Nadia
Iwas not asleep.
He thinks I was. Most of the things I have done in my life have depended on people thinking I was asleep. Or distracted. Or confused. Or any of the other states women are assumed to occupy when they are actually paying very close attention.
I heard him search the cabin.
Every door. Every cabinet. The closet by the front door. The hall closet. The locked back room, he could not get into without my thumb. The kitchen lamp he unscrewed and reassembled. That last one is the part I will think about later.
He planted something in the lamp.
I will find it when he is gone. He did not bug my kitchen. The people who built this place trained me to spot the kind of bugs people like him plant. He still planted one. I respect the fact that he was good enough to make me almost not respect it.
That was this morning.
The afternoon passed in three-hour pieces, pretending to sleep while a wounded cop searched my cabin. Now the light is going. It is 6:14 p.m.
I have his real name.
Sean Donovan. Age 38. NYPD Organized Crime Bureau. Detective First Grade. Commendations. Decorations. A clean disciplinary file. Which means either a very honest cop or a very careful one.
He is going to be careful.
I close the file. I get out of bed.
I put on jeans and a black T-shirt. No bra. There is no one to perform for. I make coffee.
He hears me. I hear him hear me. The cabin is small enough that nothing escapes either of us.
He comes into the kitchen in the same clothes as last night, minus what I cut off him.
His undershirt is white, tight enough to show the dressing.
Black ink on his shoulder, I did not see in the warehouse or under the kitchen island's fluorescent light.
A Ranger scroll. Old. The kind of black that used to be color and stopped being color.
He earned that in a life that was over before he was old enough to drink legally.
I am not looking at his shoulders.
The coffee requires a great deal of looking at.
I pour it.
"Sleep okay?"
"Fine."
"You weren't asleep."
I look up. He is leaning against the doorframe the way men with wounds lean. Conserving spinal load, distributing weight to the good side. Doing it well enough, I would not notice if I had not put the hole there myself.
"What makes you think that?"
"You'd have left the coffee until I got up."
"I make coffee twice a day. 6:14 in the morning. 6:14 in the evening. The hours my grandmother used to."
"I bet you do."
He smiles.
I pour his cup. Both cups.
It is the first time he has smiled around me. The smile takes about ten years off and adds about six inches of trouble. I do not know how that math works. The math works.
I do not look at him while I pour. I look at the Chemex because it's a safe thing to look at, and his smile is not.
"Sit down before you fall down."
"I'm fine."
"You're a man with a hole in him pretending he doesn't have a hole in him. Sit down."
"You're aggressive."
"I'm aggressive whenever I want to be."
He sits. I see him decide not to flinch. That is different from not flinching. It gets through a layer of composure I did not know could be broken.
I sit across from him. Push the coffee to him.
He takes it with the good hand, sips, and closes his eyes for half a second.
"You make good coffee."
"I do."
"It's the only nice thing I've had in a long time."
He says it the way a person says a true thing they did not plan to say. Not a compliment about coffee. Something underneath it.
I do not respond.
I hold the cup with both hands and look at the counter because if I respond, I am going to say something true, something I did not plan to say. Something that starts with I know and ends somewhere I am not ready to go.
He opens his eyes.
He is looking at me the way I have been looking at him when I thought he was not watching. The way that has nothing to do with threat assessment and everything to do with the particular problem of being in a small cabin with a specific person for half a day.
"You're going to be a problem."
"I already am one."
"I know. That's not what I meant."
I feel it before I can stop it.
The heat. Starting at my throat and moving up.
I am blushing.
I have not blushed in front of anyone since I was nineteen years old.
I pick up my coffee cup and drink from it, looking at the window. None of them works.
He sees it.
I know he sees it because he says nothing about it. A man who had not seen it would have kept talking. He goes quiet instead.
Madonna mia, my God.
I am going to mind.
We fight over coffee.
We do not call it a fight. We call it conversation. It is a fight.
He asks where I learned to suture. I say, Geneva. He asks who taught me. I say, a woman. He says that's not an answer. I say it's the answer you're getting. He says you sound like my partner.
"I am not your partner."
