Chapter 16
CINDY
Sleep and I have stopped speaking.
It’s not the bed. The bed is the nicest thing I’ve ever been unconscious on.
It’s my head, which will not close for business.
I lie there in the dark doing laps. Vadim’s face, the flat cold note under all that grief.
The rose garden, the crack in Sevastian’s voice when his brother’s name came out of him.
The Wet Sunset gone dark behind us for good.
Then back to Vadim, around again, until the sheets feel like a straitjacket I’m renting.
Around two I give up, put on socks, go hunting for a glass of water like that’s a real errand instead of my legs needing a job.
The ranch at night runs quiet. There’s a man posted at the end of the family wing who pretends not to see me as long as I stay inside the walls, which is the deal nobody ever said out loud.
The kitchen keeps one light burning over the stove like a vigil.
I drink my water at the sink, looking out at forty miles of nothing through glass that’s probably rated for rifles, and that’s when I see it.
A thin yellow line under the door at the end of the breezeway.
The garage. Where there should be nobody at two in the morning.
My first thought is guards. My second thought is Vadim, and that one walks me down the breezeway on quiet feet before my common sense gets a vote. I ease the door open an inch, ready to have seen nothing, ready to be a woman who got lost looking for water.
It’s not Vadim.
Sevastian stands in a pool of work light beside the long black hood of a Rolls, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a soft cloth in one hand, moving it over the paint in slow circles like the car asked him for this.
I stop breathing for a second, for a brand-new reason this time.
I’ve seen this man in bespoke wool with a casino kneeling around him.
I’ve seen him in headlights with a gun out.
I have never seen him like this. The jacket hangs on a hook by the workbench.
His forearms are bare under the lights, corded, old ink running up the left one, the kind of forearms that make a woman lose an argument with herself, and he’s working with the slow total attention I’ve only ever seen him spend on threats. On threats, and once or twice on me.
The watch is what gets me, though. The six-figure thing he wears like it’s nothing sits on a shelf next to a dented tin of wax, face down, like a confiscated toy.
I should back out. I came down here hunting a traitor and found a private thing instead, the kind of thing you’re not supposed to see. I get one foot into reverse.
“You walk loud for a dancer,” he says, without turning around.
“I walk normal. Your house repeats everything.”
“It’s concrete and glass. It keeps no secrets.” The cloth keeps moving. “You should be asleep.”
“So should you. It’s two in the morning and you’re polishing a car that has a staff.”
“The staff doesn’t touch the cars.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’d do it wrong. Then I’d have to notice, then we’d all have a bad week.”
I come in instead of leaving, because that’s the kind of decision I make now.
There’s a stool by the workbench, so I take it, knees up, sock feet hooked on the rung, and he lets me.
That’s the part I’ll keep turning over later.
He just lets me, no security theater, no flat voice, no wall.
The garage smells like wax, clean, faintly sweet, motor oil somewhere underneath.
It’s warmer in here than it has any right to be, or maybe that’s the company.
“You took the watch off,” I say, because I can’t not.
He glances at the shelf like he forgot it existed. “The watch is for them.” He goes back to the hood. “This is for me.”
I sit with that one for a while. The whole world gets the watch, the suit, the stillness. A piece of painted metal at two in the morning gets the actual man. Being in the room with the actual man pulls at me, low and specific, even though all he’s doing is buffing.
“Does anybody know you do this?”
“The men know not to come in here at night.”
“So if I told Tasha that the scariest man in the state does his own detailing. In his socks.”
He looks down. He is, in fact, in his socks, the shoes lined up by the door like a schoolboy’s. “Then you’d be choosing chaos,” he says, going back to the hood. “Tasha can’t hold a thing that good. It would reach the Strip by lunch.”
“Your own men gossip?”
“Worse than your dressing room ever dreamed of.” A section of fender gets his attention. “Why do you think I know everything?”
The fleet sits in a long black row down the length of the building, and while he works he tells me about them, in trade for nothing, which is new. The big armored one I ride in, which he bought the week he took the chair, bulletproof, never once shot at. “The safest money I ever spent,” he says.
“Insurance works best when everyone knows you have it.” Three more like it in different sizes, a family portrait of hearses.
Something long and low from the sixties that he calls the old man’s one weakness, which he doesn’t explain.
I don’t push. At the far end, something crouches under a gray cover, and the shape of it is wrong for a Rolls, wrong for anything sensible at all.
“What was your first one?” I ask. “Car.”
“A dead man’s Mercedes.” He says it the way other people name a high school. “It came with the job I had at nineteen. Nobody else wanted it.”
“Because of the dead man?”
“Because of the upholstery.” He doesn’t elaborate. I decide with my whole heart not to ask. He catches me deciding, and there it is again, that almost-thing at the corner of his mouth his face keeps filed under classified.
“What’s under the sheet?”
“A mistake I keep.”
“Can I see it?”
“No.” A pause, the cloth still moving. “Not tonight.”
I watch him work. It should be boring. Instead, watching his hands work is doing more for me than most men manage with a bed and an agenda.
He does the whole hood in overlapping circles, then steps back and reads the light down the length of the paint like a pool shark reading a table, finds some flaw invisible to humans, does a section over.
His hands are enormous. I was there for some of the things they’ve done.
Right now they’re being so careful with a piece of painted metal that something in my throat pulls tight.
“Who taught you this?” I ask.
The cloth stops. Starts again. “Nobody. My father kept cars. He had men for them.” A breath’s worth of pause. “I wanted to know how things worked, so I watched until the men let me do it, then I did it until I was better at it than they were.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight. Nine.” He moves down the fender. “It’s good work. It travels. Any country, any year, a man can always wax a car.”
