25. Naveed
twenty-five
Naveed
"I'm sorry."
Kat stops halfway through unwinding the gauze from her forearm and looks up at me from the kitchen stool. The lamp behind her turns the loose pieces of her hair to copper wire. Behind her, the window film I installed last week catches the light in a way real glass never would.
"Say that again."
"I put the second detail on you without telling you." My hands want somewhere to be. I let them stay at my sides. "That was wrong. I'm sorry."
Two apologies in one night. I have not given two apologies in a decade.
The words scrape on the way out. Every one of them costs something I do not have a budget line for. Command and instruction is easy. This is a language I never learned and I am speaking it badly in front of the one person whose opinion I cannot survive being wrong about.
"Why?"
"You know why."
"I want you to say it."
Of course she would. The woman built a career out of making men finish their sentences.
I count the steps to her stool. Four. Then I stop counting, because it has not been working since the corridor.
"Because the thought of losing you made me stupid."
Her hands still on the gauze.
"I've been shot at many times," I tell her. "I never once made a decision because I was afraid. Not one. Fear is data. You log it and you keep moving." My throat tightens around the next part. "Then you walked out of a boxing gym with your arm open and I stopped being able to log anything."
The refrigerator hums. Somewhere below the building, a truck downshifts and grinds up the block.
Kat considers me for a long moment. Her chin lifts.
"Stupid is not a strategy."
Something happens to my face before I can get a hand on it. The corner of my mouth pulls. Just slightly. Just enough.
She catches it. Naturally. She catches everything.
"Oh my God." She points the gauze at me. "You almost smiled."
"Negative."
"You did. That was a smile. You actually smiled."
"It was a muscle."
"It was joy, Naveed. Involuntary joy. I saw it with my own two eyes and I'm a professional observer."
The pull happens again, worse this time, and there is nothing I can do about it, so I look at the floor and let her have it.
This is what she does. I hand her a wound, she hands back a joke, and the joke lands somewhere the wound was, the whole system reorganizes around it.
"Sit down," she says. "You're looming. You loom when you're emotionally compromised."
"I do not loom."
"You're doing it right now."
I sit. The stool is too small for me and both of us know it, and she does not say so, which is its own kind of mercy.
She holds out the gauze.
"Make yourself useful. Your hands are steadier than mine."
I take it. They are not.
The lamb has been in the pot for an hour and the loft smells like my mother's kitchen.
I do not think about that often. I am thinking about it now because there is no room left in my head for threat modeling while I am doing this.
The knife goes through the onion in even sheets.
Cardamom, cumin, the cinnamon stick I found at a Bay Ridge market on Tuesday because Kat's cabinet had nothing in it but salt and a jar of something labeled everything seasoning, which is a lie, because it contains almost nothing.
Steam lifts off the pot and fogs the bottom corner of the window film.
Ballistic-rated. Holds up to weather. Fogs like regular glass.
"You're humming."
"Negative."
"You are. You do it every time." Kat leans her hip into the counter, close enough that her elbow is a hand's width from my forearm. "It's not even a song. It's like a very committed refrigerator."
I taste the sauce off the back of the spoon. Needs salt. I add salt.
She does not move away. That is the part my body keeps reporting on, over and over, like it has never received data before.
Her hip against the counter. Her bare feet on the cold floor.
The heat coming off the stove and the heat coming off her and no operational reason for either of them to be within a foot of me.
I have lived in a Brooklyn apartment for eight years. I have never once smelled food in it that I did not eat standing over the sink.
The table is unusable. Her files have taken it, and mine have joined them, route maps layered over source notes, one board and one table now, and neither of us has suggested clearing it.
So we eat standing up.
I hand her the bowl. She takes it with both hands and makes a sound into the steam that I feel somewhere behind my ribs.
"Okay," she says. "This is unfair. You can't be like this and also cook."
"Eat."
"I'm eating. I'm also lodging a complaint." She burns her mouth, hisses, keeps going. "Where did you learn this?"
"My mother." The rice sticks to the spoon. I scrape it clean. "She cooked when things were bad. She cooked more when they got worse."
Kat goes quiet next to me. Not the dangerous quiet. The other one.
"So when you cook..."
"Sometimes." I set the spoon down. "Not tonight."
