18. Kat #2
"He came to me twenty-six years old. Bad deployment behind him. Nobody wanted him on a detail, and they were right not to want him." A pause. "I was wrong about a lot of people at that age. I was not wrong about him. He was good."
"Was."
"He ate at my table." His hand moves once on my hip, then stops. "Eid. Three years running. My mother's rice. He asked for the recipe and never made it."
Something folds behind my ribs. That's the whole confession right there and he doesn't even know he made it.
"So when his face came up on my laptop…"
"I stopped seeing the operation." His jaw works. "I saw the table."
"That's not a crime, Naveed."
"It is when it is my job to see the operation."
I prop myself on an elbow so I can watch his profile in the dark. "And the second question."
"Which one."
"You know which one." I keep my voice even. "Why you. Head of global security for a twenty-billion-dollar company, and you're the one sleeping against a reporter's door in Brooklyn. Don't tell me it was availability."
Everything in him goes quiet. Not the guarded quiet. The kind where a man is standing at the edge of something and deciding.
"I read your file before I ever saw your face."
"I assumed."
"There was a name in it." His throat moves. "Not yours."
Ice goes down my arms. "What name?"
"Not tonight."
"Naveed…"
"I have never lied to you. I am not starting.
" He turns his head then, and his eyes find mine, and there is something in them I have no filing system for.
"That is the piece I can hand you tonight.
There is a debt. It is older than this job.
It is older than you and me, and it is mine, and when I can carry it into a room with your face in front of me, you will get all of it. "
"That is a terrible answer."
"Yes."
"It's also more than you've given anybody in years, isn't it?"
He does not say yes. His hand opens flat against my back, and that is the yes.
I could push. I could take this apart like I take everything apart.
I don't.
I put my head down on his chest instead, right over the drum of him, and wait for the mattress to shift, for the sheet to move, for the sound of bare feet crossing my floor toward the door where he has slept every night since he arrived.
It does not come.
His arm settles over my back. His breathing lengthens. He stays, and my eyes sting, and I press my face into his skin so he cannot see it, because a man who has not slept in a bed with anyone in a decade just chose mine, and my whole chest has gone loud with it.
I fall asleep like that.
I wake in the dark.
The warmth beside me is gone.
My hand finds the dent his body left in the mattress, still holding heat, and that is somehow worse than a cold sheet. Cold would mean hours. This means minutes. This means he lay here long enough to feel me breathing against his chest and then got up anyway.
He stayed. He stayed and then he left.
I sit up with the sheet against my chest and listen. No door. No boots. No sound of a man walking a perimeter.
The floorboards are cold under my feet. I pull his shirt off the chair because it is closest, and it swallows me, and it smells like him, and I am not going to examine what that does to my chest.
The loft is dark except for one lamp. He left the kitchen light off. He is standing at the counter in a spill of streetlight coming through the ballistic film he installed over my beautiful windows, bare-chested, head down, and he is not checking anything.
He is looking at a photograph.
It is old. Creased at one corner, gone soft at the edges from years of the same hands. Men in dusty gear, arms slung over shoulders, somebody mid-laugh with his head thrown back. A wall behind them the color of sand.
Naveed does not touch it. His hands are flat on the counter on either side of it, taking his own weight, and his shoulders are doing something I have never seen them do.
He's not guarding the room. He's guarding that.
Cold sweeps through me, scalp to heels. I have watched this man take a bullet's edge along his ribs and hand me a shirt full of blood like it was a receipt. I have watched him read a threat photograph of my own front door without a single muscle moving in his face.
He is unraveling over a piece of paper in my kitchen.
My throat goes tight. Twelve hours ago I would have walked in there with a question already loaded. I know how to open a man up. I have made a career out of the pause and the silence and the one word that gets a person to bleed on the record.
I do not move.
He gave me fragments tonight. A table. A recipe nobody made. A name that is not mine. And he is standing forty feet away holding a whole grief in his hands, entire, complete, and I am not in it.
That's what it is. He handed me pieces and kept the thing itself.
He let me have the reins tonight and I mistook it for his surrender.
It wasn't. His body, his pleasure, even the wheel, all of it spendable, all of it his again by morning.
The photograph is the part that isn't. Whatever those six men are to him, whatever the name-that-is-not-mine costs him to keep carrying, that is the room he actually lives in, and he climbed out of my bed to stand guard at its door in the dark rather than let me one step past it.
I have been let into everything of his that heals.
I am still shut out of the one room he has that never scarred over and my throat close because I recognize the floor plan as mine.
I built the identical house, brick for brick, and lived alone in it for eleven years.
I just never had to stand where he is standing now and watch someone I wanted work it out: that being loved by me and being let all the way inside me were always going to turn out to be two different addresses.
My eyes sting and I press the heel of my hand against them, furious at myself.
His breathing changes. I can hear it from here, in the dark, that deep pull and slow release, the same rhythm I felt under my cheek an hour ago when he chose my bed over my door.
He stands there a long time.
Then he turns the photograph face-down on the counter, and lays his palm flat on the back of it, and does not lift it away.
I go back to bed before he can find me watching, and I lie in the dark with my eyes open, and I do not sleep at all.