Chapter 3
DANIIL
The block had two cameras and one of them had been pointed at the same brick wall for nine years. I had checked. The other lived under the carriage lamp of the brownstone three doors down and it lost its angle on the sidewalk halfway across the Halverson stoop. I knew the gap by heart.
My watch said forty minutes since I had cut the engine across the street. The cabin had cooled. The coffee in the holder with it. I had not touched the cup.
The upper windows of the Halverson place went dark in the order they always went dark. The small one first, the boy who slept with the door open. Then the bigger one across the hall, the boy who needed two stories. Theo. Owen. I knew their names the way I knew the names of men I had buried.
She has been inside since six.
The porch light came on.
I waited for the door to open. I waited for it to close behind her.
I let her come down the four stone steps with her hand on the iron rail before I touched the handle of my own.
I had told Yuri to take the rest of the night for himself.
I was driving. I had driven myself to her twice this week already and I did not want a witness for the third.
I crossed the street at a slant.
She was reading her phone. The blue of the screen sat on her cheekbones in the soft way light sits on a face that has not been sleeping enough. She had her bag strap across her body the wrong way. She had not seen me yet.
I set my hand on her shoulder, light.
She came off the sidewalk an inch. Her whole body turned on the heel of one boot and her free hand flew flat to her chest with the fingers spread like a starfish.
"Easy."
"Gosh..." Her breath caught and went and caught again. "You’re giving me a heart attack."
"I did not mean to."
I did not take my hand off her shoulder.
"Why are you here?"
I let the question sit a beat. I let my face take the shape a face takes when a man wants a woman to wonder.
"Collecting on what you owe me."
The fear went through her eyes in a clean line. I saw it. I let her see that I saw it. I took one step forward. She took one step back. I took another. She took another. The small of her back met the iron rail of the stoop and she stopped because there was nowhere else for her to go.
"What do you want?"
I held there for one second more than was kind. Then I gave her the laugh. Two notes, short, low, the one Mikhail and I share with our mother’s mouth. It came out before I told it to.
"Easy. Dinner. I am hungry. That is the entire plan."
The breath she had been holding came out of her in one long shape. Her shoulders dropped two inches. She made a sound at the back of her throat that was half a laugh and half something I did not have a name for yet.
Then she slapped my chest.
Open palm, flat, the heel of her hand right over my sternum. There was no force in it. It was relief looking for somewhere to land.
"Don’t scare me again."
My hand came up and caught her wrist before it could fall back to her side. I did not close my fingers in a fist. I did not pull. I held her wrist the way a man holds a small bird he is not planning to keep.
"Promise."
I did not let go.
"Where do you want us to eat?"
"My kitchen, then."
"Are you sure? You are not afraid to have me in it, Chloe?"
"Should I be?"
"You are allowed to."
She looked up at me for a long second. Her eyes went over my mouth, my jaw, the place at my temple where the streetlight was setting a small green shine in the gray.
She was reading me the way I had been reading her for three months.
It was the first time anyone had looked back at me in a way I could not duck.
The corner of her mouth lifted.
"I can feel you are good."
"That is what my brothers’ wives say."
"And a little smug."
"Sorokin blood."
I walked her to the Maybach with my hand still around her wrist. She could have pulled it back. She did not. I opened the passenger door. I let go of her only when she was settled and the belt was across her shoulder and the door was shut between her and the night.
Two nights back she slept in this seat. She did not get to look at me then.
She looked at me now.
I drove. I kept my eyes on the road, because if I turned she would stop looking, and I wanted her looking.
I felt her watch the line of my jaw at the first red light.
I felt her watch my hand on the wheel at the second.
I felt her watch the small muscle in my forearm when I shifted lanes.
I kept the joke set across my face like a coat.
I did not let her see the heat at the back of my neck.
Brooklyn slid by in soft yellow. She gave me the turns in a low voice. Left here. Right at the next light. The third building, the one with the green door.
She lived on the second floor of a walk-up with a stairwell that smelled of someone else’s cooking and a hallway lit by one tired bulb. Her door had three locks. She used all three. I noted which one she turned first.
The apartment was the size of my closet at the compound.
It was hers in every inch. A small couch with a thin wool blanket folded along the back.
A rice cooker on the counter with the timer light still glowing soft red from this morning.
A line of three small plants on the windowsill, the leaves turned toward the glass.
A photograph in a black frame above the radiator, Chloe younger by some years with a small round woman in a blue cardigan, both of them squinting into a sun I could not see.
Her grandmother. I knew the face. I had watched it through a screen door once.
She set her bag on the hook by the door without looking at the hook.