Her shoulder presses against my arm. Just leans there. Stays.
I stand in my own body and let it happen and do not catalog a single exit, and the counting does not come back, and I do not go looking for it.
A weapon does not get a warm room. That was the whole architecture of it. Somebody should tell my hands.
Eight years I have run on the certainty that a man built the way I am does not get this.
The instant I stop scanning is the moment the thing I love pays for my comfort.
It is not superstition. I’ve learned that peace is the sound a trap makes half-second before it closes.
For one evening it stays quiet, and I make the single most reckless decision of my professional life, I believe it.
The door buzzer goes off like a dropped tray.
Kat does not even flinch. She checks the screen, sighs through her nose, and hits the button.
"Cami."
"Is that lamb?" The voice comes up the intercom clear as a bell. "Katarina Romero, if that man is cooking and you did not call me, we are going to have words."
Cami comes through the door with a bottle of wine in one hand and her coat already halfway off.
"Two bowls." She looks at the counter, then at me, then at Kat. "I count two bowls and one bottle. Somebody's math is off."
"There's a third bowl in the cabinet," Kat says.
"I know where the bowls are. I helped you pick them out." Cami hangs her coat on the hook by the door, which she does not have to look for, and crosses the loft like she pays the rent on it. She stops in front of me. "Your problem has been guarding your refrigerator like it owes him money."
"The refrigerator is against an exterior wall."
"Is it."
"It's the only appliance with a clear line to the door."
"Fascinating." She sets the wine down and puts her hand on my forearm. Not a brush. A landing. "Do bodyguards do private sessions, or would that be a conflict of interest?"
"I don't teach."
"That wasn't a no."
"It was."
Her thumb moves once against my sleeve, unhurried, and her voice drops into something a person would use to recommend a wine. "I'm asking about self-defense, obviously. Where to put my hands. How much pressure to apply. Whether I should expect to be sore afterward."
"You'd want a certified instructor. I can send names."
"You'd send me names."
"Three. All better teachers than me."
At the counter, Kat has stopped moving.
The spoon is still in her bowl. Her shoulders have come up maybe half an inch, and she is looking at Cami's hand on my sleeve the way she looks at a document that has been altered.
Something crosses her face I would call murder if I let myself name it.
It is gone before I can be sure it was ever there, folded away so fast that a second later she is reaching for the wine bottle like nothing happened.
File it. I do not have a category for it.
That is a lie. I have a category for it, and it is the reason I make myself look at the salt instead of at her.
For weeks I have been the only one in this arrangement visibly holding something back — the fists, the count, the door I sleep against. That was murder on her face just now, quick and total, over nothing more than a friend's hand on my sleeve, and it answers a question my discipline has forbidden me to ask out loud: that she carries a version of the same thing I keep tightly locked.
Hers show its teeth at the thought of another woman's fingers on what she has quietly decided is hers. Cami did it on purpose. Cami has no interest in me at all; She’s interested in what Kat's face does when someone touches me.
This woman deserves an award, I am in her debt.
Kat just told me the truth without a single word.
Cami's hand stays exactly where it is for one more beat. Then she takes it back and picks up a glass.
"Corkscrew, darling?"
"Second drawer," Kat says. Her voice comes out even.
"You keep it with the takeout menus. That's a war crime." Cami finds it anyway, works the cork loose, pours, and lifts the glass to her mouth. Over the rim, her eyes go to Kat and stay there.
"There you are."
It is barely a sound. Not aimed at me. I hear it the way you hear a door close two floors down.
Kat's chin comes up. "What?"
"Nothing." Cami drinks. "The lamb is excellent. I'd like it noted that I said so before the wine."
"You've had it for four seconds."
"I have a refined palate and a working nose." She sets the glass down, half full, and reaches for her coat again. "I'm going. Aaron's making a thing about dinner."
"You just got here."
"I got what I came for." Cami kisses the side of Kat's head, pats my shoulder twice on her way past like I am a horse she approves of, and is out the door before either of us answers.
The door clicks shut and the loft settles.
No footsteps in the hall. No engine idling at the curb below. The radiator ticks twice and gives up. Kat picks up her bowl, checks the food, sets it back down.
"It's cold."
"It reheats."
"Everything you make reheats. It's suspicious." She doesn't move to reheat it.
Neither do I.