Delilah
The door hasn't finished swinging shut behind Jasper when Sammie says my name in a way that tells me she knows.
"Hmm?" For some reason, I’m holding out hope that if I remain calm and unbothered, she won’t pry, because I don’t know how to tell her what happened between me and Jasper last night.
She raises her perfectly arched eyebrows at me.
"‘Hmm?’ That’s the best you can manage?" She has her coat over one arm and the pram parked in the warm patch by the window.
I peek over the edge of the pram and find Lilah asleep with both fists up beside her ears.
"I walked in here and found Jasper Federov drinking coffee before opening time. "
"He was being helpful. Fed the cats and everything." That’s the second I know I’ve let too much slip.
Sammie’s grin grows wider.
"He was being something..." She hangs the coat, ties her apron, and takes her place at the register with the serenity of a woman who has decided she can wait all day if she has to. "I’m glad you two have finally seen sense."
And that's all she says. She lets it go entirely, which is significantly worse than if she'd pushed, because now it's sitting in the room with us like an eighth cat.
Judging.
Old Bill arrives at nine on the dot and I put his Danish down in front of him along with a slice of yesterday's apple cake he absolutely did not ask for, since my first attempt at baking this morning wasn’t salvageable.
"I didn't order that."
"It's free."
"Nothing's free." He looks at the cake, then at me, over the top of his glasses. "You're humming."
"I hum." I shrug as if to emphasize that this is totally normal behavior for me. Which it is. I do hum.
He picks up his fork and considers the burnt edge with the seriousness of a man inspecting foundations. "Are you running tonight?"
My hands go still on the tray. Yesterday I rolled my eyes at him and said something breezy. Today I'm thinking about seeing Jasper holding a man against a tree and telling me I was being followed.
"No," I say. "Not tonight."
Bill's eyebrows go up so far they nearly leave his head altogether.
"Good," he says at last, and goes back to his paper with the air of a man who suspects he's been cheated somehow.
The rush lands at half nine and saves me for the better part of an hour.
I steam milk and pull shots and call out names.
My body keeps sending up small reports from last night that have me pausing every so often to try and recalibrate my brain.
There's an ache low in my hips every time I crouch for a clean jug.
A spot at the base of my throat that stings faintly under my collar.
I catch myself smiling at the grinder like it's done something charming, and Cookie sits on the corner of the counter and watches me do it with an expression I don't appreciate.
I overfill the milk jug twice and hand a cortado to a woman who ordered chai, and at one point I stand with my palm flat on the warm side of the machine thinking about Jasper carrying me two steps toward my bedroom and giving up on the idea entirely.
I only come back into the room because Rhodes is yowling at the fridge.
Kimmie comes over at eleven for the burnt end of the Victoria sponge she claimed by text this morning, which she eats standing at the counter, straight off the plate, with paint under three of her fingernails and a smear of something white along her jaw.
"It's the best part," she says, with her mouth full. "The rest is just cake."
"That's the nicest insult I've ever been given."
"It's a compliment. Everything I like tastes slightly of regret." She points the fork at me. "You look like somebody plugged you in."
I blink at her. "I don’t know what you mean."
She waits, and when I don't fill the gap she shrugs and goes back to the cake, and I love her a little more for it.
The afternoon thins out around two. Lilah wakes and gets passed between the four of us like a parcel, then Eduard collects her at half past with the pram folded over one arm and a look at Sammie that lasts a second longer than it needs to.
He nods at me on his way out. I've spent fifteen months learning to read this man and I still couldn't tell you a single thing about that nod.
By three there are two people in the café and both of them are asleep.
Sammie makes two cups of tea without asking and sets them on the end of the counter.
"Sit down before you scrub a hole in that surface," she says.
"I'm working," I state. Though I have cleaned the entire counter space several more times than usual today.
"Come on Delilah," she presses. "Sit with me."
I sit, wrapping both hands around the mug and watching at the steam coming off it. Socks jumps up onto the stool beside me and puts her paws on my knee like a witness for the defense.
"I slept with Jasper," I whisper.
"I know."
My head comes up. "How do you know?"
"Because you've been lit up like a lamp since I first saw you this morning." She blows across the top of her tea. "And because he was here before opening, Delilah, and Jasper doesn't go anywhere before he needs to be there."
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out of it. Somewhere behind me the fridge changes note, and Lucifer knocks a teaspoon off the drainer then looks at it like it’s caused him a grievance.
"You're not upset?" I ask.
"Why on earth would I be upset?" Sammie throws her head back with a laugh, then stops and touches my knee when she realizes I was serious.
I give her the answer I've been carrying around, and it comes out faster and messier than I intend.
"Because it doesn't just go wrong for me if it goes wrong.
