15. Off the Page
OFF THE PAGE
EMILIA
The cab smells like pine air freshener and my own bad decisions.
I ride uptown with my mother in my coat pocket, assembling a plan in the orderly, frozen part of my brain that takes over when the rest of me quits.
Francesca first. Then her guest room, her landline, her lawyer.
By Monday, I’ll have an agent call a locksmith and get a new phone with no history.
People rebuild from less. I've written four heroines who rebuilt from less, and I gave each of them better material than this.
Francesca's building rises gray and familiar on the corner, with its awning, brass, and the doorman who has known my coffee order for ten years. The lobby light is the warmest thing I've seen all night.
I have one foot on the curb when a black car cuts the corner and stops hard in front of the awning, close enough that I step back, and Leo comes out of the passenger door before it finishes rocking.
My whole body goes to ice. Behind him, the driver stays at the wheel, a big man with red hair and both hands in view, watching the street instead of me.
"Don't." I put my hand up, as if a hand has ever stopped a man like him. "Whatever this is, whatever you've decided we are, don't."
He doesn't take the warning. He takes one step closer instead, slow and careful, as I might bolt.
"Emilia." He stops an arm's length away, and that's when I actually look at his face, because his voice comes out wrong.
I've memorized this man over eight weeks: his face at rest, his face amused, his face shuttered for company, the face he wears in bed when his control slips a fraction and the Italian comes out. This one is new.
He's gray around the mouth, his tie is gone, he's breathing like he took the stairs, and his eyes are doing something I'd call fear on anyone else.
"You can hate me," he says, low and fast. "You will hate me, and you'll be right. But you cannot go into that building."
I laugh, ugly and small. "You don't get to tell me where's safe. You're the thing I'm running from."
He absorbs it as it lands on bone.
"I know." He doesn't move out of my way.
"Move." I step toward the building.
"Francesca called Gianna," he says it plainly, no padding, a surgeon naming the tumor.
"The night you reached out to her about the new consultant, a year of nerves ago, maybe earlier.
She's been reporting on you ever since. Gianna Severino has known who you are for a week, and an hour ago, Francesca told her you were coming.
There are people waiting upstairs, and they are not editors. "
My head shakes before I can find words, a refusal that comes from somewhere below thought.
"You're lying." The words taste like batteries. "She found me, she built me, and she's the only person on this earth who..."
I stop.
Because I'm a writer, a writer's curse is hearing dialogue twice, and my memory replays the 4 a.m. call without asking my permission.
Come straight here, sweetheart. Take a cab, not the train. Come straight up.
Then nothing. Nothing at all.
A decade of Francesca interrogating my comma placement, of her sending back a chapter because a character's grief was "two degrees too quiet." Tonight, I told her I was in trouble at 4 a.m., and she didn't ask a single question.
She already knew the answers.
Something in me doesn't shatter. Shattering is loud.
This is quieter and worse, a settling too deep to pinpoint.
My mother lied about my name. Imagination turned out to be evidence.
The man I was falling for kept a file on me in a locked drawer.
And the last warm room in my life has people waiting for me.
Everything I have ever believed about my own story was architecture, and other people drew it.
"Emilia." Leo's voice drops to the register I used to think was intimacy. "Get in the car. Hate me from inside the car."
I look at the lobby one more time, the brass, the warm light, the doorman lifting his hand in easy recognition. The worst part is how good the lie still looks from the sidewalk.
I get in the car.
Nobody speaks as we cross the city. The driver glances at me once in the mirror, then wordlessly reaches over without a word and turns up the heater.
I hate that a stranger's kindness is what almost breaks me.
We go through a parking garage, switch cars, and double back twice.
Leo watches the mirrors the entire time, his jaw set.
A distant, professional corner of me recognizes the tradecraft from my own Chapter Nine.
The safe house isn't a house. It's three rooms above a shuttered tailor shop in a nameless neighborhood, with iron shutters, a steel door, and a lock that sounds like a bank when he turns it. No art, no books. A bed, a table, two chairs, four walls. The home of no one, owned by nothing.
"No family knows about this place," he tells me, sliding the bolt. "No faction. Not Tommy, not the detail. It's mine, and now it's yours. It's the only square footage in this city where both of those things are true."
