Sammie
I give up on sleep at five forty.
It's not that the bed isn't comfortable.
The bed is obscene. The bed has the thread count of a minor European nation and a mattress that took one look at my spine and personally apologized for every mattress that came before it.
The problem isn't the bed. The problem is that every time I closed my eyes, my brain helpfully replayed the sound a body makes hitting wet pavement, followed immediately, with no respect for tonal consistency, by the memory of Eduard Federov's hand catching my wrists, and between the two of them I've had maybe three hours, in pieces, none of the pieces restful.
I lie there watching the ceiling go from black to charcoal to gray, and at six I pick up the untraceable phone Eduard gave me and text Delilah, because she'll be awake now and I wasn't about to detonate her Tuesday date with witnessed a murder, been extracted by Mr Grumpy, more later.
The reply comes in under a minute, because Delilah wakes up the way other people are defibrillated.
Dee: WHAT
Dee: what do you mean SOMETHING HAPPENED
Dee: Sammie?
Dee: whose number is this
Dee: if you don't call me by noon I'm calling the police, the coastguard, and your mother
Me: Not the police. Please. Trust me. Later. Promise.
Dee: the fact that you said not the police is doing NOTHING to calm me down
Dee: Before noon. Or I’m calling your mother.
That's Delilah for I love you. I put the phone face down on the nightstand and breathe out slowly. For the first time since what I saw last night, I feel something that isn't fear. It sits in my chest like a coal. I decide to build a fire around it.
Which is how I end up in the kitchen at six fifteen in yesterday's leggings and the spare sweatshirt Eduard handed me last night, a soft gray thing that comes to mid-thigh and smells faintly of what I imagine burning wood smells like.
This is a fact I have decided not to have feelings about.
The city outside the windows is barely awake, all long shadows, and the kitchen is a sea of black marble containing almost nothing.
So I do what I do. My hands find the coffee machine. A new model that takes pods.
I'm improvising a pour-over with a dish towel when I hear him.
I don't know how I hear him. He moves like a rumor. But some part of me has apparently already tuned itself to his frequency, because I turn before he's fully into the room, and there he is.
And oh, that's not fair.
I've only ever seen him assembled. Suit, shirt, cufflinks, the whole armored perimeter.
The man standing at the edge of the kitchen is in dark sleep pants and bare-chested, barefoot, and his hair is wrong on one side, and there are shadows under his eyes that match mine.
Something about the sight of him unarmored does a thing to my chest that I have no time to process because his gaze has already found me and stuck.
He looks at me. At the sweatshirt. His sweatshirt. Something crosses his face, fast, there and controlled and gone, and the back of my neck goes warm.
"You're awake," he says.
"So are you." I turn back to the coffee before my face can file a full report. "Bad night, too?"
A pause. "Yeah."
"Sit," I say, nodding at the island stools. "I'm making coffee. The dish towel is load-bearing, don't ask."
He doesn't sit. He comes around the island instead, and leans against the counter an arm's length away, arms crossed, watching me work with that assessing stillness he does.
An arm's length is suddenly a very small unit of measurement.
I'm acutely aware of my hands. I'm acutely aware of his forearms, and his broad chest that my eyes keep flickering to.
I pour water in slow circles and the kitchen fills with the smell of coffee. Neither of us says anything.
"You didn't sleep because of what you saw," he says finally. His version of gentle.
"Partly." I pass him a cup. Black, no sugar, because I've made his coffee twenty times and my hands don't need consulting.
He takes it, and his fingers brush mine on the handover.
The sensation travels up my arm like the building's wiring runs through me now.
"Partly just, new ceiling. I kept doing the math on how far away my whole life is.
Eight blocks. It felt further in the dark.
" I wrap both hands around my own cup. "Why couldn't you sleep?
You must be used to all this. The, you know.
" I wave a hand vaguely at the penthouse, the situation, the concept of organized crime.
He looks into his coffee for a moment. When he answers, it's in the tone I've started to recognize, the one where he's decided to say a true thing and is saying it plainly because he doesn't know another way.