It goes wrong at your kitchen table. It goes wrong at Christmas, and at Lilah's birthdays, and every day he comes in for coffee and I have to look at him.
He's Eduard's cousin. He's in your house twice a week at family dinner.
He held your daughter at her christening, and I make your coffee and I know your bank passwords and I live in an apartment you found for me.
" I put the mug down because my hands have started doing something I don't like.
"If I break this, I don't just lose a boyfriend. I lose you."
Sammie is quiet for a moment.
"Is that what you've been sitting on?" she asks. "That whole thing? All this time?"
I shrug my brows. "It's a fairly complete thought. I've had months."
She laughs again.
"Delilah. I married the head of the Bratva." She's still laughing. "In a church. There were four men in the back row who I'm fairly sure were armed and one of them cried. You dating his cousin is not going to be the thing that complicates my life."
She reaches over and takes my wrist, the same way I take hers when Bill says something that lands too close to something sore.
"You're not my employee. You're not a friend of the family.
You're my person, and there is nothing you could do with Jasper Federov or anybody else that would put that at risk.
Nothing. If the two of you crashed and burned tomorrow, I'd bring wine to your apartment and say something extremely rude about him, and then on Sunday I'd go to lunch at Valeria's and say something extremely rude about him there, too. "
My eyes have gone hot. I look hard at the tea.
"He'd hate that," I manage.
"He'd deserve it." She lets go of my wrist and picks her mug back up. "Which isn't going to happen, incidentally, because that man has been in love with you since the wedding."
I let out a snort. "You don't know that."
"Delilah, he drinks his coffee black. Everywhere.
Eduard's kitchen, the yard, my house at Christmas.
Black, no sugar, like a Federov. He comes in here and you hand him whatever you've been experimenting with in a mug shaped like a cat's face and he drinks the entire thing and says thank you.
" She counts it off on her fingers. "He remembers your supplier problems. He knows which of the cats will sit on him and tolerates it, because it means he gets to be here.
He asked Eduard in March what the café's insurance covered, and then he had it upgraded and never mentioned it to either of us. "
"He did what? Why?"
"Valeria has a bet with Natan," she goes on, ignoring me completely. "Fifty on it happening before the summer. She's going to be unbearable, I'm so sorry. And Eduard has known since roughly the day after the wedding, and he's enjoyed every single second of watching Jasper torture himself."
I laugh, wetly, and wipe my face with the heel of my hand.
"You could have said something."
"I said something constantly. I said it with my eyebrows for a year." She points at her eyebrows as if to prove the point. "Was he good to you?"
The blush floods my face before I have the chance to even try and stop it.
Sammie laughs.
I think about the paper bag on the counter and the vanilla inside it.
About the way he walked me home without once making me feel like I was being escorted.
About the fact that he opened up with me this morning and fed the cats he's still a little intimidated by, and put his hand over mine before making his way out the door like he was leaving something behind for later.
"He kept me safe for six months without telling me," I say. "He sat in a car park in the cold, all winter."
Sammie is very still for a second. "Then that's the whole conversation," she says.
It isn't. She asks about forty questions over the next twenty minutes while we restock the pastry case, gets exactly two honest answers out of me, and considers this a personal triumph. Somewhere in the middle of it the weight I've been carrying goes, and by four o'clock I'm humming again.
Sammie leaves at five, but not before giving me a tight hug and telling me to have fun.
I close up alone at six. I do the tables east to west, stack the chairs in pairs, mop, feed the cats, and take a long moment over Lemur, who has decided the mop is his enemy and must be defeated. Every. Single. Night.
At home I change out of my work clothes and don't put my running things on, which feels stranger than I expected. I stand in my kitchen instead, in the room where Jasper stripped me bare under a light that's far too bright, and I put the oven on. Baking will help keep my hands busy. Maybe I’ll try another apple loaf and see if I don’t burn this one.
At half past seven I text him. Not running tonight, so don't sit in any car parks. There's an apple loaf with your name on it and I mean that literally, I wrote it in the icing.
The reply doesn't come for nearly two hours; Sounds good. Working late. Lock your door.
I read it three times, standing in my socks in the middle of my own kitchen with the smell of apples and cinnamon around me. Then I go through to the hall and turn the key, and slide the chain across as well, which I've never felt the need to use in four years of living here.
Whatever he's doing tonight, he doesn't want me to know about it.
I get into bed on the side nearest the wall, which is not the side I have slept on since I was nineteen.
I lie there for a while listening to the gulls arguing on the roof of the building opposite.
I'm not frightened. That's the part I keep turning over.
I'm lying in the dark with a chain on my door and a man somewhere out there in the night doing something he won't put in a message, and what I feel is closer to being held.
I think that probably says something about me.
I'm asleep before I work out what.