10. Kat
ten
Kat
Cardamom.
That is the first thing, before my eyes open, before the ceiling resolves into brick and beam. Warm and sweet and impossible in my apartment, because my apartment has never smelled like anything but coffee and printer toner.
My body wakes slower than my brain does. Loose. Unclenched. I slept the whole way through, this has not happened since the night the article went live. I lie there for a full ten seconds, orienting myself.
My eyes drift to the door across the loft, wearing hardware I did not buy. Two new deadbolts and a plate over the strike that gleams like it came out of a bank.
My body keeps score of every place he has not touched yet, the list is long and loud.
It is a specific and very stupid inventory to be taking at eight in the morning about the man who is in a manner of speaking, paid to keep me breathing.
The backs of my knees. The hinge of my jaw.
The stretch of throat where my pulse sits.
My body drew up the whole map overnight while I slept the first real sleep I have had in weeks, and said body would like me to know that it is not sorry.
It’s the single most humiliating data point I’ve collected and I collect humiliating data for a living.
In the kitchen he moves like the room belongs to him and like it might turn on him.
He crosses to the stove, his eyes move to the windows, then the door, then circles back to the windows, as if unaware he's doing it.
Something brushes the back of my neck, some half-memory of another kitchen, another man walking a room the same way, it's gone before I can get a hand around it.
"You changed my locks."
"Yes."
"While I slept."
"You needed the sleep more than you needed the argument."
My patience files for divorce. I take the plate anyway, because it is eggs with something green folded through them.
"You know normal people ask."
"You would have said no."
"Absolutely."
"Then we agree."
I put a forkful in my mouth to keep from laughing, that would ruin everything.
He leans against the counter with his coffee, sleeves shoved to the elbow, the scars on his forearms sit there in the morning light where I cannot avoid them.
Ridges and one long seam that runs from wrist toward the crook of his arm.
"How'd you get those?"
He glances down like he forgot they were his. "Old work."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
"Do you practice these, or are they factory installed?"
His mouth does something smirky and my stomach flips. He drinks his coffee. Anticipation sits low and coiled, I refuse to give it a name at this hour, in front of a man who counts exits.
"Eat," he says.
"You are so bad at conversation."
"I'm excellent at conversation. You're just used to people who talk."
The door bangs open hard enough to rattle the new plate.
The knock comes again, three sharp raps that echo through the loft like gunfire. Naveed's hand moves toward his hip in one fluid motion, coffee forgotten.
"Expecting someone?"
"No, but…" The knock repeats, identical rhythm, identical force. I know that pattern like my own name. "Actually, yes. That's Cami."
I move toward the door.
Cami stands in it, sunglasses on, paper bag hoisted like a trophy, coat still buttoned.
"Bagels," she announces. "Because someone in this building has to feed you carbohydrates."
She sets the bag on my table like it is a floral arrangement, peels off her sunglasses, and gives the loft one long look that starts at the new deadbolts and ends at the man by the stove.
"I'm here to inspect the bodyguard situation."
"There is no situation."
"Darling, there is a plate of eggs in your hand that you did not cook. That is a situation with a permit and a filing date."
Naveed pours a second coffee without being asked and sets it on the counter nearest her without saying a word.
The tingles start in my neck and climb up my cheekbones. On display for this arrogant bastard to see. Man of few words.
"Where are we on perimeter checks?" I put my fork down. "Because you did the stairwell at six and again at seven and I heard the fire door both times."
I really want to shut Cami up. So, my best idea is to blurt out perimeter questions in the middle of Cami's teasing.
Who does that? Who am I and where is the calm, rational journalist now.
"Six-ten and seven-fifteen. Different intervals."
"That's not better. That's worse. That's a man who does not sleep."
"I slept."
"For how long?"
"Enough."
"That is not a unit of measurement."
Cami's hand moves across the table, easy, like she is reaching for cream. My phone leaves my elbow. I don't think much of it until I hear the soft tap of her thumbs, three seconds, four, her expression as calm as a woman ordering a second glass of something French.
"What are you doing."
"Correcting an imbalance."
"Cami."
"Sent."
Every drop of blood in my body relocates to my face. If I know my friend, and I do, she just did something humiliating. I lunge, she holds the phone above her head, across the loft Naveed's phone buzzes against the counter.
