6. Kat
six
Kat
"I'm going."
"No."
"That wasn't a question, it was a schedule."
He doesn't move from the door. He hasn't moved since the second I said the word coat, and that's the problem in one picture: a man the size of a filing cabinet standing between me and my own exit like it's the most reasonable thing in the world.
"Say something with more than one syllable."
"Negative."
"Two syllables. Congratulations."
I grab my recorder off the desk because my hands need a job.
Battery at seventy percent. Good enough.
The coat's on the hook by the console table, and I get exactly three steps toward it before his shoulder shifts a quarter inch and the whole geometry of the room changes.
He doesn't touch me, the message is clear.
He just occupies the space my body was planning to be in.
"Move."
"No."
"You want to tell me why, or are we doing the thing where you decide and I find out later?"
"Unknown location. Unknown time. Unknown counterparty." His voice never rises. That's the frustrating part. "No advance. No overwatch. You'd be walking into a room built by someone who wants you in it."
"Sources are scared. Scared people set weird terms. That's the nature of my job."
"Scared people don't set three at once."
"Oh, is that in the manual?"
"Yes."
Heat crawls up my throat, and I can't tell anymore how much of it is rage and how much is the fact that he's close enough that his aftershave and something warmer under it assault my senses and my skin has its own opinions about it.
My heart slams against my ribcage, my hands shaking around the recorder.
Somewhere below all that, low and traitorous, there's a pull in my stomach that has absolutely no business showing up in the middle of a fight.
And here is the humiliation with a time stamp on it: I am toe to toe with the walking argument for everything I have ever published, a man who moves furniture in my home without asking permission, the slow wet heat gathering low in belly does not care about one word of that.
It has read his refusal to move as a challenge and would like, very much, to lose.
I have been in ugly fights in this job. I have never once been ashamed of my own body in the middle of one until right now.
Focus. He is not the point. The wall is the point.
"You think I'm stupid."
"I think you're brave. It's worse."
"That's not a compliment, that's a leash with a bow on it."
"It's an assessment."
"Then assess this." I step in instead of back, which is the wrong move tactically and the only move I have.
"Fourteen months. I've had this story in pieces for fourteen months and every time I get close, someone with a nice voice explains to me why now isn't the time.
Editors. Lawyers. A press officer in Geneva who called me sweetheart. And now you."
"None of them were trying to keep you alive."
"You don't know what they were trying to do. Neither do I. That's the point. You all sound exactly the same."
Something happens to his perfect fuckable face. His cheekbones turn to granite. A small thing, a tightening, and I hate that I've learned to read it already. I force the distraction away and continue.
"Hear me when I tell you, mister: nothing and no one will keep me from getting this information. This is the closest I've come to finding the truth in years and I'll be damned if I let anyone keep me from it. You included."
"I'm not preventing your story," he says. "I'm preventing a body."
"Mine."
"Yes."
"Well, it's mine to risk."
"It stopped being only yours when they photographed your door."
That settles somewhere under my ribs but I don't let him see the impact. I set the recorder down harder than I mean to.
I know this shape. God, I know this shape.
It's every man who ever stood in a doorway with his arms crossed and called it care.
It's the detective who told me to let the professionals handle it when I was nineteen and asking questions nobody wanted asked.
It's my editor's hand on my shoulder, kindly, steering.
It's the whole choreography of being managed by someone bigger than you who has decided he loves you enough to make your choices.
I have spent my entire adult life not becoming a woman who waits by a door.
"You know what's funny," I say, and my voice comes out too even, and I know I've crossed into the dangerous waters. "Powerful men have been protecting me my whole career. Every one of them explained it just like you're right now. Calm. Reasonable. Numbers and risk and let me handle it."
He's very still as he watches me.
"And every single time, the thing they were protecting wasn't me."
"That's what it always is with men like you," I say. "You call it protection because control sounds ugly out loud. But it's the same hand on the same door."
He doesn't answer, and I don't know which is worse.
"Say I'm wrong."
"You're wrong."
