Chapter 4
CHLOE
The brownstone door clicked behind me and the stoop took on the slope of every long shift I had ever worked.
My braid had given up around bath time. A loose ribbon of hair kept finding the corner of my mouth.
I left it there. I rolled my left shoulder out as I came down the four stone steps, slow, because Theo had decided on the last block from the park that his legs had used up all their walking and the only solution was to be carried the rest of the way.
Owen had walked himself like a tiny diplomat, hand in mine, narrating the bushes.
Five blocks. Forty-three pounds of small boy. My deltoid is going to write me a strongly worded letter in the morning.
I cleared the last step and lifted my eyes and the smile got there before the rest of me.
He was at the curb where he had been a month of nights, leaning against the passenger side of the Maybach with his hands in the pockets of a coat darker than the night around him.
The long line of him said nothing and offered nothing and waited.
The streetlamp put a soft outline along his shoulder.
He was not on his phone. He was not pacing.
He had taught his body how to be still in a way that did not look like patience exactly, more like a decision he had finished making about an hour ago.
This is the part that should not work. A man in a coat that costs more than my rent, parked outside the brownstone of two boys I babysit, every night for a month. This should make my throat tight. It does not. It loosens something. The unsurprise is the surprise.
He pushed off the car with one shoulder when I was halfway across the sidewalk.
"How was your day?" he said.
"Tiring." I switched my bag to the other arm. "Tolerable now."
His mouth did the thing where the corner went up before the rest of him caught on. "What makes it tolerable?"
"Not what." I stepped past him, close enough that the back of my hand brushed the lapel of his coat on purpose, and I went on toward the passenger door. "Who."
He stood one beat where I had left him. The two-note laugh slipped out of him, low and warm, the same one I had heard him share with his brother in another room. Then he came after me, easy, his stride matched to mine without effort.
I opened the door myself. I folded into the seat. The cabin closed around me with the smell of cedar and leather and something colder under it, like night air that had been let in once and stayed.
He leaned in the open doorway before he let me shut it. One hand on the top of the frame. The other along the inside of the door. He looked down at me with the small light from the cabin on the underside of his jaw.
"Keep being sweet and I will have to taste it off your mouth."
The laugh came out of me before I could route it anywhere useful. It hit my ribs first. My shoulders gave with it. I covered my mouth with the back of my wrist and the back of my wrist was not enough. He watched me do it like he was filing it for later.
"Yours?" he said. "Or do you have a detour for me?"
"A friend told me about a seafood place on Sackett." I tucked the loose strand behind my ear. It came right back out. "Can we?"
"Anywhere you want."
He closed the door for me anyway, the soft click of an expensive thing doing what it was made to do, even though I had not waited.
He came around the hood. I watched him through the windshield. Unhurried. He fixed the lapel of his coat once with his thumb. He had ten different ways of moving and not one of them wasted anything.
He took the driver's seat and reached across me to test the buckle. I let him. The back of his knuckle brushed my hip through the wool of his sleeve and the wool felt warm and the warm felt like a problem I was no longer pretending to mind.
He pulled into traffic with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gear shift, and I let my head tilt against the rest and watched him drive.
At the first red light I watched the line of his jaw.
The streetlamp slid up his cheekbone, hesitated, moved on.
There was a small muscle near his ear that worked once and went quiet.
His thumb rested on the leather of the wheel.
The forearm coming out of his cuff had a low ridge along it where the sleeve pulled when his fingers moved on the shifter.
The light caught the place at his temple every other light, a pale shimmer where the hair started.
He broke first.
"Stop looking at me like that." He still had not turned his face. "I cannot keep my eyes on the road."
The warmth that had started at my collar climbed.
"Is that really how you wanted to kiss me?" I said. "Hard to control it?"
He let half a second pass. I felt it land.
"Do not ask, Chloe." His voice had gone low and even, the warmth pulled out of it and stored somewhere safe. "It only makes the wanting worse."