"It's been a long time since anyone stayed in this apartment."
I blink. "What, like, guests?"
"Anyone."
"I thought you had a housekeeper."
"Rosa leaves." He says it without self-pity, a man reporting the weather in his own country.
"Everyone leaves by evening. That's how it's built.
Last night there was someone on the other side of the wall, and I found I was listening.
" He sips his coffee. "I'm not accustomed to listening for someone. "
I stare at him. My heart is doing something complicated. "Hang on. Sorry. I need to reorganize some assumptions." I set my cup down. "You're telling me this apartment doesn't have a, a rotation. A procession. I assumed there was a procession."
His brow does the almost-frown. "A procession of what?"
"Of women, Eduard." My face is going warm but I've started the sentence so I'm finishing it, that's always been my policy and it's ruined me before.
"Look at you. You're all," I gesture at the entire length of him, which is a mistake, because now I'm looking at the entire length of him, "that.
Tall and carved and terrifying in a bespoke way.
Men who look like you have a different woman on this floor every night of the week. It's practically municipal law."
Something shifts in his expression. He sets his cup down too, slowly, and turns to face me fully, and the arm's length loses another few inches without either of us visibly moving.
"There's no procession," he says. "There hasn't been anyone in a long time.
Not because of lack of opportunity." His voice drops lower, quieter, and the morning is very still around it.
"Because I stopped wanting. Somewhere along the way it switched off, and I assumed that was permanent, and it was efficient, so I let it be permanent.
I can't remember the last time I wanted a woman. "
I should not ask. I'm going to ask.
"Can't remember at all?"
"I can now," he says. "It has a timestamp.
Four days ago, mid-afternoon, in your café, when a woman with flour on her wrist knelt in front of me and dabbed cold hot chocolate off my crotch without realizing what she was doing.
" His gray eyes hold mine, steady, unhurried, letting every word land.
"You were mortified. You made a sound like a quiet version of a smoke alarm.
And I stood there holding your wrists and realized the switch wasn't broken after all. It had just been waiting."
The kitchen has gone airless. Somewhere thirty-two floors down, the city is honking and hurrying, and up here there is no sound at all except my own pulse, which has relocated to my ears.
"That's," I start, and have to try again. "That’s a lot of information before seven a.m."
"You asked."
"I did ask." My voice has gone somewhere husky and unfamiliar. "I'm a big believer in asking things. Famous for it."
"Sammie."
"Yes."
"You're holding the dish towel again."
I look down. I am. I'm clutching it to my chest like a Victorian widow.
I set it on the counter with tremendous dignity, and when I look back up, he's closer, close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his eyes, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, and neither of us has anywhere to be, and nobody is coming, and the whole morning is holding its breath.
"Tell me to leave," he says quietly. "I'll go."
And there it is. The out. Offered plainly, meant completely, this man who takes whatever he wants from an entire city standing in his own kitchen asking permission with the morning light on his face.
I reach up and slide my hand behind his neck.
"Don't you dare," I say.
His control breaks.
His mouth comes down on mine and his hands find my waist and lift, and the marble is cold through my leggings and I don't care, because he's stepped in between my knees and one hand has slid up into my hair.
He's kissing me the way he does everything, thoroughly, deliberately, like he's been planning the route for days, and the sound I make against his mouth is frankly embarrassing.
The sound he makes back is so much worse, low and starved and four days late.
I let my fingers slide beneath the elastic of his waistband and his whole body goes still against me.
It takes me a second to understand that he's giving me time to change my mind.
I don't want time. I want him. I pull him closer by the fabric and he makes that sound again, rougher this time, and his free hand drops to my thigh, thumb tracing the inside of my knee through the thin leggings.
"Tell me if I go too fast," he says against my jaw, and his stubble scratches in a way that sends heat straight down my spine.
"You're not going too fast," I manage, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like someone who knows exactly what she wants. "You're going exactly right."