6. Kat #2
Nobody warned me about gentle. Nobody warned me that a man twice my size could put one two-syllable question in the air and take my legs out from under me.
My throat closes over whatever I was going to say next.
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you're getting."
His eyes move over my face, the same way he read my locks and my ridiculous decorative deadbolt. Only now the thing being assessed is me, and there's nothing clinical in it, and my skin goes hot from my collarbones up.
Heat spreads fast through my veins. It comes from nowhere reasonable, low in my belly and then everywhere, a slow melt starting beneath my navel that has no business existing three minutes after I called him a hand on a door.
My thighs press together on their own. My mouth has gone dry and my hands, which were shaking with rage forty seconds ago, are shaking with something else entirely now and I would rather die than let him see the difference.
Three minutes ago I called him a hand on a door.
Now I am wet in my own kitchen over the man I am supposed to be throwing out of it, I would sooner he pried the lid off that box and read every private word in it than ever know that the threat is what did this, that being wanted like a problem he refuses to solve is the most erotic thing that has happened to me in more years than I will admit.
It is the exact opposite of everything I believe.
I am ashamed, but I am not going to make it stop.
"You keep doing that," I say.
"Doing what."
"Being kind at the worst possible time."
"You'd prefer cruel."
"I'd prefer consistent."
Something like amusement moves behind his eyes, like I said a thing he already knew about himself and had never heard out loud.
"Noted."
He doesn't step back. Any other man in the history of men would have retreated by now, or closed the distance and taken the choice out of my hands, but he does neither.
He just stands there breathing, as I take in the fine grain of stubble along his jaw and the place where his throat works when he swallows.
My attention is locked on his mouth. It just happens. My eyes drop and stay, and one full second passes before I understand what I'm doing, by then he's seen it, and it's too late to pretend it was anything else.
His breathing is ragged. I feel it more than see it. That's the first crack, the rhythm going wrong for half a beat, and the sound of it does something obscene to my nervous system.
I tilt my chin up. Barely. A quarter inch, maybe less, a movement so small I could argue it away in court, and it is the single most honest thing I have done all night.
His hand comes up and stops in the air between us, the warmth of his palm reaches my cheek without touching it, then his fingers curl, uncurl, and hover there like a man holding something he has not been given permission to hold.
Touch me. God. Do it or step back but do not stand there being decent about it.
"Katarina."
My whole name. It comes out of him like it costs money.
Everything in me freezes and goes loud at once. My lips part. His head lowers a fraction, his shadow crosses my face, my eyes close because they have to, the pull between us has become the only fact in the room, and my heart is hammering so hard I can hear it over the traffic.
Some door I bricked up years ago comes off its hinges from the inside, I let it because for one inch of air I get to stop being the woman who does every dangerous thing alone and become a woman about to be taken by someone who could and won't unless I say so. The relief of it is obscene. But here right now, a breath from his mouth, I’d trade the entire architecture of that for his hand actually landing on my face, the wanting doesn't even have the decency to feel like weakness.
It feels like coming home to a house I never let myself build.
An inch. Less. The air moves against my mouth. Something cracks against the window.
Hard. Sharp. A flat percussive smack of glass taking a hit, and the sound rips through the loft like a gunshot in a church.
I flinch back so fast my hip catches the counter.
Naveed is already turned, already moving, the softness gone so completely it's as if I invented it.
The second smack is the window coming apart. Glass goes everywhere at once, a bright hard rain of it across the counter and the floorboards, and the sound is enormous, wrong. Something heavy hits the boards and skids.
I don't remember moving. One breath I'm at the counter with my mouth still open from almost, and the next there's a wall of him in front of me, his back filling my whole field of vision, his arm braced across me and pinning me to the cabinets. He got there before the glass finished falling.
My ears ring. Cold air pours through the hole where my window used to be and hits the sweat on my neck.
"Down."
I go down. My knees hit the floor and his hand stays flat between my shoulder blades, holding me under the counter line, and he's not even looking at me, he's looking at the window, at the fire escape across the street, at the roofline, his head moving in short exact increments.
My heart is going so fast it hurts. Four seconds ago this same body was melting for him.
Four seconds ago I had my chin tipped up like an idiot with my eyes closed.
Now I'm crouched on my kitchen floor with glass in the hem of my sweater with my blood slamming in my throat, the two feelings stacked on top of each other, terror sitting right on top of want, and they will not separate.
He moves. Fast, low, along the counter and out of the sightline, and there's nothing human in how he does it. No panic. No noise. He's simply somewhere else, then somewhere else again, checking angles I didn't know my apartment had.
He's been doing this his whole life.
And God help me, watching him do it turns something over in my belly that has no right to be there while my window is on my floor.
"Clear."
"Naveed."
"Stay down."
He crosses to the window on the wall side, looks out at a slant, holds still for three full seconds, then comes back and crouches beside the thing that skidded across my floor.
A brick. An actual brick, red and chipped, with paper wrapped tight around it and secured with two rubber bands.
He doesn't touch it with his hands. He pulls a folded knife from his pocket, slips the blade under the bands, and rolls the paper open flat against the boards.
Block letters. Thick black marker.
NEXT TIME IT’S FIRE.
Everything in me drops.
You keep digging, you'll burn next. The message that lit my phone ten minutes after I hit publish, a photo of me at my own window, shot from the street. Then the board, days later. My face, a caption about burning. I told myself both were noise, because the internet is full of men who type things.
It wasn't noise. It was a schedule. And it just moved to the next item.
I sit back on my heels, glass crunching under me. My hands have gone cold and useless in my lap.
"Kat."
"I read it."
"Don't touch it."
"I'm not."
He's looking at me now instead of the room, and everything that was in the eight inches between us before is still there, sitting behind his eyes, neither one of us is ever going to say a word about it. It has been locked somewhere neither of us can reach.
"You're bleeding."
I look down. A thin red line across the back of my hand. I didn't feel it happen.
"It's nothing."
"Sit on the couch. Away from the glass."
"Naveed."
He waits.
"They were watching. They knew you were in here with me."
His face hardens but he doesn't answer, which is answer enough, and then he's up and moving again, phone already at his ear, saying words in that flat operational voice into someone else's night.
I stay crouched on my knees on my own floor, in the home I built with my own money, my own taste, with my own two hands.
The paper lies open in front of me.
FIRE.
The cold sweeps through the hole where my window was, right across my face, smelling like rain and the river and the street below.