Chapter 14
The evening had not gone how I had expected it to.
I had come for a chain. I had ended up on a couch with dangling legs eating instant noodles while a woman who thought I was a struggling escort threatened me with security camera footage and bar manager phone calls before locking herself in her bedroom.
The couch was too small. This was not a surprise, I had known it was too small the moment I sat down, confirmed it definitively when I attempted to lie down and discovered that my legs had nowhere to go except over the armrest at an angle that my back was already filing complaints about.
The stuffed animals had been relocated to the floor.
At some point I removed the t-shirt because the alternative was continued suffering and I had made enough concessions for one evening.
I stared at the dark ceiling.
Her imagination was genuinely something. I had been many things to many people- feared, respected, hunted, negotiated with. I had never been a desperate virgin escort with a troubled financial situation.
Very creative imagination.
I had looked for the bag the moment she disappeared.
Of course I had. The coffee table, the kitchen counter, the armchair all empty.
She had grabbed it before she walked away, which meant the bag, and everything in it, was behind a locked door I had no reason to go through without explaining things I wasn't ready to explain.
Sly kitten.
She had no idea. No idea who I was, no idea what I was, no idea that the bar manager she was planning to call would sooner remove his own hand than give her my name.
It was better that way. No threat. No complications.
No cop raids on apartments where I happened to be sleeping on couches while searching for missing heirlooms.
I could manage this. I knew her schedule, Luca had sent it through with the address, neat and thorough as always. She left at seven. I had the entire day while she was at work to search the apartment properly, find the chain, and be gone before she came home.
Simple. Contained. No explanations required.
My mind went, against my better management, back to the kiss.
I had kissed people before. It was nothing notable or unusual. But this one had been....
Different.
Not in a way I had words for immediately.
More like- there was something that ran constantly in the background, always, the permanent low frequency noise of being exactly what I was in exactly the world I operated in, and for a moment it had simply stopped.
The way a machine you had forgotten was running suddenly went quiet and the silence was so complete you felt it in your chest before you understood what it was.
Then she had pushed me.
Women had gone to considerable lengths. Considerable, creative, occasionally dangerous lengths.
There had been a drink spiked at a charity event four years ago- my own security had missed it, I had noticed the taste myself, handled it quietly.
There had been notes, approaches, elaborate setups designed to manufacture accidental opportunities.
Women who understood exactly what I was and wanted proximity to it anyway, for reasons that ranged from ambition to something considerably less strategic.
This one had pushed me, with both hands, stood up delivered a speech about security camera footage.
I looked at the locked door for a long moment. She really has admirable audacity from someone so small.
Then I closed my eyes.
Sleep came somewhere around midnight, uncomfortable and late, my back already registering a formal complaint about the couch that would make itself known in the morning.
The blanket was there when I woke up.
I had no memory of taking it and I was a light enough sleeper that I would have remembered taking it. Which meant she had come out at some point in the night, in the quiet and the dark, and put it over me, and gone back to her room without making a sound.
The smell reached me before anything else did.
Something was cooking. Not instant noodles.
Something else, something that moved through the apartment with the specific warmth of food made from actual ingredients, and my stomach registered the information before my brain did, a low involuntary response that I hadn't experienced in longer than I wanted to count.
Nonna's kitchen. The one memory that had stayed completely intact through everything small, warm, the smell of something on the stove and her voice somewhere in the background, the specific safety of a place that had been safe before I understood that safety was not a permanent condition.
She had cooked every morning until she couldn't anymore.
After she was gone I had cooked my own meals for years, because the alternative i.e, trusting someone else to prepare food in my kitchen had proven, more than once to be a decision with consequences.
The immunity to poison had been built slowly and expensively.
I sat up. My back made its complaints known immediately. I rolled my shoulders, stretched until something cracked satisfactorily, and followed the smell to the kitchen.
She was at the stove with her back to me, hair slightly messy from sleep, wearing something oversized that came to her mid thigh. Whatever was in the pan smelled considerably better than anything that had come out of that kitchen last night.
"What are you cooking?" The words came out lower than usual, rough from sleep.
She turned and dropped the spatula.
It clattered against the pan and then the floor, and her eyes went from my face to my chest and then her ears went red.
Then her cheeks. Then down her neck - a progression so complete and so rapid I watched it happen in real time.
I had seen colour leave people's faces before, standing across from me with considerably less pleasant circumstances involved. This was something entirely different.
She made a sound. High pitched. An octave above her usual register. Then she covered her face with both hands and squeezed her eyes shut.
"Why are you moving around like that?!"
I looked at her. Then at the kitchen around me. Then back at her.
"Like what," I said. "On two legs. Like a human?"
"No I mean - where are your - why don't you have any -" she tried, pointing vaguely in my direction with her eyes still firmly shut.
"The shirt." I crossed the kitchen toward her, unhurried, and watched the red spread further down her neck with each step.
"You mean the second skin. It was uncomfortable so I removed it sometime last night."
I stopped directly behind her. Close enough.
Leaned down until my voice was level with her ear. "You would have seen it, actually."
She went very still.
I let that sit for exactly a moment.
"When you came out to put the blanket on me."
The tips of her ears darkened another shade.
I straightened slightly, just enough, and looked at the pan on the stove.
"Don't you think," I said quietly, "that you've seen me like this too many times to still be acting like this?"