Sean
She opens the door and steps back once.
That is the invitation.
I come inside. The door closes behind me with the soft metal slide of the deadbolt, and for one second, neither of us moves.
I followed her from the bank.
That is the part she does not know yet.
I am standing in the entryway of her apartment on West 12th, and she is standing twelve feet from me at the kitchen counter, and the math she is doing in her head right now is the math of a woman trying to figure out where she lost the operation.
She lost it on Fordham Road at 8:42 a.m. I was parked across the street.
She did not check her mirrors.
That is the part I will be thinking about for a long time. Nadia Ferraro does not get into a Range Rover that is not registered to her without checking her mirrors. Unless she has just opened a piece of paper that has done to her what the paper has done.
She did not check her mirrors because she could not.
I speak first.
"I want to know what was in that box, Nadia. And I want to know now."
Her face does not change.
The leather jacket is on the back of a chair. Her hair is loose. There is a Chemex on the counter. She is barefoot.
Her eyes cut to the door behind me. "How did you find me?"
"I followed you from the bank."
She closes her eyes for one second. When she opens them, her face is doing what her face does. Nothing.
"What was in the box?"
"Sean. I am going to ask you to leave."
"That is not on the table."
"It is on the table."
"It is not."
She does not move from the counter.
I come the rest of the way to her. I put my hand on the counter beside her hip. Not touching. Close enough that her body knows the geometry before her face does.
Her breath changes.
I hear it. She hears me hear it.
"Nadia."
"Don't."
"What was in the box?"
"I cannot tell you."
"Cannot?"
"Will not."
"Which is it?"
"Both. You are a cop. You are a man with a wound in his side. You are a man whose adoptive father took money from a Greek whom the Morettis are at war with. You have already burned half your life down for me. I am not going to be the one who hands you the match for the other half."
The air leaves the kitchen.
She has, in five sentences, named the war. The cop. The wound. What we have been to each other since the warehouse.
She has also told me, without saying it, that what is in the box has a Greek in it.
Fuck.
"Then I am going to find it myself."
"You are not. I have already moved it."
She wants me to choose, right now, in her kitchen, whether I am here for the document or for her.
"I am here for both."
"You can have one."
"Which."
"Choose."
I lift my hand off the counter. I put it on her throat. Same hand. Same throat. The throat that was under my hand in the warehouse on the night I decided not to die.
Her pulse is faster than her face. It always is.
"I choose you."
"That is not a real choice."
"It is the only one I am making."
She closes the half-inch between us. She puts her hand on my wrist. Not to remove it. To hold.
"The wound," she says.
"It can wait."
She puts her mouth on mine.
It is not the alley. The alley was angry and fast — a brick wall and a gun she had just put away, and no time for anything that wasn't urgent. This is the question we did not ask in the alley.
She kisses me slowly. The way a woman kisses a man she has decided to let through. Her hands find the front of my shirt. To open. Button by button.
When she gets to the dressing on my side, she stops.
"Sit."
She walks me with one hand flat on my chest to the kitchen island. Turns me. Presses me down onto the stool. Steps between my knees and peels the shirt off my shoulders without taking her eyes off my face.
She pulls her own shirt off over her head.
No bra.
I have not seen her in full light before. The alley was dark. The cabin was dark. This is the kitchen light on a Saturday morning, and I take a moment I do not apologize for.
She lets me.
"Come here," I tell her.
She comes.
I lift her onto the island. She wraps her legs around me. I put my mouth on her collarbone. The hollow of her throat. I work my way down. Her hands go into my hair.
I get her jeans open. Get her out of them. She is wearing nothing underneath.
I put my mouth on the inside of her thigh. She grips the edge of the island. I find the center of her with my tongue, and she makes a sound I have not heard from her before. Not loud. Not performed. The sound a woman makes when she has stopped deciding whether to make it.
"Madonna mia."
Quiet. Against the inside of her own arm. She has thrown an arm across her face.
I move the arm.
Two fingers under her wrist. I take it from her face and put it on the granite beside her.
"I want to see you."
She looks at me.
"All of it."
She lets her arm stay where I have placed it.
I go back to what I was doing. Two fingers into her without taking my mouth off her clit. She is wet — for me, for this, for the kitchen and the morning and the choice.
"Sì. Lì. Sean. Lì."
I do not need a translation. She knows I do not need a translation. She gives it to me anyway.
She comes with both hands in my hair and her eyes on mine because she has decided not to close them.
I let her have it.
She pulls me up by the hair and kisses me with the taste of herself on my mouth and does not flinch from it.
"I want you inside me," she says. Low. The voice she does not use in rooms.
I push inside her slowly.
So wet that there is no resistance. So tight my hand goes to the granite to brace. I go deep and stay there.
She stops moving.
She puts both hands flat on my chest and looks at me, and for the first time since the warehouse, she is not doing anything with her face. Not the consigliera. Not the operator.
Just her face.
"I do not do this."
"I know."
"There has been no one. Not like this. Not close."
"I know."
"I am very good at knowing what to do. I am not good at this."
"Neither am I."
She looks at me for a long second. The eyes of a woman who has been deciding, for a very long time, whether to let the door open.
She has decided.
"I am yours."
Something moves through me that is not gentle.
"Mine," I say against her throat. "Mine only. And I am not letting you go."
I press my forehead to hers. I start to move. Slowly. The slow she has not let me have until now. The slow the alley did not have and the cabin did not get to finish.
Her legs lock around me.