She slipped her boots off and lined them up under the bench with the toes pointed in.
She washed her hands at the sink for the count of twenty.
She pulled rice from the cabinet under the counter and rinsed it in a metal bowl the way a woman rinses rice when she has rinsed it three thousand times, the heel of her hand pressed to the grains, the water going from milk to almost clear in three changes.
She pulled pork belly from the fridge. Gochujang. A jar of kimchi from the second shelf. A head of green onion. She moved a pan to the burner and let it heat without saying a word.
I leaned against the counter and watched her.
"Stop staring. I feel awkward."
"I am staring."
I did not pretend it was anything else. I shifted half a step toward the window so the line of my body did not corner her against the stove, and then I stayed where I was.
She glanced sideways at me and I caught the glance and she caught me catching it and the corner of her mouth went up again. She turned back to the pan.
The pork belly hit the heat and the kitchen filled with the sound of fat learning a new shape. She layered the kimchi in after it, a slow practiced pour, and what came up off the pan was the kind of thing a person makes for themselves on a tired night. The rice cooker clicked.
"Where are your plates?"
"Above your head."
I reached up. Two bowls, two small plates, the cheap kind that come four for a dollar at the market on Eighth.
I set them on the counter beside her. The kitchen was small enough that my shoulder was close to hers when I plated, and I did not move it away.
She did not move away either. She spooned rice.
I spooned the pork and the kimchi over the top.
She set two pairs of chopsticks across the bowls.
She turned to lift her bowl and I was already turned to her.
I lifted my hand and set my palm along her jaw. The same hand. The same set of it I had laid against her cheek in the back of the car two nights back when she had been asleep and warm and not mine to touch. She was awake now. She knew where my hand was. She knew where her face was inside it.
"Can I kiss you?"
She went still under my palm. She did not look away. Her pupils widened the small amount a pupil widens when a body is deciding.
"No."
I did not pull my hand back at once. I took one breath with my palm where it was. I felt the small pulse under her jaw against my thumb. Then I dropped my hand. Clean. No drag of the fingers, no last brush along her chin.
"Let’s eat then."
I picked up both bowls and carried them to the small table by the window without making a thing of it. I set hers at the chair that faced the room. I took the one that faced the door. I waited for her to sit before I sat.
She told me no. She told me the truth. Good.
She sat. She took her chopsticks. She watched me take a first bite the way a woman watches a man eat her cooking for the first time, ready to wave off whatever I said.
The food was good. The kind that only comes from hands that have done this since they were small.
"This is very good."
She did not believe me yet. Her face said so. But the corner of her mouth went up the way it had on the sidewalk.
"You don’t have to say that."
"I do not say things I do not mean. You will learn."
She ate for a moment. The window behind her had the kitchen light doubled in it and her face doubled with it.
"Thank you for respecting my no."
I set my chopsticks down.
"Trust me. I want to. When we do, I want you wanting it too."
The color came up under her cheekbones in two soft patches. She pressed the back of her hand to the side of her face the way she had at the compound when Lily had teased her about looking at me too long.
"Stop talking like that."
I gave her the two notes again. Low. Mine and Mikhail’s. She caught the sound in her shoulders and let it land.
She set her chopsticks down across the rim of her bowl. She lined them up with her thumb. She looked at me the way a person looks at a door they are about to open.
"How did you know where I work?"
I did not answer at once. I set my own chopsticks down and I put my hands flat on the small table on either side of my bowl. I let the joke fall off my face. I looked at her full.
"We did not meet the other night."
Her eyes did not move.
"I saw you three months back at a coffee shop on Mott.
You were a penny short for an iced coffee.
You laughed at yourself instead of going red.
The boy behind the counter waved you off and you put the dollar in his tip jar two days later.
I watched you do that too. I started looking for you after that.
It is the thing I do for a living. I am good at it. "
She did not move her hand off the side of her glass.
"I know where you live. I know where you work. I know the names of the boys you put to bed. I know what time you call your grandmother at the end of every week, and I know what her voice sounds like through your door when you do. I know what your shampoo costs."
I stopped there. I held her eyes.
"Are you afraid?"
She did not look down. She did not pull the glass closer. She did not move at all for the length of one slow breath. Then her thumb moved on the side of the glass and made a small clean track through the condensation.
"It should scare me..."
She took the smallest breath.
"It doesn’t. I don’t know why."
I smiled. Not the smile I had worn on the sidewalk. Not the one I had worn in the car. The smaller one. The one my mother used to catch on my face when she found me reading at the window as a boy, the one I had not given away in a long time.
Ptichka. You are not running. You should be running. You will not, and I will not let you, and you are going to find that out about both of us soon.