you, not to lie to you. This is a contract. It carries duties on both sides. You will need to learn quickly which of my refusals cost only my patience, and which cost blood, and I would rather you learned the difference across a desk, with both of us still fully dressed and reasonably calm, than in a moment neither of us chose.”
I thought, briefly and with real commitment, about throwing up directly onto the contract, if only to see what clause covered that.
“How do I know I'm actually paying it down.
How do you measure that. What stops you from deciding, three months in, that I owe you forever, that the number just keeps moving whenever it's convenient for you?
What's the unit here, days, hours, some currency you invented specifically so I could never check your math? And my shop. What happens to my shop. I can still work, right? During the day, with my hands, doing the actual job that pays my actual rent...”
“Mr. Venn.”
“My employee. My cat. You do not get to fire her, you do not get to walk into my shop unannounced, you do not get to materialize over my register like you're haunting the place...”
“Mr. Venn.”
“And the nights. Where do I sleep? Am I supposed to just...”
I didn't see him move. He had been on the other side of the desk, and then he was not, and my back met the bookcase along the wall hard enough that a book shifted somewhere above my head, and the scatter of broken phone pieces on the floor shifted under my heel as I braced.
One of his hands came down flat against the wood beside my head, and the other found my jaw, not rough, but final, the way a door closes when someone means it to stay closed.
His face was close enough that I could count the different colors sitting in his eyes if I had wanted to, which I very much did not, on principle.
“Be still.”
“Get off me.”
“I am not on you.”
“Get back, then.”
He did not get back. If anything, the words seemed to settle him rather than move him, because he stayed exactly where he was, and the warmth coming off him was making it steadily harder for me to think in complete sentences.
“You are going to ask me questions all night,” he said, very low, the words landing somewhere well below my ribs, “and I am going to answer every one of them, and we are going to be standing in this exact spot until the sun comes up over a city that has already forgotten both of our names, and I am not willing to do that. I would like to answer your questions now. All of them. Once, in full, without interruption. You will listen, and I will not repeat myself, because repeating myself is a kindness I am not currently in the mood to extend. Yes?”
“I...”
“Yes?”
His voice had dropped even lower on the second word, and I do not have a clean way of describing what that did to me, except to say that I felt it, low and specific, and I very much did not want to feel it, and my body, unhelpfully, disagreed with my wanting.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good.”
He did not take his hand from my jaw. He spoke close enough that his breath moved against the corner of my mouth, which was its own separate crisis, one I planned to examine later, in private, possibly never, possibly for the rest of my life.
“The unit is days, calculated against compliance, and I will show you the ledger any time you ask to see it, because a man who hides his math is a man who intends to cheat, and I do not intend to cheat you, whatever else you currently believe about me. The shop is yours. The cat is yours. I will not fire your friend, I will not appear over your register, and I will not set foot inside your shop unless you invite me there yourself or your safety demands otherwise, which I trust it will not. The nights you spend here, in a room of your own, with a door, and a lock that works from the inside, because you are not a prisoner in this house. You are a counterparty to a contract, and counterparties are owed better than locked doors they cannot open from within. You will be a guest here in every respect except the ones this paper names specifically, and about those, I promise you honesty, every time, without exception.”
He watched me absorb all of it, unhurried, as though he had the whole night to wait for my face to catch up to what he had just said.
“I'm not done asking.”
“I know you are not.”
“You can't just stand there and answer everything in one breath and expect me to...”
He shifted his weight, closing the last half inch between us, and his thigh pressed against mine, and the heat of him stopped being distant and became immediate, pressed directly against the length of me.
My hips pushed forward, a half inch, entirely without my permission, before I managed to stop them.
He did not smile. He did, however, exhale, slow and controlled, and the exhale moved warm across my mouth, and whatever had been a small, manageable problem at the front of my jeans became, very suddenly, a much larger one, insistent against the seam.
Oh, I thought. Oh, fuck.
He did not back away. If anything he leaned that half inch closer instead, his thumb moving once against my jaw, slow, deliberate, and his eyes stayed exactly on mine the entire time, unwilling to give me even that much room.
“Ask the rest of your questions, Nico.”
He had not used my first name before that moment and I hated how much I liked the sound of it in his mouth.
“And if I don't sign?” I managed to get out.