Chapter 7
DANIIL
Icame back into my body before she did.
The light coming in through her cheap white curtains was a thin amber, the kind of light that did not belong to a city, the kind of light that belonged to a girl who slept with her windows facing the wrong way and did not mind because she was a person who liked to be woken up gently.
Her room smelled the way it had smelled when I had walked into it last night, except now it also smelled like me.
That was not a thing I let myself think about for long.
I let myself think about it for one breath. I did not name the breath.
She was on her side, facing me, hair a tangle she had not bothered with after the shower, one hand tucked under her cheek the way a child sleeps.
The soft white shirt of mine she had put on at the end of last night had ridden up past her hip in her sleep, and the line of her was a line I had spent a portion of my life trying not to look at and had spent the rest of last night looking at and was now looking at again.
Mine.
I propped on my elbow and watched her sleep for exactly the length of one slow breath that I did not let myself name, and then I leaned in and I put my mouth at the side of her neck.
Soft. The kind of kiss that did not ask for anything.
Then again, lower, where her hair started, where her shoulder began.
I breathed her in. She had a smell that lived under the soap and the shampoo, and it was the smell of her, and I had walked around for two months not knowing it and now I knew it and I would not be able to forget it.
She stirred. She did not open her eyes.
"First you ruin me last night," she said into her pillow. "Now you ruin my sleep."
"Your mouth is dangerous."
"Says the bratva."
"This bratva is out of his mind for you."
She smiled against the pillow. It was a slow smile, the kind that came up out of a person who was warm and sore and not regretful.
"And I am... hungry," she said. "Feed me."
I laughed the two notes of it. It came out of me before I had a chance to be careful with it. It was my mother's laugh. I let it go. I got out of the bed.
She made a small noise of protest when my weight left the mattress, and I bent down and pulled the sheet up around her again, and she rolled onto her back and stretched, one long line from her wrists to her toes, and I had to look away from her on purpose, because what I had said about her mouth was true and what she had said about being hungry was true, and one of the two had to wait.
I went to the kitchen.
I came back two seconds later because I had remembered her floor.
"Up," I said.
She blinked at me from the pillow. "What?"
"Floor is cold. You are not putting your feet on it."
"I have socks."
"You are not putting your feet on it."
She lifted her arms in the air. She did it without thinking about it, the way a small girl lifts her arms when she has decided that an adult is going to handle a thing for her, and the inside of my chest did something I did not have a word for.
I picked her up in the sheet. The sheet was warm from her. I carried her the few steps from the bed to the kitchen and put her down in one of the two chairs at her small kitchen table, careful, like she was a thing I had been given and was responsible for not breaking.
"Sit. I am the one who cooks today."
"Mm," she said, sleep still in it.
I moved around her tiny kitchen the way a man moves who has been in a kitchen long enough to know the cabinets.
The cabinet above the sink had the plates.
The drawer to the left of the stove had the wooden spoon.
The fridge had eggs on the second shelf and butter in the door and the heel of a loaf of bread on the counter under the cloth she covered her bread with, and on the door of the fridge in a small glass jar she kept the kimchi she made herself in batches, the one she ate out of with a spoon when she thought no one was watching. I had watched her. She did not know.
I put the kettle on for her tea. I pulled the small pan she liked.
I turned the burner low because I was going to do the eggs the way Yelena did them, slow, the butter taking its time in the pan, the yolks given the room to come together the way an egg comes together when the person eating it matters to you.
I felt her watching.
"Hot," she said.
I did not turn around.
"Careful. One more compliment and I will fuck you in this kitchen until you can't stand."
"Scary."
"That did not sound scared."
"It was not supposed to."
I turned. I crossed the small floor to her and bent over her chair and flicked the soft of my finger against the center of her forehead.
"You are becoming a problem."
"You started it."
She caught my hand on its way back. She brought the back of it to her mouth and pressed her lips to it and let it go. She did it without ceremony. She did it the way a person does a thing she has been doing for a long time.
I went back to the eggs.
They came out the way Yelena would have wanted them to come out.
Soft. Bright. The toast was the toast you got when you let the heel of a loaf finish in the butter the pan had been ready to give up.
I plated her food, set it down in front of her, put the tea at the corner of the placemat so she would not knock it over, sat down across from her in the other chair with my own plate.
She put a forkful in her mouth. She closed her eyes.
"You are a problem," she said, around the egg.
"That is what I said about you."
"I was first."
"You were not."
"I was."
"Eat your eggs, Chloe."
She ate them. I ate mine. She told me about the woman on her floor who had been arguing with her boyfriend through the wall for a week and how she could not tell anymore whether the woman wanted him to leave or wanted him to stay.
I told her I would handle it if she wanted me to.
She told me I was not handling anything.
I asked her if she had slept well. She said she had slept like a person who had been broken into pieces and put back together correctly.
I did not have an answer to that. I drank my coffee.
She set her fork down. She wiped the corner of her mouth with the side of her thumb.
"Can we go to the mall? I want to buy something."
"I cannot say no to a woman in my shirt."
She got up to dress. I cleaned the dishes. I did not look at the door of the bedroom while she dressed, because if I had I would not have made it to the car.
I drove her myself. The Maybach took the parkway smooth and quiet the way it takes anything.
She put her hand on the console between us at the on-ramp, and I did not look at her for the length of the parkway because I had a feeling that if I looked at her she would take it back, and I was not ready for her to take it back.
She did not take it back.
I parked on the third level of the deck because that side of the building put us close to the atrium, and she liked the atrium because of the light. She had told me that once in passing weeks ago and I had not forgotten it.
She walked me into the store like she had been walking toward it for a year, because she had.
I saw it on her face before we reached the counter.
She had been wanting that specific phone for as long as I had been driving past her at the coffee shop window, and she had been putting away whatever a girl puts away who has been saving for a thing on her own, and today was the day.
She saw the model on the display along the back wall. The corner of her mouth moved.
I leaned in. My voice low at her ear.
"Let me get it."
"No."
I blinked. She did not soften. She did not turn her head. She kept her eyes on the phone.
"I saved for this. Let me have it. Let me have the moment where I got it for myself."
I stopped.
I understood her faster than I had understood most things in my life.
She did not want a man with a black card to clip her wings on the way out the door.
She wanted the small clean version of the moment she had been promising herself, the one where she walked in with her own money and walked out with her own thing, and she wanted to give that to herself, and I had almost taken it from her without knowing I was doing it.
I put my wallet back inside my jacket. I put my hand at the small of her back.
I walked behind her to the counter as her not-shadow.
She handed her card to the boy at the register and he ran it.
She signed the screen with the side of her thumb.
When he slid the bag across the counter she smiled wider than I had seen her smile yet.
I took the bag before she could reach for it. I did not ask. She did not stop me.
We walked out into the atrium. The light was the light she had told me about.
She kept turning the box over in her hands inside the bag as we walked, the way a child checks a thing she has been given to make sure the thing has not gone away.
I bought her a coffee from the kiosk by the fountain.
She drank half of it and handed me the cup.
I drank the rest because she had given it to me.
She got the new phone out of the box at a bench by the railing and powered it on and held it close to her chest while it set itself up, and I watched her watch the screen come alive, and the small line at the corner of her mouth came back.
She started taking pictures of me.
She did it sideways. She did it when she thought I was reading a sign.
She did it when I was looking at the directory and pretending to be looking at the directory.
I pretended not to notice. I noticed every one of them.
I would notice every one of them for the rest of my life if she kept taking them.
We turned the corner near the atrium.
I heard my name in a voice I had not heard in a few weeks.
"Daniil!"