"No. You're the woman holding my real name in her phone and pretending she isn't."
I freeze. Not visibly. I am too good at this for visibility. But internally, something shifts a quarter inch.
He has known I have his name for hours. He has been letting me think he did not know.
We are even.
"Sean."
He has been Liam Walsh since the warehouse. I have been letting him be Liam Walsh because it meant distance, and distance meant safety. I have just said his real name across a kitchen counter and done away with both.
He knows it too. I see it in the half-second before his face does anything.
"Donovan." I look at him over the rim of the cup. "First grade. Organized Crime. Clean record. Three closed investigations into Moretti Global and an open one that is going to become a very different investigation by the end of today."
His face does the half-second recalculation. The thing he never shows twice in a row. I have now caught it twice.
He leans forward slightly across the counter. Not enough to close the distance. Enough to change it. Enough that I am aware of exactly how much counter there is and how easy it would be to remove.
He is watching me as if I were the most interesting problem he has encountered in a long time.
"My father," he says. "Frank. You know about Frank."
"I know there was a Frank Donovan. NYPD, retired. Killed. You were thirteen."
He goes still. The kind that is a wall, not a tell. Built a long time ago around this exact subject.
"That's accurate."
"I'm sorry."
"Most people are."
"I mean it differently."
"I know."
He looks at me. He does not move on. He sits with it. The dead father thing, the thing he does not perform around. He has decided to let me see that he does not perform around it.
I do not deserve to be shown this.
I am being shown anyway.
"Your father," he says.
"Don't."
"Your father, Nadia."
"Don't push it."
"The man you were dreaming about last night."
I set the coffee cup down carefully. The carefulness is the point.
"You heard me."
"Yeah."
"What did I say?"
"Non era mio padre."
He says it badly. The Italian sits in his mouth like something he has not learned to hold. He says it anyway. Because he heard me say it, and because he wants me to know he is going to keep hearing me say it until I tell him what it means.
"He wasn't my father. My biological father. The man whose name is on my birth certificate raised me. He was a good man. He is dead. He did not know."
"Did your mother know?"
"My mother knew everything. She knew and built our entire life around the lie anyway."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting."
The corner of his mouth moves. He has caught me using his line. He is not going to mention it.
The cabin is very quiet.
We have just told each other something true about the people who raised us. I did not plan to do that. I have been in this man's presence since the warehouse, and I have told him more true things than I have told most people in a year.
I stand up to clear my cup.
He stands at the same moment.
The kitchen is small. One path to the sink. He stops because of the wound. I stop because he stops.
We are very close.
I have been in rooms with dangerous men my whole adult life and never had to remind myself to breathe. I am reminding myself now.
He puts his cup down without taking his eyes off me.
I put my hand on his chest to push him back.
I do not push him back.
My hand stays. He covers it. Not hard. Not pinning. Just holding. The way a man holds something he does not want to drop.
"Nadia."
"Don't."
"Tell me to stop."
"Don't make this my problem."
"It already is."
"Cazzo, fuck." In Italian. Under my breath. The part of me that swears in Italian is the part that has stopped pretending.
"Tell me to stop."
"I'm not telling you to stop."
He kisses me.
Not polite. Not tentative. The kiss of a man who has been holding still for a long time and has decided he is done holding still. I kiss him back the same way.
His hand goes into my hair. The other one is still over mine on his chest, except now my hand is under his shirt, and the shirt is the problem.
We do not make it to the bedroom.
We make it to the wall.
He has me against it before I know I have moved. The wound does not slow him down. I should be worried about the wound. I am not worried about the wound.
His mouth goes to my throat.
The press of his lips. The drag of teeth that is not quite teeth.
The hot wet of his mouth on the line of my collarbone, and the cool of the cabin air on the wet he leaves behind.
He smells like the iron of his own blood, and the bar soap from my shower he used at some point this afternoon without asking, and something underneath all of those I do not have a name for.
He pulls the T-shirt over my head.
He stops for one second when he sees there is nothing underneath.
His eyes go dark in a way I am going to think about every time I close my eyes for the next several months.
