4. Kat #2
"Mr. Safar." Cami raises her voice to a normal tone. "Do you have an opinion on any of this?"
"No."
That's it. One syllable, delivered with the warmth of a filing cabinet, and he goes back to marking the sash.
Cami turns to me with something close to reverence.
"I like him."
"You don't know him."
"I know his construction." She retrieves her bag. "Rare. Try not to renovate him." At the door she tosses over her shoulder. "Since your company is way hotter than mine, I'll leave you to it. Don't do what I wouldn't do."
She's gone before I can answer, leaving the door to close itself behind her.
The loft goes quiet. Outside my beautiful windows the light has gone thin and orange along the brick across the street, four o'clock spilling into five. I stand there holding an empty mug in a room that is going to be dark soon.
With him still in it.
By nine, the loft has changed temperature.
Not the air. The air is fine. It's the shape of the space. My lamps are on, the corners of the room have gone soft and brown, and the man in it has picked his spot.
Not the couch or the chair by the window, which is objectively the best seat in the loft and every guest I have ever had has taken within four minutes.
He pulls one of the mismatched chairs from my table, turns it, and sits down at an angle to the front door with his back to the brick.
That's it. That's his choice. A hard wooden chair, six feet from the deadbolt he installed, sightlines running clean across my whole floor.
"There's a couch."
"I know."
"It's a good couch. People compliment it."
"It faces away from the door."
He says it like he's explaining the weather.
I go to my desk, open my laptop, pull up the manifest file and stare at a customs date I have already memorized. I read the same line four times without absorbing a single character of it.
Reasons to dislike him. I start the list because listing things is what I do when I need my brain to behave.
One: he took my lock apart without permission. Two: he answers questions with one word and thinks that counts as conversation. Three: he moves through my home like it's terrain. Four: he called me an asset.
He didn't. Al-Mansour did. He told you what the word was and then told you he wasn't going to use it on you.
Strike four.
Three is arguably a feature, given the week I'm having. Two is objectively true and getting less annoying by the hour. One saved me two hundred dollars of false comfort.
The list is thinning. Cami would have something to say about the list.
My back aches. I roll my shoulders, the movement pulls my eyes off the screen, and there he is, forearms on his knees, watching the door like it might do something interesting.
"Do you sleep?"
"Yes."
"Tonight?"
"Some."
"That's not a number."
The corner of his mouth moves a fraction. "No."
I close the laptop. The click sounds loud.
"You could put your feet up."
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine. I'm saying the option exists."
He looks over at me. The lamp catches the honey in his eyes. It does something unforgivable, and I forget what I was going to say next.
Every place on my body that has been ignoring him all day files its report at once. My skin warms under my sleeves. The pull low in my belly is patient now, not urgent, and somehow that's worse, because urgent I could blame on the day.
Nobody has watched a door for me since I was nineteen.
"Kat."
"What."
"Go to bed."
Not an order. Something closer to permission.
I stand, take my glass to the sink. Then I stop in my bedroom doorway with my fingers on the frame.
"Naveed."
"Yeah."
I don't have the second half of the sentence. So I say, "Goodnight," close the door, and through it I hear the chair shift once as he settles in against the wall.
I wake at some hour with no number attached to it.
The loft is completely still, the radiators are quiet, the street below emptied out, and my body surfaces without permission.
My door is open a few inches. I left it that way. I don't remember deciding to.
Through the gap, the main room is all shadow and one thin band of streetlight coming through the tall windows, laying a pale stripe across the floorboards.
At the far edge of it, the front door. He's against it.
Not the chair. The chair sits empty where he left it, angled and useless.
He's on the floor with his back flat to the door, one knee bent, the other leg out long in front of him, head tipped back against the wood.
His arms are crossed loose over his chest. His face turned slightly toward the room, and even asleep it doesn't look soft.
It looks like something set down on purpose.
His body is the lock.
That should frighten me. A man I met this afternoon has laid himself across my only door so that nothing reaches me tonight without coming through him first, and I am not frightened.
I am settled. Warm all the way through, low and shameless, in a way I have no permission for.
Some ruined animal in me looked at the largest, most dangerous thing in my home barricading me in, and read it as safe, lay down and went soft everywhere at once.
That's what surfaces first, but it doesn't stay a thought. It goes lower and sideways and lands somewhere behind my chestplate where language doesn't reach.
Something old moves under my ribs. Familiar in a way I can't place. It has the shape of a room I've stood in before, a hallway, someone's boots, and I get about that far before I stop, because whatever's on the other side of it isn't something I want to walk into at three in the morning.
I let it go. I'm good at letting things go if I don't look at them straight.
My chest aches. The kind that spreads.
My whole body has gone loose under the blanket, one foot out, as it always ends up, and the looseness is the wrong response. That's the part I can't get around. I should be uneasy. There is an armed stranger asleep in my home and I have never in my life slept well with company in the next room.
Instead, my shoulders have relaxed for the first time in three days. My jaw is unclenched, my breathing is doing something slow and unfamiliar without my supervision.
He didn't take the couch. He didn't take the corner with the good sightlines and the comfortable cushion.
He took the door.
He can't get past me, isn't something he said. It's just how he arranged himself before he let go of being awake.
Heat gathers at the back of my eyes, and I blink it off before it can commit to anything.
I pull the blanket up over my shoulder and turn my face into the pillow so I'm no longer looking through the gap. There. Done. Not looking.
I am not going to examine the part where the most dangerous man who has ever stood inside these walls is also the first thing in years that has let my body believe it could stop guarding itself. That is a door I do not open at three in the morning.
I didn't see anything.
That's the lie, and I hold onto it with both hands, because if I don't name it, I don't have to decide what to do about it.
The other lie, the one underneath, I hold tighter still: that when I went loose in the dark just now, it was only relief.
Not the other thing. Not the ruined, grateful thing that did not just feel safe tonight, that felt kept, owned and turned its face into the pillow so no one would ever see how much it liked it.
I lie there listening to a man breathe against my front door, and I don't fall sleep again.