CHAPTER 10 #2
Her mouth was very near mine. I could see the copper-bright split where she'd bitten her own lip, worrying at the fear she will not say out loud.
The pen had slipped from her hair and her hair had come down dark around the both of us, and she looked at me with those gray-green eyes gone soft and reckless at the edges, and she was a half-second from it.
I have negotiated my entire life by reading the moment a person decides, and she had decided.
And I wanted it. Let me be precise, since precision is the only currency I trust. I wanted her mouth and her weight and the small undone sound she would make against my coat, with an appetite that frightened me, the wolf of me up under the skin and pacing, the part that had settled on her four days ago without consulting the rest of me.
I lowered my voice without meaning to, the way I do only when I am truly past my own control.
"No," I said.
She went still. The blotchy heat of temper climbed her throat, and under it, faster, came the worse thing, the flinch she covered in a half-second but not fast enough for a man whose profession is reading the thing people cover.
"No," she repeated, flat, Counsel's voice, the one that keeps men at surname distance. "Fine."
"It isn't what you think."
"It's exactly what I think, Cross. You'll cross a hostile border for a stranger but you draw the line at the attorney.
Noted, and on the record. " She pulled the blanket tighter and looked at the heater coil as if it had personally signed something it shouldn't have.
"I'm a big girl. I've been turned down by better-dressed men. "
That landed where she meant it to. It is a remarkable skill, hurting a man precisely while bleeding yourself, and I admired it even as it went in.
Here is the thing I did not say, because I did not yet know how to make it sound like anything but another invoice.
The no had wanting underneath it, all the way down.
I have spent four days keeping her alive, bribing marshals and forging transit papers and standing between her and a glamoured knife, and the wolf in me has counted every one of those things, written them in the column my father died not reading, and the moment she turned her mouth up to mine in the cold I felt the whole ledger of it rise between us like a wall.
She owes you, she is grateful, gratitude in a freezing room at two in the morning is not the same as wanting.
I would sooner cut off the hand that winds this watch than take a kiss I had, in any sense, earned.
I will not be paid in her. I will not let her settle the debt of staying alive with her own body.
The one time I let myself become a debt, four days, tied, I learned what it is to be a number someone else collects, and I refuse to make her a number that I collect.
Even if it kills the both of us by inches.
So I let it read as rejection, since that was the only available costume.
---
She was shivering harder now, because anger burns warmth faster than cold does, and because the heater was failing along with everything else. I made a decision the way I make all the expensive ones, quickly, before I can total the cost.
I took off my coat.
"Don't," she said. "I don't want your—"
"It isn't a kindness," I said, and settled it around her shoulders over the blanket, the wool still warm from me, warmer than a human had any right to leave it, and I watched her stop arguing the instant that warmth reached her skin, which told me precisely how cold she'd gotten and made something in my chest behave very badly.
"It's logistics. You're a human in a steel box at thirty degrees and I run hot, so the math is simple.
You're the cargo I refuse to lose, which means you get the coat. Physics doesn't keep a ledger."
"You said you don't believe anything's free."
"I lied, and I do it charmingly. The coat is free. Take the coat."
She took the coat. She pulled it close and put her face down into the collar of it without seeming to know she was doing it, breathing in the bergamot and old leather of me the way a person breathes in something they have decided not to want, and I had to look at the failing coil for a while.
Then I did the other thing, the small thing I have never done in front of another living soul.
"When I can't sleep," I said, "which is most nights, I wind this.
" I held up the watch. "It was my father's.
It's an automatic, which means it doesn't need winding, the motion of a wrist keeps it going, so the act accomplishes nothing, the most useless ritual a grown man performs. " I turned the crown between two fingers. "Three clicks. Listen."
The cold room went very quiet. Even the storm seemed to hold its white breath.
In the dimming orange I wound my father's watch the way I have wound it every night of my life, three soft clicks, one, two, three, exactly the same as they have been for thirty years, the only fixed point in a life that has had no others.
"Why pointless," she asked. Her voice had changed. Quieter.
"Because nothing I do keeps anything," I said.
"The watch keeps its own time. The packs keep losing their freedom.
My father kept dying no matter how perfectly I read the contract afterward.
I cannot keep a single thing in this world by holding it.
" Three more clicks, slow. "But I can wind a watch that doesn't need it, and tell myself one small thing is happening because I chose to make it happen and for no other reason.
It's how I sleep. It's the only thing I own that nobody can collect, because it's worth nothing to anyone but me. " I held the crown still. "Do it."
She looked at me. Then she took the watch in her cold fingers, my coat huge around her, and she wound it.
One. Two. Three. The clicks went into the concrete and the storm and the failing light, and I watched the woman who refuses to need anyone do a useless tender thing with her hands because I'd asked her to, and I thought, this is the one I am not allowed to want, and I have just handed her the only ritual that lets me sleep.
My voice does something terrible when I am undone. It goes very gentle.
"There," I said. "Now you'll sleep. Wind it three times when the dark gets long. It won't do a thing, which is exactly the point of it, and the mercy."
---
The heater ticked down toward nothing. I would have to find some arithmetic of bodies and blankets that kept everyone breathing till dawn, and I would do it, because that is what I am, the man who manages the impossible logistics of keeping people the world wants dead alive one more night.
For a moment, though, I watched her hold my father's watch to her ear like a child listening for the sea, and I let myself want the wrong thing, privately, with no one to read it but me.
She'd be warm now. Confused, and warm, and angry at me in a way she would not be able to fully justify by morning, and that confusion would harden into the simplest available story, the one I'd dressed it in: he didn't want me.
It would set up like concrete and cost me later, in a glass office, in ways I could already itemize. I am very good at foreseeing the bill.
I told myself I'd explain it someday, when there wasn't a vote bearing down on us and a witch buying the dark to bury her in.
I would find the words to say I'd stopped precisely because I wanted her too much to take her cheap, wanted her free and owing nothing, choosing me clean or not at all, and that the gap between those two things was the entire distance between love and a transaction, between my father's life and the contract that ended it.
But she was already half-asleep against the warm wall, my coat to her chin, the watch ticking its borrowed time in her hand, and she said, drowsy and stubborn and unwilling to let me have the last word even now, "If this is you turning me down, Cross, it's the warmest rejection I've ever filed."
So I gave her the only true thing I had, the thing I could afford, which was almost nothing and was everything I owned.
I stood, and my hand reached for a cuff I was no longer wearing, and I looked down at her in the last of the orange light.
"I don't take what I'm owed, darling," I said. "Ask me for what you actually want, and watch what I do. " Then I left her warm and confused in my coat.