Eduard
I'm sitting in the back of the car in a suit that smells like a beverage menu, and I am thinking about her hands.
This is a problem I identify immediately, the way I'd identify a tail in traffic or a voice on a call that doesn't belong there. Identification is supposed to be the first step toward resolution. I identified it four minutes ago, but I'm still thinking about her hands.
Dmitri glances at me in the mirror when I get in.
He's driven me for six years, through wars and funerals, and in that time, he has learned exactly when to speak and when to pretend he's a piece of the car.
He looks at the tea drying on my lapel, the latte on my sleeve, and the hot chocolate across my thigh. He says nothing and pulls into traffic.
Smart man.
I run the incident back in order. The cat, Lemur, the one with the ringed tail that appears to operate independently of the rest of him. She caught his tail, lost the tray, overcorrected. The physics were straightforward. Nothing about the physics requires further review.
What requires further review is the seconds that followed.
She moved before the mugs finished landing.
That's the first thing I noted. No freeze, no apology delivered from a safe distance.
She was in front of me with a fistful of napkins before I'd fully registered the temperature of the now cold hot chocolate.
Talking at a speed I've only otherwise heard from men who know they have one sentence left to convince me of something.
Something about the cat. Something about dry cleaning.
Her hands were moving the entire time, pressing and dabbing with the focused efficiency of a field medic.
And then her hands arrived at a location that neither of us registered until it was too late.
I've been searched at gunpoint. I've been stitched up in a safe house kitchen by a man whose medical training began and ended with livestock.
I have a professional relationship with my own adrenaline that I would describe as thoroughly negotiated.
None of that prepared me for a woman in a denim apron and tightly fitting pink T-shirt crouched in front of me, dabbing a napkin against my crotch with the unselfconscious commitment of someone who had not yet realized what she was doing.
Then she realized.
The sound she made will stay in my head for some time.
I've accepted this. It was somewhere between a hiccup and a smoke alarm, and her face went a shade of pink I can only describe as summer roses.
I stood there holding her wrists, both of us frozen in the single most absurd tableau I have ever participated in.
I wanted to laugh.
I had to sit with that, because I can count the number of times I've genuinely wanted to laugh in the last five years without opening my other hand.
My jaw ached with holding it in. If I'd let it out, I don't know what it would have sounded like.
It's been long enough that I no longer have current data.
"Boss." Dmitri's eyes flick to the mirror again. "The apartment, or the office?"
"Apartment." I look down at my sleeve. I’ll need to make an appointment to see Kaminsky for a new suit.
My phone buzzes inside my ruined pocket. Jasper.
Gerald moved money today. Sloppier than usual. Getting close.
I read it twice. The first time, I absorb the information the way I'm supposed to, slotting it into the picture I've been building for three weeks. Gerald is accelerating. Accelerating men are frightened men, and frightened men make mistakes that end them.
The second time I read it, I notice that my first thought after getting close was that when this is over, I'll have no reason to sit in that café.
I put the phone face down on my knee.
That thought gets flagged in the same place as her hands and the sound she made.
Along with the fact that I've spent six consecutive days at a corner table drinking adequate coffee under the supervision of a cat named after the devil, telling myself the sight line justified it.
The sight line does justify it. That's what makes the rationalization so clean.
I could stand in front of my cousins and defend every hour I've spent in that place, and they'd accept it.
I've watched the accountant for a total of perhaps ninety minutes this week.
I've watched her for the rest of it.
I know her rhythm now, even though I didn't set out to learn it.
She works the room in loops, counterclockwise, tables first and then the counter, and she touches things as she passes them.
The back of a chair. The edge of a shelf.
The older man's shoulder, one tap, some running joke between them I'm not privy to.
She remembers every order of every customer in the building.
She talks to the cats in complete sentences and appears to believe they're answering.
She gave me shortbread because of a policy she invented while walking toward my table, and when I paid, she looked at me like the transaction was the least interesting thing that had happened between us.
She started my coffee this morning before I'd reached the counter. The machine was already on, she said. As though that explained the cup being mine, black, house blend, ready at the exact minute I arrived.
I've had people anticipate me my entire adult life.
It's built into what I am. People anticipate me because the cost of failing to is severe, and their anticipation has the texture of fear even when it's dressed as respect.
What she did had no fear in it anywhere.
She just noticed what I take and when I come in, and she acted on it, casually, the way she scratches a cat mid-stride without breaking her sentence.
I don't have a category for that. I'm a man with a category for everything, and I don't have one for a woman who is kind to me for no reason with nothing to gain, in a building she filled with rescued animals and hand-lettered rules, who dabbed cold hot chocolate off my crotch and then wished herself dead loudly enough that I could see it happen behind her eyes.
Her blue eyes.
I have them committed to memory now. Wide blue eyes staring up at me. My cock twitches for the first time in months. Years even. I’d started hardening as soon as her hands reached my chest and kept heading south and couldn’t catch her wrists in time for her not to notice.
I should probably apologize. That’s what a gentleman would do. Apologize for his body reacting to a woman’s touch.
The car pulls up outside my building. I sit for a moment longer than necessary.
"Same time tomorrow," I tell Dmitri.
He nods, and if he thinks anything about a seventh consecutive morning at a cat café on Calloway Street, he keeps it behind his teeth, where it belongs.
Upstairs, the apartment is exactly as I left it.
Clean lines, closed blinds, a refrigerator containing water and the takeout Valeria mocks me for.
It functions. I stand in the middle of it in a suit that smells like someone else's afternoon, and for the first time, I notice how quiet it is.
My apartment has always been quiet. The quiet was a feature. I chose it the way I choose everything.
Tonight, it just sounds like a room where nothing happens.
I strip off the jacket and lay it over a chair for Kaminsky's post-mortem.
I answer Jasper's message with instructions about Gerald that are precise and take me twice as long to compose as they should.
I eat standing at the counter. And when I finally sit down with the day's real work in front of me, ledgers and names and a problem in the Popov shipment that will need a decision by Friday, I give it my full attention, because that's what I do.
It takes me forty minutes to notice I've been tapping my pen against the same page, thinking about tomorrow. Wondering whether she'll be able to look at me, and what color her face will go when she tries.
I put the pen down and head for the shower.
Fuck.