Chapter 16
CHLOE
The tile was cool against the soles of my feet.
I had not bothered with the slippers the wives had left folded in the dresser.
I had not bothered with much. I had pulled on the long t-shirt that smelled of the cedar drawer and the soft sleep pants I had been living in since I had come back through the door of this house, and I had walked down the back stairs without turning on a single lamp.
The kitchen was dark except for the small undercabinet strip someone always left on at this hour. The little line of warm light ran along the marble like a vein. I crossed to the cabinet by the sink and reached up for a glass and that was when I saw him.
He sat at the long island in a black undershirt and dark sleep pants, one bare foot hooked on the bottom rung of the stool.
His hair was wet at the ends from a late shower.
A glass of red wine stood half done in front of him on the marble.
The bottle was at his elbow with the cork laid loose on its side.
He had been alone with himself for a while in the dark and I could see it in him, in the small bend of his shoulder over the glass and in the way his eyes lifted now at the small sound of the cabinet, surprised, as if he had forgotten the house held anyone else in it.
"Can't sleep?" I said.
He gave me a small nod. He did not speak.
I crossed to the sink. I turned the tap and filled the glass and the water ran cold over my fingers as it filled.
I drank half of it standing there with my back to him because I needed something to do with my mouth that was not say his name into a kitchen with no light in it. The glass sweated against my palm.
I set the glass down on the rim of the sink. I did not turn around right away.
"Stay a minute," he said behind me. "It might sound strange. I rest easier when you're in a room."
I closed my eyes for a half breath. I let the line land where it wanted to land in me.
"It doesn't sound strange," I said. I turned. "It sounds like you, Daniil."
He looked at me a long beat. The kitchen light caught one side of his face and left the other in shadow and I could see the small adjustment in him at his own name, at the shape of the word in my mouth. He pushed the wineglass away from him an inch. He did not look at it. He looked at me.
I crossed the kitchen to him.
I did it slow on the cool tile. I let my body decide the thing my head had been arguing about for three months.
My body decided easily. I came around the corner of the island and I stepped into the gap between his knees where he sat on the high stool, and he did not move back to make room and he did not lean in to take.
He waited. His knees opened a little to let me stand inside them.
I wound my arms around the back of his neck. My face was on a level with his now, his eyes a foot from mine in the strip of warm light, the smallest line at the corner of his mouth where the bruise had gone yellow at the edge of his jaw.
He set the glass down on the marble. Both his hands came up to my waist over the t-shirt.
The heat of his palms went through the cotton in two flat shapes and I closed my eyes for a half breath because that warmth had been gone for ninety days and a small handful more, and my body had been keeping count without asking my permission.
I opened my eyes again. He was watching my face. The amnesia-soft eyes I had been calling Pete in my head for a week were watching me, and underneath them another set of eyes had started to come up to the surface, the older ones, the ones I knew.
"Did I treat you well before?" he said.
"You treated me like you owned me," I said. "I liked it."
The corner of his mouth lifted. Not the polite lift. The smaller older one I used to know, the one that lived a little lower in his face and pulled a little less far. The lift that said he had heard me.
"Am I your boyfriend?" he said.
"Not exactly," I said. "Close to it."
His hands tightened at my waist by a small amount. He did not look away.
"How close?" he said.
"This close," I said.
I kissed him.
His mouth opened under mine the way a door opens when the right hand finds the right knob in the dark.
Soft at first. He let me set the pace. I had been waiting ninety days to put my mouth on him with my own permission and he had been waiting in a body he did not remember to be kissed by the right one, and when our mouths met the kitchen did the small respectful thing of going away around us.
I tilted my head. I caught his bottom lip between mine and let it go.
He breathed in once against my mouth, the smallest catch, and the low sound he made then was a sound I had not heard since the bathroom of my apartment a small life ago.
I had carried that sound in my chest like a coin in a pocket for three months and here it was again, the same one, a small low hum at the back of his throat that he had not asked his body for.