"Prove it."
And he moves. Everything he does looks like it was decided six seconds before it happened. But he crosses the space between us in two steps and suddenly there is no space, just him, all that height blocking out the pendant light over the table so half his face is shrouded in shadow.
"If I wanted control," he says, "you'd be in a room upstate right now. No windows. No phone. No name on the lease. You'd have been asleep in the car before you knew you were in it."
My mouth opens and closes, lost for words.
"I could do that in ninety minutes. I've done it to men who could buy this building with what's in their coat pocket." His eyes hold mine. "You're standing in your own kitchen. Your laptop's open. Your source's message is still on your screen."
The room is overly quiet. Even the radiator picks that exact second to shut up.
"So don't tell me what this is," he finishes. "I know what control looks like. I've had to use it. This isn't it."
He has just described making me disappear down to the lease and the needle, calm as a man reading tide times, but instead of fear my whole body posts a full-throated yes to the wrong question.
I can never share this with anyone: the sentence should have frozen my blood yet it lit me up from the navel out, that a man laying out in flat detail exactly how easily he could take me, then choosing visibly, not to, is doing something to me that no gentleness in my life ever has.
He didn't reassure me or swear he'd never.
He let me stand here knowing precisely what he is capable of and watched me not step back.
I should have a comeback. I make my living on comebacks. My brain reaches for one and comes back lacking, and in the empty half second where the words should be, my body takes over the broadcast.
He is so close that the heat wafting off him crosses to me.
His black shirt strains at his shoulder, the flat white line of an old scar running up the back of his hand, the beat moving under the skin of his throat.
My heartbeat relocates somewhere high and stupid.
Warmth coils in my belly and settles there like it's paid rent, and it has nothing to do with the argument.
I am furious about it in a way I do not have a category for.
You are mad at him and you want him to keep standing exactly where he is.
Two things. Both are true. Neither one willing to leave.
My breath thins and I hate it. I hate that my chest gives me away when my facial muscles are working double duty to remain impassive. I know it's giving me away because his eyes drop to where my sweater is moving too quick over my ribs, then come back up.
He saw it. He definitely did.
He doesn't say a word about it, not so much as smirk or step back.
He doesn't do a single thing a normal man would do with that information, and somehow that's more unbearable than if he had.
His cheekbone shifts, his hands hang loose at his sides for a moment before forming into fists.
Both of them. Slow, like they're doing it without his permission.
I have spent an hour watching this man not do things.
Not open the boxes. Not raise his voice.
Not use the fear coming off me in waves he can obviously read.
And every held-back thing has stacked up in the room like pressure behind glass, until the restraint stops looking like safety and starts looking like the opposite — a barely-leashed thing, letting me see the leash on purpose, choosing in front of me, over and over, not to close the last of the distance.
I have armor for men who take. I have none, none at all, for a dangerous one who keeps deciding not to and give me a front row seat.
I look at them and something short-circuits in my gut.
"Don't," I say, and I don't even know which part I'm talking about.
"Don't what."
"Don't stand there being reasonable while I'm still yelling."
"You stopped yelling."
"I'm regrouping."
The corner of his mouth does something. It's not a smile. It's a two-millimeter event that would be invisible on any other face but on his it's practically a marching band, and it lands under my skin and spreads.
"Kat."
That's all. My name, the short version he keeps refusing to use, and it comes out lower than the rest of him has all night, roughed down at the edges like he had to drag it through something to get it out.
The whole loft narrows to the eight inches between us.
"Okay?"
One word, so soft, I almost didn't recognize it. Not the voice that told me negative and laid out my death in three bullet points. Something lower, slower, pitched for the eight inches and nothing past it, and it plunges in me like a hand pressed flat over a wound.
Oh, that's not fair.
I have armor for the other thing. I have a whole closet of it, built piece by piece over fourteen years of men explaining me to myself. Yell at me and I sharpen. Condescend and I go for the throat. Call me sweetheart in a marble hallway and I will make you famous in a way you'll hate.