Chapter 6
CHLOE
The bench had a knot in the wood under my left thigh that I had started to find affectionate.
I had picked it the last three times. It sat under a maple at the edge of the playground, far enough back that the noise of the kids came in soft, close enough that I could watch them without looking like I was watching them.
The sun was doing that low autumn thing where it lay across everything like a hand.
A toddler was holding a melting orange popsicle in one hand and her mother's coat in the other and refusing to choose between them.
The ice cream truck on the corner was playing the same eight notes on a loop, and a boy in a red shirt was negotiating with his father about a second bar.
I had spent two dollars on a paper cup of strawberry sorbet twenty minutes earlier just to feel like I was a person on a day off, and I was eating it slowly enough that it had gone to liquid at the bottom.
My grandmother used to take me to a park like this one in Queens when I was small, and she would tell me, in her short way, that the air would be good for my heart. I think that was the first time anybody told me that air had anything to do with the heart.
My phone buzzed in my lap and his name on the screen did the thing his name had started to do, which was move my pulse up half a step before I had even answered.
"Where are you?"
"At the park."
A pause. I could hear the city behind him, a horn and an engine.
"Can I come?"
"Yes please. I want to see you."
The pause this time was different. Lower.
"You are killing me with that sweet voice."
"So dramatic. Get here now."
"On my way."
I hung up and I let the smile come. The one I had kept off my face while he was on the line. I tipped my chin up to the maple and let it sit there, the kind of smile that does not really have a place to go.
I did not turn when he came up behind me.
I did not need to. The air at my back changed the way air changes in a room when someone you have been thinking about steps into it.
Then his mouth, warm, at the spot under my ear and along my cheek.
A kiss that was nothing like the kiss at the seafood restaurant and somehow exactly like it.
"Come sit with me," I said, low, and I caught his arm and pulled him down onto the bench beside me.
He sat. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into him, and the weight of him going down into the wood was not the usual weight. It was the weight of a man who had been on his feet for a long time and had not put himself down anywhere.
"Tired?"
"Yes. I have been gathering information on someone we think is a threat."
I turned my face a little toward him. He was looking out at the slide, not at the slide.
"Your work is dangerous."
"Are you worried?"
I let a breath go through my nose. "Of course. Who else am I going to kiss if you are gone?"
His arm at my shoulders tightened a quarter inch. The kind of tightening that is not a hug, it is a claim.
"Nobody. Stop talking about kissing anybody else."
"Just a what-if," I said, laughing into his shoulder.
"I do not like what-ifs."
"Then be careful. Do not die on me."
"I will not. Nobody will touch my girl."
I leaned back a little so I could look at him sideways. "Your girl? You are presuming a lot."
"Do you want me to kiss you right here to settle it?"
"There are children watching."
"Then stop arguing with me."
He put his head down on my shoulder. Right there in the open.
A man I had watched walk into a restaurant like he owned the block, putting his head on my shoulder under a maple tree.
He let out a breath that had three days of work in it, and then he went.
Not in pieces. All at once. The way a person goes when they have not let themselves go in a long time and the body finally takes the chance.
I did not move. I sat with the cup of melted sorbet in my left hand and his head on my right shoulder and I listened to him breathe.
Slow. Slower. A small tendril of hair at his temple had stuck to the skin there with sweat from the walk over, and I wanted to tuck it back, and I did not, because moving would have woken him.
The ice cream truck played its eight notes again. Somewhere a small dog complained at a pigeon. I sat with him while the sun moved a finger's width across the path.
The first drop hit the back of my hand and I thought, no.
The second hit the bench between us. The third was on his temple, on the white scar I had learned to look for there. He came up out of sleep the way he did everything else, all at once, his eyes finding mine before his head was even off my shoulder.
The sky cracked. Not warning. Decision.
"Shit."
We were up. He had my hand and my bag in one motion and we were running, the wood chips spraying, the ice cream truck shutting off mid-note as the man inside slid the window down.
I was laughing by the time we hit the path.
He was not. He was scanning. He had not put down the part of him that scanned, even half asleep, even running.
The Maybach was at the curb. He got the door for me and got around the hood in three strides and we were in, doors thumping closed against the noise of the rain on the roof. He turned the wipers on. The world outside the windshield went underwater.
"Your place," he said. Not a question.
I gave him the nod he did not need. He pulled into the street.
By the time we hit the green door of my building the rain had soaked us both through the shoulders and down the back.
I got the three locks in the order I always got them, top middle bottom, fingers a little clumsy with the cold of the water on my skin.
The hallway light on the second floor buzzed once when I flipped it, settled.
He came in behind me and shut the door and threw the deadbolt himself without asking.
We stood in the small front hall, dripping. The water from my hair was making a slow line down my back. His jacket was a darker color across the shoulders than it had been an hour ago. There was a drop on his eyelash. I watched it fall.
I was going to say it before I could talk myself out of it.
I turned to face him. I put my palm flat against the wet front of his shirt, over his heart, which I could feel under there going at a pace that had nothing to do with running.
"You will catch cold. Shower with me."
He went still.
I knew his stillnesses by now. There was the one that came at the end of a conversation.
There was the one that came when someone said something he did not like.
And there was this one. The one that came before motion, not after.
The one that meant he had heard me and his whole body was deciding what to do about it.
His eyes did not leave my face. The shift in them was small. The pupils, the line of his mouth, the place at his jaw where the muscle worked once.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"Are you sure about what you are offering me?"
Yes. I have never been more certain of anything I have said out loud in this apartment.
I did not say that out loud. I stepped the inch closer.
I put my wet hand on the side of his jaw, where the stubble was already coming in for the night, and I lifted up onto my toes and I kissed him.
Open mouth this time. Brief. Unmistakable.
I let him taste the sorbet still on me and I let him feel that I had decided.
"I am, Daniil," I said against his mouth. "You said I was yours. Prove it."
"Are you drunk?" His voice had gone low and slow and a little rough at the edge.
"Are you coming with me, or am I about to change my mind?"
He moved.
He lifted me. Not in the gentlemanly way he had lifted me out of the back of his car after dinner one night, careful, mindful of the dress.
This was the lift of a man whose patience had snapped clean.
One arm under my thighs, one arm across my back, and I was off the floor and against his chest and he was already walking.
My arms went around his neck without my brain catching up to them.
"The bathroom is the second door," I said, breath coming faster.
"I know where your bathroom is," he said, the words barely shaped, half a breath he was using to steady himself.
He set me down on the cold tile and reached past me and turned the dial of the shower on. He turned it hot. He turned the lights down at the dimmer by the door without looking. He knew where the dimmer was too. He had been in this bathroom before. He had not been in it like this before.
The water started up. The steam came in slow drifts, low along the floor first, then higher, finding the mirror, finding the lights, softening the edges of the room. The sound of water on tile filled the small space.
He turned back to me.
"Come here."
I came. He worked the bottom hem of my wet shirt up between his hands.
Slow. He paused with the fabric at the bottom of my ribs, his thumbs against the skin there, and he looked at my face.
Asking with his eyes if I wanted to stop him.
I did not look away. He lifted it the rest of the way and over my head and let it fall wet onto the floor.
He did each thing like that. He unzipped the side of my jeans and waited a beat with his hand at my hip.
He went to his knees on the bath mat to peel the wet denim down my legs, and even on his knees he kept his eyes on my face every time he was about to move to a new piece.
I had thought I would be embarrassed, standing in front of him like this. I was not. I was held. I was watched.
When it was my turn I had to use both hands on the buttons of his shirt and they shook a little. He covered my hands with one of his and steadied them.
"Take your time."