"Madonna," I say. Without meaning to.
He does not need a translation.
He puts his hands on me. Both hands. Open palms. The way a man holds a thing he has been told about and is finally being allowed to touch.
His thumb finds my nipple, and the file in my head goes blank.
"Sean."
"Yeah."
"Stop being careful."
"I am not being careful."
"You are."
"A little."
"Don't be."
He takes off his shirt without breaking the kiss. The dressing is bright against his skin. I am not looking at it.
He gets my jeans the rest of the way off.
He goes to his knees.
He goes to his knees with a hole in his side, on the kitchen floor of a cabin he was not supposed to know existed, and he looks up at me before he does what he is about to do.
He has been thinking about putting his mouth on me since the kitchen island. He is going to use the answer.
"Look at me."
I look at him.
"Don't close your eyes."
"I won't."
"Say it."
"I won't close my eyes."
His mouth is on me before I have finished saying it.
I make a sound, and I do not have a way to stop it.
The sound goes up the center of me and comes out of my mouth, and I have not made that sound in front of a person in years. It is not the sound of the consigliera. It is the one I have not let anyone hear since Geneva.
He hears it.
He works for more of it.
He finds my clit with his tongue and stays there.
He studies me the way he has been studying me since the warehouse, with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be in the next ten minutes and the discipline of a man who has been told no by women like me his whole career. He is not going to be told no tonight.
"Lì," I say. "There. Lì, Sean."
I do not say it in English.
I am not able to speak English right now.
My hand grips his hair. My hips move, and I cannot stop them, and he does not want me to stop them. His hand goes under my hip and lifts me into his mouth, the quarter inch that does it.
"Cazzo. Sean. Madonna mia."
He works two fingers into me without breaking the contact of his mouth.
I am wet enough that there is no resistance.
He goes deep on the first stroke, and I am clenching around them before I have decided to. The fingers find the place inside me that the rest of my career has not been paying attention to.
I am close. At the edge of the kind of orgasm I do not let myself have in front of other people.
He shifts to lift me.
I see it then.
The dressing on his side.
Dark through the gauze. The whole back of the bandage is soaked dark.
The blood is running down his ribs in a thin line.
I can see from where my hand is fisted in his hair.
He has been on his knees on a kitchen floor with a hole in him that he has been pretending he does not have, and the pretending has run out.
"Sean."
He understands before I finish the word.
He does not pull away.
He puts his forehead against my hip and breathes.
His breath is hot against the inside of my thigh, and I have to close my eyes because the want is still in my body and is going to be in my body for the next several hours, regardless of what we do or do not do.
"Yeah."
It is not a yeah of agreement.
It is the yeah of a man who is going to remember this for the rest of his life and is, also, not done with me.
He gets up slowly.
He kisses me before he reaches for his shirt. He kisses me with the taste of me on his mouth. I take it.
"You’re bleeding, Sean."
He looks down.
"That feels dramatic."
"You’re leaving a trail."
His eyes follow the drops of blood on my kitchen floor.
"That feels slightly more concerning."
My phone buzzes.
The secure line. The kind of buzz that means something has broken.
He hears it. Looks at it. Looks back at me. His hand still on my hip. My jeans on the floor.
"Whatever that is. It's not good."
"No."
"You should look."
He lets go in stages. The hand on my jaw last.
I pull my jeans up. We both put our shirts back on. The dressing is bright through his. I am going to redress it after.
The before of the after has just been suspended.
I cross to the phone. I do not let him see the screen.
MATTEO IN TRANSIT. CATSKILLS PERIMETER REGISTRY PING. ETA TWO HOURS.
He will not find this address. But the secure line does not buzz for the registry ping alone.
I open the security app.
Six cameras going dark in order. North to southwest, clockwise. Someone walking the perimeter.
This address is not on any registry. The only people who knew this cabin existed are dead, retired, or me.
Someone has found it.
He is watching me. He cannot see the screen. He can see my face.
"Nadia."
"Get your boots on."
"What is it?"
"Get your boots on."
He goes for his boots. I do not tell him what is on the screen. He does not ask twice.