Chapter 4 #2
I set the half-peeled shrimp on the rim of my plate. I wiped my fingers on the paper towel. I made my voice warm and I leaned across the table on my forearms so my face was the only thing in his sightline.
"Tell me about the shrimp," I said. "Are they always this good or did we get lucky?"
His eyes came to mine. Slid past me to the booth over my shoulder. Came back to mine. He had heard me. He was somewhere else.
"Did you sleep last night?" I tried. "You look like you did not."
"Enough." He said it without looking at me.
"Who did you see today?"
"Mikhail."
I slid a peeled shrimp toward his plate.
"Eat one. They are better than they should be."
He did not look at the shrimp.
The bench at the next booth creaked again. The men had stopped pretending they were not talking about me. They had decided they did not need to.
"Legs like that, and a face on top of them," another said, lazy, like he was reading down a list. "I had a clean shot at her on the way in. Sat down instead." A laugh from the heaviest of them. "Slow play loses you the round, brother."
A bottle came down on their table with a small careful finality.
"Hundred says I am the one who walks her out tonight."
"Make it two."
"Three."
Daniil gathered himself in the way water gathers at the lip of a glass before it goes over. His shoulders set. The pulse at his temple ticked once. The hand at the side of his glass went still.
He pushed back from the booth. He did not scrape it. He did not slam a palm. He stood the way a man stands when he has finished a conversation in his head and is on his way to deliver the conclusion.
"Stay here. I will..."
I was up before he finished. My hand caught his wrist the way his had caught mine on the brownstone sidewalk a month back.
Not a grip. A hand. Light, the pad of my thumb on the inside of his cuff where his pulse lived, my fingers loose along the bone.
He looked down at where I had touched him.
He looked at my face. The face looking back at me did not belong to the man who had ordered the fish.
I did not pull him down. I rose into him. My heels lifted out of my flats. I put my other hand to the side of his jaw and pressed my mouth to his.
Closed. Quick. Light. Real. His lower lip was warm and a little chapped from the wind. There was the smallest catch of breath in his throat that I felt more than I heard. I came back down off my toes.
"Don't." My voice had gone somewhere I did not recognize it. "Sit."
He did not move.
I kept my hand on the line of his jaw. I kept my eyes on his. The room had rearranged itself around the two of us without me noticing. The woman with the pencil had paused at a table by the back. The four at the next booth had gone quiet in the way kids go quiet when an adult walks in.
He sat.
He sat slow, the way a man sits when he is choosing to and wants you to see him choose.
His hand came up off the bench as it came down and caught mine before it could fall away from his jaw.
He drew it across the table with him and laid it palm down on the worn vinyl edge and covered it with his and did not give it back.
I sat. My knees were not entirely on board with sitting yet.
Then my brain caught up with what my mouth had done.
The blood went to my ears first. It moved inward across my cheekbones, found my jaw, met itself at my collarbone.
I felt every degree of it arrive. My free hand drifted up to my own lips before I knew I had moved it, two fingers pressed light to the place his mouth had been, checking.
He saw me check. His thumb ran once over the back of my hand, slow, the pad of it warm.
I kissed him. First. On the mouth. In a room with witnesses.
I lowered my hand. My face was hot enough to read by. I did not look at the next booth. I did not have to. Daniil was still holding my hand and the platter had gone half cold and the scallops had skinned over at the edges and none of it mattered.
"You are so cute."
"Shut up and eat."
He let go of my hand only because he was reaching for the shrimp bowl.
He took one. He twisted the head off with his thumb and forefinger, peeled the shell back from the tail in two clean pulls, lifted the dark vein out on the edge of his nail, and laid the pink curl on the rim of my plate.
He picked up the next. He set it down. He picked up the third.
Three shrimp on my plate. He had not eaten a single thing.
I watched his hands. Long fingers. A small white scar across the knuckle of his left index that I had not earned the right to know about yet. They moved through the shrimp with the patience of a man who had decided to do one small thing well in front of me.
I had been carrying a question around for a week. I let it out while his hands were busy and his eyes were on the bowl.
"Do you like me?"
He did not look up. His hands did not pause.
"Yes."
No flourish. No flirt under it. The word came out the way he had said his brother's name, like a fact he was reporting rather than a thing he was deciding.
I smiled into the steam off my plate.
He set the shrimp on my plate. He looked up.
"Do you like me?"
"I won't tell."
The two-note laugh slipped out of him, low.
He set the next shrimp down half peeled.
He leaned across the small table, slow enough that I could have stopped him and we both knew it, and he pressed his mouth to my forehead.
Light. The way a man marks a thing he is already sure of.
His breath moved a fine piece of my hair against my temple. He sat back.
"Does not matter," he said. "You are mine even when you do not say it."
"You're full of yourself."
"And you blush a lot for someone denying it."
I picked up the shrimp because my hands needed somewhere to be and put it in my mouth so my mouth would not give him another thing to read.
He poured water into my glass. I watched his hand do it.
The candle on our table had lit itself one more time tonight, by his hand or by the woman with the pencil, I had not seen which.
I watch him peel another. My hand stays where he put it. I do not answer his question with words. The answer is sitting on the rim of my plate, three pink curls deep, and he already knows it, and I think I am going to let him.