4. Four #2
"Easy. I'm checking the collar." I slid two fingers under the fabric at his neck. He was warm. His pulse was right there under my finger, faster than a man standing still in his own living room had any right to be.
"Too tight," I said, keeping my voice low. "It sits against yer throat instead of floating. Yer neck is thicker than standard. Most tailors never adjust for it."
I moved my fingers to the front of his throat and slid my thumb along the inside of the collar band. His Adam's apple moved against my knuckle when he swallowed.
"Ye should have a centimetre of clearance here. Ye've got a quarter of that. That's why ye're adjusting yer tie all day."
He hadn't moved. My fingers were on the throat of a man who'd killed someone yesterday, and he was letting me do it.
I moved down and put both hands flat on his chest, spread across the lapels.
The wool was warm from his body, and I could feel the shape of him through it, solid, dense, real, and my breath caught before I could stop it.
Six months since I'd touched a man. Six months of concrete floors and zip ties and keeping my hands to myself, and now I had my palms pressed against a chest that could crack me in half.
The heat of him was soaking through the fabric into my fingers and up my arms and settling somewhere behind my ribs.
I kept talking because if I stopped talking, I'd stop thinking.
"Too tight through here." I pressed in, mapping him through the wool.
Dense muscle, the kind from use, not exercise.
My hands moved over the plate of his chest and down the taper of his ribs, and I was reading him the way I'd read a hide, but my hands were taking their time about it.
"Armhole's cut too high. Ye can feel it bind when ye reach. Aye?"
"Yes." Rougher.
"A proper fit would give ye room here." I slid my hands to the sides, thumbs tracing the seam. "And here." I pressed my thumbs below his pectorals, and his stomach clenched hard through the fabric.
I stepped back. The flush was there, creeping across his cheekbones. His lips were parted, fingers curling into his palms at his sides.
"Now," I said. "The trousers."
I put my hands on his waist.
I slid my fingers under the waistband, thumbs hooked over the top, and pulled the fabric away to check the sit. My knuckles grazed bare skin where the shirt had rucked up. The heat of him hit me like an open oven. His abdominal muscles locked tight under my hands.
He was hard. The trousers didn't hide it, and I was close enough that I didn't have to look.
He grabbed my wrist so fast that I didn't see it coming.
The grip was crushing, bone-on-bone, and he wrenched my hand out of his waistband and shoved me back into the dining table.
I caught the jacket before it hit the floor.
My da would've come back from the dead to kill me if I'd let a piece like that touch the ground.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?
" His voice was low and shaking, and his face had gone from pink to white.
He caged me against the table, hands flat on either side of me, close enough that I could smell the fear on him.
The smell of a man whose body had just told him something his brain was going to war with.
"I was checking the fit of yer trousers."
"Bullshit."
"Aye. It wasnae entirely about the trousers."
He grabbed my shirt and pulled me in close enough to see the vein in his temple jumping. "You think this is a game? You think you can put your hands on me and I won't put a bullet in your fucking head?"
"Ye could. But it willnae make yer dick less hard, will it?"
He shoved me. My back hit the table's edge. He was breathing hard, fists balled, his whole body trying to turn whatever was happening into anger because anger was something he knew what to do with.
"Go on, big man. Hit me. Break my nose. Whatever makes ye feel better. I'll still be here in the morning and ye'll still know what ye know."
He moved, and I flinched. Six months of warehouse training overrode the mouth, and I jerked back with the jacket pressed to my chest like a shield. He stopped. The rage broke. For half a second he was just a man looking at someone half his size who'd flinched from him.
Then the ice came back, harder than before.
"I'm no going to tell anyone," I said. I dropped the brat and let my voice go steady, the way my da talked to skittish clients. "Whatever just happened stays in this room. Yer men dinnae need to know. This is yers and I'll leave it alone."
He stared at me, chest heaving, hands shaking.
"Gregori," he called.
The door opened. Gregori's eyes went from Aleksi to me and back. He knew something had happened. He was too smart to ask.
"Cuff him. To the bed. He doesn't leave the room tonight."
"Boss?"
"Did I stutter?"
Gregori took my arm. I let him. I held the jacket to my chest, and Aleksi turned his back on both of us.
"The jacket stays with him," Aleksi said to the window. "And bring him his insulin."
Gregori walked me down the hall, cuffed my wrist to the bed frame, and set the insulin kit on the nightstand.
"What did you do?" he said, low enough that Aleksi wouldn't hear.
I could've ended Aleksi right there. One sentence. Your boss got hard when I put my hands on him. Gregori would've done the math. Men like him always did, and information like that was worth more than anything in my pockets.
But I'd told Aleksi it stayed in the room, and God help me, I'd meant it.
"My job."
Gregori gave me a long look, then left.
I sat on the too-hard mattress with a dead man's jacket in my lap. The apartment went quiet. Then footsteps started down the hall, heavy, pacing, back and forth.
I leaned back and closed my eyes with the cuff cold on my wrist. No pillow yet, but someone had left water and an apple on the nightstand, and the ice cream would be in the freezer by morning.
That was the kind of man he was. He raged and shoved and cuffed you to furniture, then made sure you had your insulin and your tools and your ice cream.
Planning was the smart play. I'd stayed alive for six months by being smart.
But I was thinking about his pulse under my fingertip, how fast it had been at his throat.
His Adam's apple against my knuckles when he swallowed.
The heat of his waist where the shirt had rucked up.
And the half-second crack in his face when I'd flinched, the one that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with a man seeing himself through someone else's eyes.
That last one wasn't strategic. That one was just him.
I pressed my face into the jacket. It smelled like cigarettes and garlic and old leather and somebody else's da, and for a second I let myself think about the shop on Victoria Street, the sound of a sewing machine, the smell of hide and wax and my da's voice saying, “Start with what ye can see, lad.”
Then I put it down and started planning for tomorrow.