16. Margot
MARGOT
The lights went out, and for the first time in years I stopped narrating my life and started living it.
It happens the way the important things always do, all at once and without asking permission.
One moment the shop is its ordinary evening self, the lamp warm on the counter, the radiator ticking through its complaints, the storm working the front windows like it holds a grievance.
The next moment the whole block drops into black.
The refrigerator hum in the back gives out, and the streetlights with it.
Even the city seems to hold its breath to see what the dark intends to do with us.
I have been strung tight for days, and I have refused, with real discipline, to name the reason.
It is a small heap of things that will not quite add up.
Once, without my ever asking, he made me coffee exactly the way I take it and left it where he knew I would find it.
He knows what I ate on a day off I am certain I never told him about.
And since the night on my couch a new watchfulness has settled into him, a stillness that never quite switches itself off.
I keep filing each of these under coincidence, because the alternative is a question I am not ready to ask out loud, and the dark tonight does me the treacherous favor of giving all of it a body I can feel standing in the room.
"Daniil." I send his name out into a space I can no longer see. "Please tell me that was the whole street and not just me forgetting to pay the electric again."
"Not you this time. The whole block is dark." His voice arrives from closer than I had placed him, low and entirely untroubled, the voice of a man for whom the dark is a first language. "Stay where you are. Do not walk toward the window."
I am halfway into a joke about candles when I hear it, the thing his ears caught a full second ahead of mine. A scrape sounds at the back of the shop, soft and careful and deliberate. It is the specific noise of a person working very hard not to make one.
He is already moving, and the way he moves takes every theory I ever floated about him and quietly files them all under wrong.
There is no fear in it and no hurry in it either.
He crosses the black shop the way water finds the low ground, without a single wasted inch, and when he speaks again his voice has gone flat and stripped of all its warmth, and that, more than the sound at the door, is the thing that lifts the hair on my arms.
"Behind the counter," he says. "Now. Do not make a light."
I have spent my whole life talking back to men who tell me what to do. I do not talk back to him. I fold down behind the counter with my heart going like a caught bird, and I listen to the most dangerous quiet I have ever sat inside.
He goes toward the sound, and the dark swallows him whole.
I hear the back door give, not break, only give, the way a door opens for a man who has already decided that it will.
For a long moment there is nothing. Then comes a single low grunt that is not his, and a scuffle so brief it is almost courteous, and a sound I choose not to examine too closely, something heavy meeting a wall and thinking better of getting up.
When he comes back he is not out of breath.
That is the detail my body understands a beat before my mind can.
A man does whatever he has just done in the dark and returns with his breathing perfectly even, and every animal instinct I own sits up and recognizes a predator that has decided, for its own private reasons, to be gentle with me.
"What was that." It does not come out as a question. My voice has left its punctuation somewhere behind the counter.
"Someone who tried the wrong door on the wrong night." He pauses, and then, lower, hands me the nearest thing to a confession I have pried out of him yet. "He will not come back. Look at me. Are you hurt?"
"You're asking me? You're the one who walked into the dark after him."
"I am difficult to hurt," he says. "You are not. That is the whole of our arrangement, and I intend to keep it exactly that way."
He has crouched in front of me, and the storm throws just enough gray light through the front glass to give me the edges of him and nothing else.
His hand comes up and finds the side of my jaw the way it did on the street weeks ago, checking me for damage, except this time no bus sighs past to rescue either of us.
This time there is only the dark, and the rain, and the fact that I have just watched a man make a threat vanish and then turn straight back to ask, before anything else, whether I am all right.
"I keep waiting for you to be a normal amount of frightening," I say, and my voice is not steady, and I discover I do not care. "You keep insisting on being the other thing instead."
"What other thing?"
"The kind a sensible woman runs toward."
So I close the last of the distance myself, because for once in my life I am not watching the scene from a safe remove but standing squarely inside it, and I kiss him in the dark with the whole of the fear still bright and loud in my blood.
For one heartbeat he holds completely still, the pause where he weighs a thing before he lets himself trust it.
Then something in him lets go of a rope it has been gripping for weeks, and he takes the kiss the way he takes a doorway, owning it completely and without a sound, and leaves me in no doubt at all about which of us is setting the pace.
His hand slides into my hair and closes, not hard, only certain, tilting my face to exactly the angle he wants it, and the last of my composure goes out of me like a breath I forgot I was holding.
I am a woman who argues. I argue with customers and critics and the ghost of my own grandmother.
I do not have a single argument left in me.
He kisses me slow and deep and unhurried, as though we have all the dark in the world, as though he ordered the storm for the two of us himself, and every place his patience once frightened me turns, in a single instant, into the exact thing I want it turned on.
His mouth leaves mine and travels the line of my jaw to the soft place beneath my ear, and I feel him breathe me in, slow, like a man committing to memory something he means to keep.
His free hand flattens against my hip and draws me in until there is no dark left between us, until I can feel exactly what the storm has done to him, the plain hard fact of how much he wants this pressed against me through too many layers of cloth.
A sound comes out of me that I have never once made in front of another person.
He answers it low in his chest, pleased, and the pleasure in it undoes me faster than any tenderness could.
"You are shaking," he says against my throat.
"That's not fear," I tell him.
"I know exactly what it is." His teeth graze the tendon of my neck, just enough to make me lose the shape of my own name. "I have wanted my hands on you since the first night you looked up and saw my face. You cannot imagine what it costs a man to wait as long as I have."
"Then stop waiting," I say, and it is the bravest and the most reckless thing I have ever said aloud, and I would say it a hundred times over for the sound it pulls out of him.
"Upstairs," I manage against his mouth. "There's a bed. It's a whole feature of my apartment I've been shamefully underusing."
"In a moment." He does not lift me and he does not hurry me.
He keeps me there against the counter in the ruined dark and takes his time, one hand splayed at the small of my back and the other sliding up beneath the hem of my sweater to spread warm and certain across the bare skin of my waist, and when I make a sound I will deny in daylight he says, very low, "There.
That is the sound I have been waiting for.
" I am too far gone to ask him what he means by it.
He works me open the way he works everything, patiently, one fact at a time.
His hand climbs the ladder of my ribs and closes over my breast through the thin cotton, his thumb dragging slow across the tightening peak of it until my knees give up their argument with gravity, and he catches all my weight against him without seeming to move at all.
I have written men who take. I have never written one who takes his time like this, as though the taking is the point and the having can wait, and the discovery that the difference matters this much is going to keep me awake on nights I cannot yet imagine.
He gets me up the crooked stair somehow, his mouth never fully leaving mine, stopping once on the landing to press me flat to the wall until I forget there is a bed at all, past the cat who flees the scandal and through the door I rebuilt for exactly this kind of night without ever once knowing it.
In the dark of the bedroom he undresses me slowly, with a terrible and complete focus that leaves me feeling less like a woman being taken to bed and more like a first sentence being read by someone who fully intends to finish the entire book.
The sweater goes first, lifted over my head and dropped somewhere I will not find it for days.
Then his hands are at the button of my jeans, and he pauses there on purpose, waiting until I lift my eyes and give him the yes he already knows he has, and only then does he ease the denim down with a slowness that is its own kind of torment.
And then I am bare in the storm light while he is still fully dressed, and the imbalance of it should frighten me and instead lights me up like a struck match.
He steps back half a pace to look at me, and there is nothing shy in the way he does it, no polite skating of the eyes.
He reads me the way he reads a room he intends to hold, taking his time, top to bottom, and I feel the look land on my skin like weather.