"Sean."
"Yeah."
"Più piano. Sì. Così." Slower. Yes. Like that.
I am as slow as she asks me to be.
She comes with her hand at the back of my neck and her mouth against my jaw. I follow her a moment after, hard enough that the granite would have bruised me if I had been the one with my back on it.
I look down.
The dressing on my side has bled through. A spreading circle that has been happening for the last half-hour without either of us paying attention to it.
She sees it at the same moment. Puts her hand flat over the dressing and presses — automatic, the same way she did it in the Catskills kitchen.
"You bled on my counter."
"I'll replace the counter."
"It is Italian marble."
"I'll replace it."
She almost smiles. The almost-smile she does not let turn into a smile. I have been collecting these since the cabin.
"Shower," she says. "Now."
The bathroom is white tile and steam glass, and the kind of unrelenting cleanliness a woman keeps when she lives alone and cannot afford to be careless about a single thing.
She turns the water on without looking at the dial. She already knows the temperature.
She peels the dressing off my side the way she peeled the first one off in the Catskills. Clinical. Quick. The gauze comes away with my blood on it.
"It needs Bellevue."
"Monday."
"Today."
"Monday."
She walks me into the shower, one hand flat against my body. The way you guide a man who has been wounded and is still standing because you decided he was going to be.
She steps in behind me. Naked.
She washes my back slowly. Her fingertips find the Ranger tattoo at the top of my left shoulder blade. She traces the outline. She does not ask what it means.
"How old?"
"Twenty."
"Before you were old enough to drink legally."
"Barely."
She says nothing. Keeps her hands moving.
I turn around. Take her face in both hands. Run my thumb along her lower lip. Slowly. She lets her mouth open under my thumb. Her tongue touches it once. Just enough.
"Sean."
"Yes."
"Stop being careful."
"I am not being careful."
"You are."
I kiss her. Turn her. Her back goes to the tile. She makes a small sound at the cold. The water hits both of us at an angle now and the steam is thickening around our heads.
"Hands on the tile."
She looks at me for one second. She turns. Puts both hands flat on the wall.
I put one hand on her hip. The other goes between her shoulder blades, flat, holding her there. Not pressing. Holding. The way I held her hand on my chest in the kitchen. Same hand. Same hold.
"Tell me what you want."
"You. Inside me. Now. Cazzo, Sean, now."
I push inside her on the first stroke.
She drops her head. Makes a sound that is not quiet and is not performed and has nothing of the consigliera in it. Raw. Low. Mine.
I do not ask her whose she is.
She has told me.
"Sean."
"Yeah."
"Harder."
"Yeah."
"Non smettere," she whispers. Don’t stop.
"I'm not."
She comes with a sound that hits the tile and the glass and comes back at us as something larger. I follow her a second after, with my forehead against the back of her neck, hard enough that the wound tears, hard enough that I am bleeding down my side again.
I do not care.
She dresses the wound at the bathroom counter. Antiseptic. Fresh gauze. Her hands on my side the way they have been on my side since Long Island City. She tapes the last edge, and her hands rest on the dressing for one second.
I put my hand over hers. She does not pull away.
We end up in the bedroom.
She gets into bed without explanation. I follow her. She turns on her side. I come in behind her. She pulls my arm over her and puts my hand flat on her chest over her heart.
I feel it beating.
She falls asleep.
I do not.
She has moved the document. But the safe is still in the apartment.
I am the worst version of myself right now — exhausted, rewrapped, just had a woman fall asleep on my arm who told me she is mine.
The detective wins.
I find the closet. Find the panel. The keypad is biometric; I work the housing loose. The safe opens manually with a small lever inside.
Almost empty.
A single folded sheet of paper at the back. Not the document. Something she did not move because moving it would have told me she had something in here besides the document.
I unfold it.
A hand-drawn family tree. Nadia's handwriting.
Vittorio Antonio Moretti. Deceased. Maria Isabella Moretti. Deceased.
Three sons.
Alessandro Moretti. Born March 3, 1984. Matteo Moretti. Born February 12, 1988. Luca Moretti. Born September 17, 1992.
I stop.
February 12, 1988, is my birthday.
Margaret Voss told me last night there were two of us. Twin boys. Fraternal. Different faces, same hour.
I have a brother.
He has been in this city the entire time.
I refold the paper. Put it back. Close the safe, reset the housing. I leave the closet exactly as I found it.
I get back under the covers.
She makes a small sound and fits against me again. Her hand finds my chest and stays there.
She is going to know I looked. The moment she opens her eyes and reads it on my face, the way she has read every other thing on my face since the warehouse.
She is going to let me look anyway.
My phone vibrates on the nightstand at 11:42 a.m.
CAPTAIN SULLIVAN.
IA wants to talk. Someone filed a complaint about the Moretti investigation. Came from inside their legal team. Get to the precinct.
I read it twice.
I look at the woman asleep on my chest. I look at the bedroom door, behind which is the kitchen, behind which is the safe, behind which is a family tree with a name on it that shares my birthday.
I look at the phone in my hand, with a message from my captain saying the Moretti legal team has just moved against me.
The Moretti legal team.
I look at her sleeping face.
She has moved the document. Someone inside the Moretti legal machine just put Internal Affairs on my back. She has done both of those things. And then she has let me into her bed. And let me put my hand on her throat. And told me she is mine.
She is going to wake up and look at me like nothing has happened.
I am going to look at her the same way.
Stronzo — asshole, Nadia.