His hand at my waist slid up my ribs. His thumb found the underside of my breast through the cotton and did not press.
He set the weight of his hand there and let it rest, the way a man sets a hand on a thing he is being permitted to hold.
The cotton was thin enough that I felt the heat of his palm clear through.
I felt his thumb learn the shape of the underside.
I broke the kiss. I moved my mouth to the side of his neck.
His pulse was fast there under the soft skin behind his ear. I set my mouth on it. I caught the edge of his jaw with the side of my teeth, not hard, a small remembered move from a former life of his, and he breathed out against the side of my face in a way that was not breath at all.
"Fuck," he said, low at my ear.
It was the first half of his older voice through. The contraction was gone out of it. The Pete in him had not said the word.
His hands moved. Both palms slid down to the backs of my thighs.
"Hop," he said.
I hopped.
My legs went around his hips and locked behind him and he stood up off the stool with me against him in one clean motion as if his body remembered the weight of me and the right way to carry it. There was no pretense now about who was taking who anywhere. I locked my arms around his neck.
He carried me out of the kitchen.
The hall was dark. He did not look down for the steps when he reached the staircase.
He went up them with me in his arms the way a man goes up stairs in a body he has been going up stairs in for years, even when his head did not remember which body that was.
I turned my face into the side of his neck on the way up and I breathed him in.
The compound soap. The clean wet at the ends of his hair.
And underneath those, the thing I had been hungry for in the dark of my own bed for three months, the thing I had not been able to name and would not need to name again now that I had it against my face.
He shouldered the door of his bedroom open with his hip.
I knew the room. I had been in it a handful of times in the last few days.
The big bed under the long window, the lamp on the nightstand on low, the small chair by the dresser where he hung a clean shirt.
He carried me three steps in and he set me down at the foot of the bed on my feet. He stood back from me a half step.
He looked at me. The older eyes were near the surface now. The Pete softness had moved over and made room. He held my gaze a long second and I held his.
"Tell me to stop," he said. "You tell me now."
"Don't stop," I said.
The line went through him. I saw it go. His shoulders settled the half inch they had been holding above where they wanted to be.
He undressed me first.
He did it slow. The same slow I had learned in the bathroom of my apartment in a life he did not remember, the kind of slow that was not careful in the polite way but careful in the bratva way, the slow of a man who took the small details as personally as the large ones.
He found the hem of the t-shirt at my hips and gathered it up between his fingers.
He lifted it. I raised my arms. The cotton went up over my ribs and over my shoulders and over my head and he set it on the chair by the dresser the way he set things he meant to be careful with.
He looked at me. The pale skin under the lamp. His eyes moved down without hurry, the older eyes, the ones I knew. I let him look. I had not let anyone look at me in three months and the only thing I wanted now was the weight of his eyes on me with his permission and mine.
He knelt for the sleep pants.
He was the kind of man who knelt for the small details.
He hooked his thumbs in the waistband and he drew them down over my hips and down my thighs and to the floor and he paused on the way down with his hands at my hips.
He looked up at me once. He did not need the permission.
He had it. He was asking anyway because his body remembered that part too.
I nodded.
He took his time on the way back up. The flat of his hand traveled the outside of my thigh on the way to standing.
The pad of his thumb caught the small soft place at the inside of my hip and his mouth followed his thumb for one slow second, a small kiss on the inside of my hip that put a small hot thing low in my stomach that had been asleep for three months and was awake now.
He stood.
I undressed him.
I found the hem of the black undershirt and I drew it up over the long flat of his stomach and over the harder flat of his ribs and over his shoulders and over his head.
The bruise at his jaw caught the lamp on the way past. I set the shirt on the chair beside mine.
I came back to him. I set my palm flat over his chest where his heart was running under the skin and I felt it, the steady fast give of him, the heart of a man who knew where the night was going even though he did not know whose night this had been before.