Chapter 2 #2
It came at a pace just a little too quick for the house. A second one followed, slower, catching the first by the collar.
He came around the arch with his hand on the molding and a question already half on his mouth.
"Did either of you see..."
He stopped.
He saw me.
For one beat his face did the thing a face does when it has been carrying something heavy and is allowed to set it down.
The tension dropped out of his shoulders all at once.
Not slowly. All at once, the way water lets go of a glass that has been tipped.
His hand on the molding loosened. His mouth, which had been on its way to making a hard sound, settled into something smaller.
Then he put the lock back on. Quick. Almost graceful. If I had not been looking, I would not have seen it happen.
Almost.
I saw it.
"Don't be too obvious, Daniil," Jade said, deadpan into her coffee. "Sit. Drink something."
He sat across from me. Not beside. Across. He picked up the pitcher on the table without looking at it and poured water into my glass first, mine before his, before either of theirs, before anything.
He set the pitcher down.
He looked at me, full, for one second.
His eyes were a gray-green I had not been ready for. The joke he was always holding one inch behind his mouth was there, but it was thinner than it had been the night before in the hall I could not remember.
Then he looked away. On purpose. He picked up his own cup and gave the morning his profile, as if to give me back the part of the room he had just taken.
He doesn’t want me to see how he is looking at me yet.
I picked up the water glass. I drank because he had poured it. I drank because the floor was steady now and I wanted to keep it that way.
"So," Lily said, after a beat, eyes on Daniil over the rim of her mug. "Lesser devil. You sleep at all?"
"Some," he said.
"On the couch," I said, before I caught it.
Three pairs of eyes touched me at the same time. Lily's were laughing. Jade's were not surprised. Daniil's came back to me on a half second of delay he did not entirely manage.
I looked at the melon on my fork.
"He sleeps wherever the job drops him," Jade said, dry. "Once it was a closet. He convinced it that it was a five-star hotel until morning."
"I am a charming guest," Daniil said.
"You're an unpaid one," Lily said.
"Family rate."
"There's no family rate. There is family, there is the rate, and you have never been on the right side of either column."
He took it on the chin and smiled. It was a good smile, the kind that did not quite reach his eyes, because his eyes were busy not looking at me and not looking away from where I was.
He held it until Lily was finished, sipped his coffee, and set the cup down with the care a man uses on something he does not want to break.
I bit the inside of my lip. The corner of my mouth went up anyway. I dropped my gaze to the plate before it could do more than that.
I ate slowly. Pear. A bite of toast with butter that tasted like a farm.
Two sips of tea Lily had pushed at me without comment.
The room around me ordered itself into things I recognized.
A pepper grinder. A bowl of salt. A small jar of honey with a wooden dipper that had been licked clean by a child at some point. The house had grown around a child.
I was not safe. I was not unsafe. I was in a room with three people who knew exactly what they were and who were letting me catch up.
When the plate was halfway empty Daniil set his cup down.
"I will take you home," he said.
I nodded.
Lily walked me back up for my shoes. She did not ask if I wanted company on the climb. She put her hand under my elbow again and took the part of my weight my legs were still negotiating. At the door of the room I had woken in she paused, one hand on the frame.
"You'll find his number in your bag," she said. "Don't make him wait three days to use it."
She kissed me on the side of the head, quick, the way an older sister might, and went back down.
The couch was empty. The jacket was gone. The blanket I had been under was folded at the foot of the bed in a square so neat it had been done by hands that never did anything halfway.
I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I went down.
He was waiting by the front door with a coat over his arm.
Not his. Mine, the thin one I had not been wearing the night before because the club had been warm.
He must have asked Lily where it lived. He held it open and I turned my back to him and let him settle it onto my shoulders, and his hand did not linger, and the not lingering was its own kind of touch.
Outside, gravel. A long low car, dark, the kind of dark that ate its own reflection. He opened the passenger side for me himself. There was no driver. He went around to his own side, dropped into the seat, and the engine came on so quietly I felt it through my hip before I heard it.
We pulled away from a house I had not gotten to see the front of properly. Trees. A gate. A road between two stone walls, and then one without.
He drove with one hand low on the wheel. He did not put music on. The cabin was leather and quiet, with a thin clean smell of him under it, the cedar I had woken to, the soap I did not own.
After a mile I gave him my address. Brooklyn. The cross street. The buzzer number, because I always said it without meaning to.
He nodded once.
His mouth shifted then. A small private smile, set at one corner, gone before it finished, the kind a man wears when he has been told a thing he already knows.
"What happened?" I asked. "At the club."
He did not reply right away. He let the question sit in the cabin until I could hear myself ask it, and then he gave me an answer at the volume of a man who had decided in advance how much of the truth he would give a woman the first time she asked.
"A man put something in your glass," he said. "My brother and I were there. We got you out. A doctor checked you. You slept the rest off upstairs. That is all of it that matters this morning."
It was not all of it. I could feel the rest sitting in the space behind his teeth, neatly folded the way the blanket had been. He was not lying. He was choosing.
"Thank you," I said.
"Do not thank me for that."
He said it as if he had been waiting for permission to.
The city came up around us in the slow way it does when you are coming in from somewhere quieter.
Trees thinned. Houses thickened. A bridge.
The river under us, then the river behind us.
He took the streets I would have taken, the small ones, the ones a driver who lived here used instead of the avenues.
He pulled up at my building. He did not double park. He found a length of curb that fit his car as if it had been measured for him.
He turned the engine off.
I sat for one breath with my hand on the seat belt. My fingers were not quite mine yet, but they were closer.
"Chloe," he said.
It was the first time I had heard him say my name. He pronounced it like a word he had practiced alone and saved for a moment like this.
"Yes?"
"If anything tonight does not feel right. Anything. Call. Do not think about whether it is worth the call. Make the call."
I nodded. I did not trust my voice with more than that.
I opened the door. I got out. The sidewalk was warm under my shoes after the cool of his car. I took the two steps to the curb and turned back before it had finished closing on its own hinge.
He had his hand on the wheel and his eyes on me through the open window, the lock back over the rest of his face, the joke set neatly across the front of it.
"Thank you," I said, again.
I leaned in through the window before I let myself think.
I put my mouth at the corner of his jaw.
The stubble was rougher than I had let myself imagine.
The skin under it was warm. I kissed him there, once, light, where the jaw met the throat, and I felt him go still the way a man goes still when he has been waiting a long time to be touched and has not allowed himself to want it out loud.
I pulled back before he could do anything with the stillness.
I turned and went up the three steps to my building. I did not run. I almost did. I made my hand find my keys at the bottom of the bag and my key find the lock and the lock turn, and I did not look back at the curb, because if I had looked back I would not have made it through the door.
The door closed behind me.
I put my back against it.
My chest was working faster than the walk up the steps had earned. The hallway light buzzed once and settled. I could hear a neighbor's television through a wall. I could hear my own pulse louder than the show.
My hand lifted on its own and found the side of my own face, the place my mouth had just been. As if his cheek had left something there I could feel from the inside out. As if I could find the shape of his jaw on my own skin.
Oh no.
That was the sentence. That was all of it. I leaned my head back against the door and let it be the only one.