It’s the most he’s ever told me about being a child. Three sentences, all of them about wax, and I hold very still the same way I held still in the rose garden, because the wild thing has wandered close again. I don’t want it bolting back into the dark.
“Why this, though?” I keep my voice down where the moment is. “Of everything. You could be asleep. You could pay a machine to do this in twenty minutes.”
He’s quiet long enough that I figure the door’s shut. Then he straightens, looks down the black shine of the hood, and answers the paint instead of me.
“Nothing I do is ever finished. The money moves. The war moves. There’s no morning where any of it is done.” He tips his head at the car. “This is done in an hour. Nobody dies of it, and you can see your face in done.”
I sit with that. It explains more about this man than anything he’s said to me with the lights on, and he said it to a fender, which also explains more about this man than anything he’s said to me with the lights on.
“I used to tape my own ankles,” I hear myself say.
He looks over. Waits.
“Before competitions. Two hours early, every time. The venues had trainers who’d do it for you, good ones, and the other girls used them.
I never let anybody wrap my ankles in my life.
My coach thought I was superstitious.” I shrug, sock feet on a stranger’s stool, telling the dark a thing I’ve never once said sober.
“Superstition had nothing to do with it. It was the one part I could hold. You can’t make the judges score you right.
You can’t make the other girls fall. The tape, though.
The tape was mine. If it was done right, I did it right, and for two hours before every event, something in the whole screaming world was handled. ”
The cloth has stopped moving altogether now.
“So,” I say, suddenly aware of every inch of myself. “Wax. I get it. That’s all I’m saying.”
He looks at me for a long moment, the gray eyes nearly colorless under the work lights, and there’s something in his face I haven’t seen pointed at me before.
Not the desert look, not the count-room look, something worse for me than either.
I’ve just read him back to himself in his own garage, in his own language, and the stillness on him says he heard it.
“The tape,” he says, “is why you read the whale better than men I’ve trained for years.”
“The tape is why I’m still alive, probably.” I say it light. It doesn’t come out as light as I ordered. “You keep what you can hold. The rest belongs to the house.”
“The rest belongs to the house,” he repeats, slow, like he’s checking the fit of it, and the corner of his mouth moves, because if anybody in Nevada is the house, it’s him. Then he holds out the cloth. “Show me your circles.”
“My what?”
“You want to sit in my garage at two in the morning, you work. House rule.”
So that’s how I end up waxing a murderer’s Rolls in my socks.
The wax goes on thin, he tells me, no pressure, let the cloth do the work, and apparently my circles are a crime in this jurisdiction.
He watches me butcher a square foot of immaculate paint with his arms crossed, suffering out loud in Russian.
Then he comes around behind me, and his hand closes over mine on the cloth.
The garage gets very small.
He’s warm all down my back without touching me anywhere except the hand. He smells like wax, like clean cotton that’s been working. His hand moves mine in slow circles, no pressure, around, around, and I stop being able to hear the work light over my own pulse. Neither of us says anything.
There’s nothing performative left to say it in.
The paint comes up like dark water under the cloth, our hands in it together, his ring cool against my knuckle, the heat of him one inch off my shoulder blades, and I understand that I will be feeling this exact nothing-touch for days, which is ridiculous, which changes ridiculous nothing.
When I finally get a section right, his breath comes down warm beside my ear.
“There,” he says. One word, low, and it lights me up from the spine out.
I turn my head. It’s a mistake, or it’s the point, I’ve stopped being able to tell my mistakes from my points.
His face is right there. The stubble, the mouth, the eyes already on me like they arrived first and waited.
We are one bad decision from the count room all over again, except there’s no money down here, no audience, no deal to hide inside.
Just two people in shirtsleeves and socks at the hour when true things get loose.
I watch him understand it the same second I do.
This wouldn’t be like the other times. This would matter.
His hand comes off mine like the cloth went hot. He steps back, a full step, puts the work light between us, and the shutter comes down over his face, that flat smooth nothing I’ve watched him close over himself before.
“It’s late,” he says. “You should sleep, Cynthia.”
The name with the edge back on it. I know this move. I’m earning a degree in this move.
“Sure.” I slide off the stool, keeping my voice easy, because the alternative isn’t easy, and he doesn’t get that from me twice in one night. “Thanks for the lesson. I’ll invoice you for labor.”
I’m at the door with my hand on the cold metal when his voice comes again, quiet, aimed at the car.
“You did the last section right.”
It shouldn’t help. It does anyway, the whole way back down the breezeway, which tells you exactly what kind of trouble I’m in.
Seven years of customers telling me I’m gorgeous never once got past my teeth.
One sentence about wax technique from a killer in his socks, and I float down a hallway like the prom worked out.
Back in the guest room, the bed and I look at each other.
We both know it’s over between us. The sky past the glass has gone the color that comes before the color that comes before dawn.
My hands smell like wax. I can still feel the print of his palm across my knuckles, which is nothing, which is a hand, which is somehow more than everything that happened on a steel table under a casino.
I am not going to lie here in the dark doing laps about that too.
So I pull the gray blanket off the couch in the sitting room, the soft one that’s technically furniture, and I take it out to the back terrace, because if I’m going to be awake I’d rather be awake under something enormous.
The lakebed lies out there flat to the edge of the world, holding the last of the night.
The cold is real. The blanket mostly argues it down.
Somewhere behind me in the big quiet house is a man who builds walls all day, takes them down with a cloth at two in the morning, puts them back up the second anybody sees.
Somewhere in the same house, if my gut is right, is a liar with a sad loyal face, and nobody believes me yet, including me, most hours.
I wrap the blanket tighter and keep both of those where I can see them.
The sun isn’t up yet. I decide to outwait it.