4. FOUR
FOUR
Caleb
Iheld it together until I was off her block.
I'd like to say I kept my composure the whole walk home, that I processed the situation with the discipline of a man who has spent twenty years training himself to remain calm under conditions most people can’t spell.
I made it about forty feet past the corner before I had to stop and lean against a building and put both hands on my knees and breathe like I’d just run stairs.
I’d kissed her.
I straightened up. Started walking. My hands were shaking, which they haven’t done since my second tour, and I shoved them in my coat pockets and walked faster.
Passed a bodega still open, a fluorescent box of light with a cat sleeping on a stack of newspapers in the window.
Passed two guys smoking outside a bar that should have closed an hour ago.
Passed a woman walking a greyhound in a plaid coat, the dog not the woman, and I clocked all of it — faces, hands, distance, posture — because that’s what I do, that’s what’s always running, and tonight the program was competing for processor space with the fact that I was hard and had been since she’d said okay.
A small voice. Surprised. Like she’d planned to say something else — something dry, something that kept her on her side of the wall she lived behind — and okay was what came out instead, and the embarrassment that crossed her face right after was the thing that broke me, because embarrassment meant she wasn’t performing. She was just there.
Okay.
I walked faster. The cold wasn’t touching me. I could still feel the heat of her mouth against the rest of the freezing night.
By the time I reached my building my hands had stopped shaking but my jaw was sore from clenching it.
I nodded at the night doorman — Raymond, sixty-something, ex-transit cop, reads the Post cover to cover every shift — and took the elevator up without saying a word.
Raymond didn’t take it personally. Nobody in my building takes my silence personally.
They’ve had four years to get used to it.
* * *
My apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a building I own a share of, in a neighborhood that has no personality and wants none.
I bought the place because it was clean, quiet, and the sightlines from the living room windows covered three approaches.
That’s not how normal people choose apartments. That’s how I choose everything.
The furniture is dark and minimal because I don’t like clutter.
There’s a leather couch that faces the windows, not the television.
There are no photographs on the walls because I don’t have anyone to photograph.
There’s no art because I don’t have opinions about art.
The one personal item in the entire space is a framed topographic map of the Kunar Province that Theo gave me when we left the service, hung in the hallway where I didn’t have to look at it every day but knew it was there.
Danny’s penthouse has a view of the park and furniture that costs what cars cost. Jagger’s place looks like a magazine shot it. Elliot’s looks like a think tank having a nervous breakdown. Mine looks like a man lives here who hasn’t decided whether he’s staying.
I dropped my coat on the chair. Poured a Redbreast and drank it standing up at the counter, which I never do.
Two fingers, sitting, slow — that’s the rule, and tonight I did four fingers standing up and swallowed them like water.
It didn’t work. The warmth hit my stomach and went nowhere near the problem.
The problem was that I could still feel her hair between my fingers. I could still feel the small hard shapes of her keys where she’d made a fist against my chest.
And I could still feel the scrape of my own stubble against her mouth.
I hadn’t shaved because I hadn’t planned this, and somewhere in the middle of the kiss I’d felt the drag of it against her lower lip and registered, through the noise, that’s going to leave a mark, and the thought hadn’t slowed me down at all.
If anything I’d pressed harder. Wanted the mark there.
Wanted her to see it tomorrow in whatever mirror she used and know it was mine.
I don’t think like this. I have spent my entire adult life building a structure around every impulse and keeping the structure maintained, and this woman had walked through it in one evening and hadn’t even had to push. She’d just said okay and the whole thing had come down.
I put my hands flat on the counter and leaned forward and tried to think about something else.
The embassy contract Theo was negotiating in D.C.
The schedule rotation for next week. The broken camera on the third-floor stairwell that maintenance hadn’t fixed.
Griffin — I should be thinking about Griffin, about the pattern I was building, about the background check I still needed—
Her mouth. Warm against the cold. The catch of breath she’d made when I deepened the kiss.
A half-sound, a surprised little intake, like she hadn’t expected what it felt like and hadn’t managed to cover the surprise in time.
I’d felt it against my lips more than heard it, and my hand had tightened in her hair before I could stop it, and she hadn’t pulled back. She’d leaned in.