I laughed again. Different this time. Lower in my chest. It came out as half a breath and stayed in the cabin between us.
My hand went out across the console and found his on the gear shift without checking with me first. My fingers laid themselves over his knuckles, light, easy, like they had been doing it for a year.
He did not move his hand. The light went green and he shifted with my fingers on top of his and the gear caught anyway, smooth, like he had built that shift for two hands.
He did not look over. He let the small smile happen at the corner of his mouth and that was the only place it lived. The smile that did not quite reach. I had stopped waiting for it to reach. I had started liking the place it stopped.
He is going to be a problem. He has been a problem. He is going to be a worse one.
The seafood place sat between a laundromat and a closed bodega and you would not have found it if a friend had not told you.
The window had fogged at the bottom from the steam off the open kitchen.
The tile floor was old and chipped and clean.
The booths along the wall were red vinyl with the seams resewn at the corners.
A wall by the register held a hundred laminated menus on a string.
The whole place smelled like Old Bay and garlic butter and crushed ice on a metal tray.
A woman with a pencil behind her ear waved us toward whatever we wanted. He put his hand at the small of my back and steered me to the booth in the back corner. He took the side facing the room. I did not have to ask why.
"The shrimp platter," I told the woman when she came. "Half pound. With the pan-fried scallops on the side, please."
He glanced at me before he ordered. He knew already. He had been watching me order for a month.
"Add the grilled fish," he told her. "Water with lemon."
She wrote it without writing it down and walked her pencil away.
He took off his coat. He laid it across the back of the booth the way you would put a cat down without waking it.
"You stare," I said.
"I look." He set his forearms on the table. The candle in its short jar put a small flame in each of his eyes. "Staring is what a man does when he wants something. Looking is what he does when he already has it."
I drank my water because I had no available answer to that.
The platter came in a steel bowl with paper crumpled in the bottom, a small pot of melted butter beside it, a lemon wedge that had been cut by somebody in a hurry.
The shrimp were a heap of pink against the steam.
The scallops sat dark gold against the white of the plate, two crisp brown edges, a spoon of something green at the side.
He pushed half the scallops onto my plate without asking.
I pushed half my shrimp onto his without asking either.
That was how we were going to eat tonight.
"Theo bit Owen today," I said.
"Bad?"
"On the forearm. He left teeth. Owen cried for the principle of it more than the pain."
"And you?"
"I told Theo we do not use our teeth on people we love."
His mouth went up at the corner. "Did he take the lesson?"
"He filed it under negotiable."
He laughed with teeth this time. I logged it.
The four men sat down at the booth next to ours when I was halfway through the scallops.
They came in loud, the way a group comes in when they have been somewhere louder first. Two drinks in already, maybe three.
Suits and ties loosened the right amount to feel like loosening was their idea.
The bench creaked when the heaviest of them dropped into it.
They ordered bottles and another round of bottles and the bottles came fast and went down faster.
Their eyes went around the room out of habit and stopped on me out of choice.
One of them, the one nearest the aisle, kept his there long enough to want me to notice him keeping it there.
He set his glass down without taking his eyes off me and spoke loud enough for his friends to hear and not pretend he had not meant me to.
"Look at that," the one nearest the aisle said, low. "Look at all of that. Tell me you would not put her over the bar." The man across from him let a laugh come up through his nose, slow, like he was tasting it. "Mouth like hers, you would not have to ask twice. And that waist on her."
I kept peeling.
Across from me, Daniil's face changed without changing.
The flirt that had been threaded through his mouth fell away first. The amusement at the corners of his eyes went after it.
The layer beneath that, the one I had been pretending he kept folded somewhere I would not have to see, climbed to the surface.
His shoulders went still in the way I had learned to read in the last month, the kind of still that comes before motion, not after it.
The hand at the side of his glass went very white at the knuckles.
No. Not tonight. Not over a table of nothing.