The door locks, the adrenaline quits, and everything I have been carrying since the lullaby dream comes up my throat at once.
"You sat in my apartment," I begin. My voice doesn't shake, which surprises us both. "And watched me bleed onto a page, and you were taking notes. Session notes, Leo. Details extracted. I read them on the floor of your office while you were wherever men like you go at 3 a.m."
He stands by the door and takes it. Doesn't reach for me, doesn't sit, doesn't arrange his face into anything. He just receives it, eyes open. Has decided he'll hold every round.
"You slept next to me and cross-referenced my subconscious with a map.
" I'm moving now, the room is too small for what's in me.
"You corrected my hero's gun hand and wrote down what my flinch told you.
Breakfast was a vector. You made me think I was falling in love, and the whole time I was a dig site. A treasure hunt with a body attached."
He doesn't flinch. Looks at me steadily, like every word is a sentence he's been waiting to be charged with.
"Yes," he says.
"Don't agree with me!" I'm shouting now, and I let myself, because there's no one left to perform composure for.
"Tell me I'm wrong about one thing. Pick anything.
Pick the smallest thing and tell me it was real, then explain how I could ever believe you.
You're so good, Leo, so good that I watched you fall asleep and still can't tell which man was the lie. "
The silence afterward rings in my ears. My chest heaves. Somewhere under the rage, I notice I'm crying. I’m furious about that, too.
"Everything you just said is true," he answers at last, quiet and level.
"I was going to tell you everything today.
I know that doesn't matter. Tomorrow doesn't count when today is the day you found out.
But you asked me to pick one thing, so here it is.
It isn't strategy, it isn't the mission, and it isn't about any ledger.
" He takes a breath. "I have never, in my life, been more terrified than I was twenty minutes ago, watching you reach for that lobby door. "
The word is so quiet, so unlike anything I've ever heard him admit, that for one breath I forget I'm furious. Then I remember, hard.
"Terrified?" I throw the word back at him. "Of losing the asset? Of explaining to your employers that the dig site walked off?"
Something moves through his face then, fast and unguarded, controlled again before I can name it. When he speaks, his voice has gravel in it that I've never heard.
"Terrified that the last thing you'd ever believe about me was the drawer."
I kiss him to shut him up.
It's not forgiveness. Not even want, not at first. It's the only violence left to me: fists in his shirt, teeth in the kiss, shoving him back against the steel door hard enough to rattle it in its frame.
He takes it, too, lets me, until something snaps in him.
Then his hands clamp around my waist, and he kisses me back like he's the one drowning and I'm the surface.
"Emilia." He breaks off an inch, breathing wrecked, searching my face. "Tell me to stop, and I stop."
It would be so easy to say yes. Easier than any other yes I've said in eight weeks.
"If you stop," I tell him, dragging his mouth back down, "I will never forgive you for that, either."
His pulse jumps under my hand on his throat. The asking has changed: not permission, but the words on the record.
"Then say it." His voice drops against my lips. "Say you want me to fuck you."
I make him wait three breaths for it, because tonight I take whatever I can.
"I want you to fuck me like the man from the drawer." I bite his jaw hard enough to leave a mark. "Not the consultant. Don't you dare be gentle. You don't get to fuck me the way you love me."
Something dangerous settles on his face, and when he answers, it's the quiet voice, the one that has always been more frightening than shouting. "Then I'll fuck you like you're mine," he murmurs. "That part was never a lie."
We tear at each other. There's no other verb for it.
I cost his shirt its buttons; my coat lands on the floor with my mother still in the pocket.
He drags my shirt over my head, the bra coming with it, his mouth on my nipple before I can take a breath, biting hard enough that I cry out and arch into the pain.
The other hand finds my other tit, rolls the nipple between his fingers, ungentle, deliberate.
Then he spins us so my back meets the steel door, one hand fisting in my hair to tip my throat open for his mouth, the other dragging my jeans open.
When his fingers slide between my legs, he exhales a curse into my neck.
"Christ. You're soaked." He drags two fingers through me, slow and obscene, holding my gaze as he does it. "All that hate, and your pussy's been telling the truth this whole time."