This wasn’t working.
I poured the second whiskey, stared at it for a second, then left it sitting there untouched. There was no point pretending. I was standing in my kitchen at two in the morning, still rock-hard from that kiss on her stoop, and it wasn’t going away on its own.
I undid my belt, right there against the counter. No patience for walking to the bedroom, no interest in making it civilized. I shoved my pants down just enough, wrapped my hand around my throbbing cock, and gave in.
It wasn’t slow or teasing. It was pure need—rough, urgent, almost angry. I stroked hard and fast, chasing relief like a man who’d been wound too tight for too long.
The thoughts came sharp and filthy.
Her chin lifting for me. That soft, surprised little sound she made when I slid my tongue into her mouth.
The way her fist had twisted in my coat like she was hanging on for dear life.
I kept thinking about tasting more of her—kissing down her throat, sucking on the soft skin just above her collarbone, biting the spot where her neck met her shoulder until she moaned my name.
My grip tightened.
I thought about those small, capable hands.
The same hands that neatly squared reservation cards and clutched keys like tiny weapons.
I wanted them wrapped around my cock instead, stroking me with that same focused intensity, her short, clean nails digging in just a little while she looked up at me.
Fuck.
I imagined pushing her up against the wall in her hallway, pinning her there with my body, and telling her every dirty thing I wanted to do to her.
No polite version. No restraint. Just raw truth whispered against her ear: how I wanted to drop to my knees and eat her until she shook.
How I wanted to bend her over and fuck her deep and slow until she couldn’t think straight.
How I wanted to fill her up and mark her so thoroughly she’d still feel me the next day at work.
The fantasy hit hard. My hand moved faster, rougher, thumb swiping over the leaking head with every stroke. My jaw clenched so tight it ached.
I came suddenly, forehead pressed against my arm on the counter, her name gritted out between my teeth like a curse and a prayer all at once. Thick spurts hit the cabinet below as my whole body locked up, hips jerking into my fist.
For a few blessed seconds, everything went quiet.
Then the want came rushing right back, heavier than before.
I cleaned up. Washed my hands. Ran water on my face.
Looked at myself in the bathroom mirror — cropped hair going gray at the temples, jaw that needed shaving, the scar behind my left ear from a piece of window frame in Jalalabad that the medic had stitched with six neat sutures and said you’re lucky it wasn’t your eye, and I’d said copy that and gone back to my post. I’d been twenty-six.
Now I was forty-one and standing in my bathroom at two-something in the morning wondering when I’d become this person. I’d spent fifteen years after the service building something clean and controlled. Everything measured. Everything in its lane. I did not moon over women. I did not lose sleep.
And yet here I was. Hands on the sink. Water dripping off my jaw. Looking at a face I’d never been particularly interested in and wondering what she’d seen in it, on that stoop, in the dark, that had made her say okay instead of goodnight.
I picked up my phone. Texted Theo.
Theo Kane. Six-six, two-sixty, quiet the way I’m quiet.
We’d shared a wall for twelve months in a FOB in Kunar Province and come out the other side of it with the kind of understanding that doesn’t need words.
He was my head of building security because I trusted him completely, and I trusted him completely because I’d seen him carry a man a quarter-mile under fire and never once mention it after.
When I texted Theo at two in the morning, he didn’t ask why. He just answered.
Go deeper on Griffin. Not the file. The man. Prior addresses. Past complaints. Anything sealed, anything dropped. I want the full picture.
Three dots. Then:
Copy. Timeline?
Yesterday.
I couldn’t fix the thing with Brooklyn tonight.
I didn’t have the words for it, and even if I did, the words weren’t the point.
The point was that I’d kissed her and she’d kissed me back and she’d gone upstairs alone and I’d gone home alone and we were both, right now, doing what we’d always done: being alone.
And I didn’t have a plan for how to change that yet. I’m good at plans. I’d get one.
What I could do tonight was Griffin.
Griffin, I knew how to handle. Griffin was a problem with a shape and a pattern and an endpoint, and I’d been doing this long enough to see where it was going, and I was going to be there first.