"Don't read that."
He reads it.
His face gives nothing away. Not a twitch, not a blink, not one degree of change while his eyes travel down a screen that, based on Cami's expression, contains language that would get a woman removed from a museum.
My stomach folds in on itself. Heat climbs my neck and settles in my ears like a fever.
"What did you write."
"Something honest."
"Cami."
"You have been circling it for four days. I built a bridge."
Naveed picks up his phone. Types. Sets it down. Takes a sip of his coffee.
My screen lights in Cami's hand. She reads it. She reads it again. Then she presses the phone flat to her chest and closes her eyes.
"What," I manage. "What does it say."
She turns it toward me.
Kevlar.
One word. No follow-up bubble. Nothing.
A laugh punches out of me sideways, wrecked, I clap a hand over my mouth, it does not help.
"He's perfect." Cami sets my phone down with the care of a curator returning a small bronze to its case. "I need to lie down."
She crosses to my sofa, arranges herself along it, and drapes one forearm across her eyes like a woman recovering from an aria.
Naveed rinses his cup and goes back to watching the windows as if none of this occurred in his lifetime while I'm still standing there with my ears on fire.
Cami lifts her forearm an inch and looks at me from beneath it.
I sit on the far end of the couch because standing is starting to feel like a statement.
Cami does not move her arm. "Ask me what I'm thinking."
"Absolutely not."
"That man checks your locks every night." Her voice does not lower even a fraction. "Every night, Kat. And you have not climbed him. You must be walking around horny as a dropped grenade."
The bagel leaves my hand before I decide anything. It hits her palm, she catches it without opening her eyes, and she takes a bite.
"Thank you."
"He is thirty feet away."
"Twenty-two. I measured with my eyes."
The water runs in the kitchen, and there is no version of this world in which he did not hear every syllable, because the man hears my heart rate through a wall.
I open my mouth to say something dismissive with edges that will put this whole conversation in a drawer where it belongs.
Nothing comes.
Say it isn't true. It sits there behind my teeth, the sentence I have said a hundred times about a hundred men, today the machinery that usually delivers it has quit on me.
Because it is true. Because last night I lay in bed listening to the fire door and imagined his hands instead of the lock, and I did not stop myself, and that's the part I would rather not know about myself.
There it is, admitted in the one room I can never lie in, inside of my own skull.
I lay in the dark listening to a dangerous man check a fire door and I did not think about the danger for one second.
I thought about the size of his hands and the baritone he uses when he says my full name and what it would take to make him stop being careful with me.
I got there quiet, deliberate, in a bed twenty-two feet from where he stood watch, not knowing he was standing over that.
I am a serious person. I have covered three wars adjacent and a cartel lawyer's waiting room.
And I am coming apart in my own home over a man who answers a filthy text with the word Kevlar, and the worst part is not the wanting but just the thought feels like a relief, like setting down something I've been carrying alone and highlighting the relief as far more dangerous to me than lust ever was.
An ache builds where his hands have not been, which is everywhere. My thighs press together without asking me. My skin has gone too warm.
"You didn't deny it." Cami finally lifts her arm.
"I'm eating."
"You are holding a fork. There is nothing on it."
I look at the fork. She is correct, which is her worst habit. I had reached for it to give my hands a task after I tossed the bagel at her.
"He makes eggs," I hear myself say. "Who does that."
"A man who is going to ruin you thoroughly and clean the kitchen after."
"I hate you."
"You adore me, and you are flushed from the collarbone up."
I press the cool back of my hand to my neck, which helps nothing. I ache in places that have names I would never say at dinner.
"How is Aaron?"
Her chewing slows. Just slightly, but I have known her since we were nineteen living on ramen and ambition.
"Aaron is fine."
"That is what people say about weather."
"Aaron is being secretive." She sets the bagel down on her knee. "He keeps clearing his throat and starting sentences with the word 'so.' He is building up to something."
"Something bad?"
"Something permanent." She examines her own hand. "I have not decided which is worse."
The water shuts off in the kitchen. Neither of us looks over.
"Cam."
"Do not use your interview voice on me."
"You started this."
"I started it about you. That is a completely different structure."