10. Kat #2
She bounces off the couch, stands, pulls her coat straight at the shoulders, and gathers her bag like a woman leaving a gallery she has already bought something from.
"I have a site walk in Tribeca at ten. The engineer is going to tell me the cantilever is impossible, and I am going to tell him the drawings are already stamped."
"Cam."
"Don't."
"He wants to move in with you."
She stops with one arm in her sleeve. Straightens the cuff. Finishes the other arm before she answers.
"He asked me last Thursday what I thought about closet space."
"That's a proposal."
"It's an ambush." She works the buttons from the bottom up. "The sex is very good. That is the trouble. When the sex is bad you have a reason. When it is that good, the only thing left standing between you and a shared mailing address is you."
I sit back into the cushion and that statement lands right under my ribs, it does not stay in her half of the room.
She is not talking about Aaron. She is describing me. This structure I erected, every door in it locked, she has been walking my floor plan for four days pretending to inspect the plumbing.
And the plan is uglier than she is letting on, because the locked-building bit is the polite version and we both know it.
The true version is that I decided, a long time ago and entirely on purpose, that occupancy is how you get hurt, if I never let anyone move in, no one could ever be evicted by a car on a wet Turnpike at four in the morning.
Cami built her walls out of good sex and bad timing, and she can still choose the drawer if she wants it.
I built mine out of two graves and a fireproof box, I am no longer certain I remember how the door opens from the inside, or that there is anything left in here worth the draft if it did.
"So say yes."
"So climb the man."
"That's different."
"Structurally? It is identical. Two women in fine buildings, refusing occupancy."
"You just called yourself a building."
"I call everyone a building. It is my one flaw.
" She hooks her bag over her shoulder. "You have a man who changes your locks at dawn, answers filth with a single word, and you are eating his eggs at arm's length like they are evidence.
I have a man who wants a drawer and I have started scheduling late meetings.
We are the same disaster in different coats. "
"That is the meanest thing you have ever said to me."
"It is the kindest and you know it."
Naveed has not moved from the counter. He is watching the windows but I'm almost sure he can hear our conversation. My cheeks traitor-red and I stare at a spot on the coffee table until the burn drops out of it.
"Say yes to the closet," I tell her.
"Say something to your problem." She dons her sunglasses. "One of us has to go first. It is not going to be me. I have a cantilever."
"Coward."
"Architect." She kisses the air near my temple, which is as close as she gets when she means it. "Eat the eggs, Kat. All of them."
The door closes. The new deadbolt engages behind her without anybody touching it, which means he crossed the room and I never heard him.
My phone rattles against the table.
Not Cami. No name at all, just the ten digits I have had memorized since February, and my whole spine goes upright.
"That's a source." My thumb is already moving. "That's the customs one. She has not called me in six weeks, she only texts."
Across the loft, everything about him changes without a single visible motion. His attention lands on me full weight, and the room drops about ten degrees.
I’ve started to be able to feel it the instant he does that, the warm domestic morning going hard and operational in the space of one breath.
And God help me it does something to me every single time, this proof that the softness is real precisely because he can shed it that fast. A man who is gentle because he does not have anything else in him is just weak.
A man who could take this entire room apart and chooses, in front of me, to pour a second coffee instead, that one I would follow into traffic, I am beginning to understand that at some point, quietly without deciding to, I already have.
"Speaker."
"It's my source."
"Speaker, Kat."
I answer. I put it on speaker. And I set the phone down on the table between us, it's the first thing I have handed him without being asked.
The line hisses, then a voice comes through thin and fast.
"Are you alone?"
"I'm in my apartment."
"That is not what I asked."
"Yes." I answer while I mouth 'sorry' to Naveed.
A pause. Something shifts on her end, a chair, a door, the sound of a woman deciding.
"I have the manifests. The originals, not the filed versions. The filed versions have four containers on them. The originals have nine."
My pen is in my hand and I do not remember picking it up.
"Nine."
"And the broker signatures. The same three names on every one, spread across four companies that are supposed to have nothing to do with each other." Her breath catches. "I cannot send this. Not encrypted, not anything. I put one page through a scanner and my machine got wiped inside two hours."
"Then I'll come get it."
"Alone." The word lands hard. "That's the condition. I see one other person, one car that stops when I stop, and I burn the whole envelope in a parking lot and you never hear from me again. I am not being dramatic. I have a kid."
Across the table, Naveed grips the wood, every muscle in his forearm has gone to stone.
"Where."
"I'll text you a place tonight. Not before."
The line dies.
The silence after is enormous. My heart is at a full-on sprint.
"No." His voice is flat and low.
"She has nine containers on paper that shows four."
"She has a demand designed to strip you of cover. That's not a source condition. That's a hunting instruction."
"Or it's a terrified woman with a child."
"Both are true. Only one of them survives contact."
I stand because sitting is losing. "The story does not move unless I move. That is the whole job. I cannot report it from behind you."
"I'm aware."
"Then you know what happens if I don't go."
"I know what happens if you do."
We have run this exact track four times in six days and it is worn smooth now, both of us hitting our marks faster, and I brace for the part where he plants himself in the doorway and I have to go around him.
He straightens off the counter.
"Then we move together."
Everything in me stops. The breath I had loaded for the fight sits in my chest with nowhere to go, and my grip on the pen loosens enough that it rolls out of my fingers and off the table. My knees do something unhelpful and I put my hand on the back of the chair.
"You don't get to tell me no."
"I just did. Take it or leave it. Your choice.
Choose how badly you want this story." He crosses to the window, checks the street, comes back.
"Either we do it my way or not at all. You go in.
I'll stay out of the room but close enough that if the situation turns, I'm already moving.
I'm not letting you out of my sight otherwise. "
"That's not protection."
"No." His eyes come to mine and stay. "That's partnership. Different thing."
My throat goes tight and useless.
Twenty-nine years of doing this alone, and a man in my kitchen just said we.
We. Two letters, and my whole architecture takes the hit at the foundation.
I have a personality built to demolish that word, I have walked out of jobs and beds and one very nice apartment rather than let anyone pour it into a sentence about me.
It has never once worked. It works now, in my own kitchen, out of the mouth of the largest and most withholding man I have ever stood next to, and the reason it works is the reason I am in real trouble.
He did not say it to keep me somewhere safe.
He said it to walk beside me straight into the thing that could get us both killed.
Every man before him offered to stand in front of me.
This one offered to be dangerous next to me instead, and I did not know until this exact second that it was the only thing I have ever wanted.
I would trade the wall for it. The whole wall, every pin, fourteen months.
That is the sentence I will take to my grave unsaid.