Sammie
The dessert does not survive.
I want it on record that I fought valiantly.
I moved it to the far end of the coffee table.
I put a cushion in front of it. At one point I told it, out loud, "You belong to Eduard," and the baklava said nothing, because it's baklava, and the fireplace channel crackled away judgmentally.
By the time I hear the elevator at nine forty I am sitting cross-legged on the sofa with an empty box and no defense strategy.
"Before you say anything," I say, "there was a struggle."
"I can see that. Who won?"
"It was a draw. We're both gone." I watch him hang the coat, and I do my scan, the one I've apparently developed without noticing, the one that checks his hands and his knuckles and the line of his shoulders for evidence of whatever "business" meant tonight.
Nothing. He looks intact. He looks, actually, lighter than when he left, some long-carried thing set down, and my chest unclenches by degrees.
"How was business? Did you businessify? Were things businessed? "
"It's handled." He rounds the sofa, and instead of taking the chair, he sits beside me, close, his thigh warm along mine, and picks up the empty baklava box, examines it, sets it down. "All of it."
"All of it, meaning."
"Meaning it's over. The people responsible for what you saw have agreed to certain terms. The café is safe. Delilah is safe. You're safe." His gray eyes come to mine, steady. "You can go home, Sammie. Tomorrow, if you want. Tonight, if you want."
And here's the thing about hearts. You think you know what's in yours. And then a beautiful man says exactly the words you've been waiting to hear. Only instead of relief, the bottom drops out of you like a trapdoor, and you learn, in one horrible lurching second, what you were actually afraid of.
Not the Popov’s.
This. The end of the reason to be here.
"Oh," I say. "That's. Wow. That's great."
I am, by trade and by nature, a professionally cheerful person.
I have smiled through burnt batches and health inspections and a customer who once tried to return a scone with a bite out of it.
I deploy everything I have into that "great," every watt, and I watch it fail completely, because he's Eduard, and he reads me the way I read weather over the counter. His eyes narrow a fraction.
"You're upset."
"I'm not upset. I'm thrilled. My cats, my ovens, my own bed.
" My voice does something on bed that I'd pay money to take back.
I stand up, because sitting still has stopped being possible, and I gather the baklava box and the mug like closing time, hands finding a job.
"I'll text Dee tonight, she can meet me in the morning, we've probably lost half the pastry stock but honestly the walk-in was due a deep clean anyway, and, um.
I should probably wash your sweatshirt before I give it back. It's had a life."
"Sammie."
I'm at the kitchen island now. I don't remember walking here. My eyes are stinging, which is ridiculous, I refuse, absolutely not. "And obviously your coffee's on the house for life. When you're passing. If you're ever, you know…passing."
"Sammie." He hasn't raised his voice. He's just suddenly there, between me and the sink.
He takes the mug out of my hands and sets it down before taking my chin in one hand and tipping my face up.
It's over, he's seen it, the stinging eyes and all of it.
"If I'm ever passing," he repeats, quietly, but it sounds like a question.
Something moves through his jaw. "You think this is me sending you away? "
"Isn't it?" And the wobble gets into my voice now, fully arrived, no stopping it.
"It's fine, Eduard, truly, I get it. Crisis over, variable resolved, everything goes back where it was.
You said it yourself. And your normal doesn't have a…
a woman in it. You told me the switch was off for years, and maybe it just needed, I don't know, a hard reset.
I was, I happened to be the nearest—" and I can't finish that sentence, I can't make myself call what happened between us a reboot, so I stop, and the fireplace channel crackles in the awful silence like it's eating popcorn watching us.
Eduard closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, there's something in them I've never seen at full strength before, only in flashes, only in the corners. He takes my face in both hands now.
"I'm going to explain something," he says, "and I need you to hear all of it, because I'll say it plainly, and I don't have your gift for saying things twice in nicer ways.
Tonight I sat in a room with the most dangerous men in this city, men my father spent thirty years teaching me never to show a weakness, and I told them what you are to me.
Openly. On purpose. I made your café and your staff and your ridiculous cats a protected territory in a criminal negotiation.
I told them that if you're ever so much as accidentally frightened, I would spend everything my family has ever built and consider it a fair price.
That's not a thing you say about the nearest woman, Sammie.
That's a thing you say once in a lifetime, if you're lucky enough to have a reason, and then you spend the rest of that lifetime meaning it. "
I've stopped breathing. He keeps going, thumbs stroking my cheekbones, voice low and even and completely without cover.
"I'm sending you home because I see you.
You are a person who runs on light, and your light is eight blocks east of here, and I will not be the man who kept the sun in a beautiful box on the thirty-second floor.
That's the only reason. The day I met you, my apartment was a place I stored myself between tasks.
Tonight I called it home in a message and didn't correct it, and it isn't the apartment that changed. "
"Eduard," I whisper.
"I'm not finished. You asked what we're doing.
I didn't know, the first time you asked.
I know now." His forehead comes down to rest against mine.
"I want the café at eight in the morning and the corner table.
I want to learn the cats' schedules. I want your mother's approval and Delilah's many opinions.
I want to drive you home tomorrow, and then I want to come back the day after that, and the day after that, for as long as you'll allow it.
I should warn you that I'm hoping the answer is forever, because that's the term I've already committed to.
I told a room full of Bratva. It would be embarrassing to walk it back. "
A laugh breaks out of me, completely undignified, and he smiles in that way that makes me feel like I’ve won the lottery.
"You want forever," I say. "You, Mr Grumpy, you want forever. With me."
“I’m greedy. I want the next forever, too. And the one after that.”
And that's it, that's the whole of me, gone, every last held-back piece.
I pull him down by the shirt and kiss him, and he gathers me up off the floor entirely, my feet leaving the tile, his arms a closed circuit around me.
The kiss goes from salt to sweet to something with a great deal of forever in it.
When he finally sets me down, I keep hold of the shirt.
"Okay," I say, still sniffling, grinning so wide it hurts. "Tomorrow you take me home. But I have terms. I'm told that's how it's done."
"Name them."
"Corner table gets a reserved sign. Real one, laminated.
You get a mug with your name on it and it lives on the shelf with the regulars, and I warn you now, Old Bill will talk to you about the weather, that's the toll, everyone pays it.
" I count on my fingers. "You come for dinner with my mother every other Sunday, because if I have to endure it, so do you.
Delilah gets to interrogate you once, supervised.
And the sweatshirt stays with me. It's mine now. That's non-negotiable."
He considers me for a long moment, and I watch him take my terms with the full seriousness of state business.
"Done," he says. "Though you should know the sweatshirt was never in question. I've seen you in it." His eyes darken in a way that has become recently, gloriously familiar. "It was always yours."
"Good," I whisper.
He picks me up, and I wrap around him like ivy with abandonment issues as he carries me toward the bedroom.