Chapter 6 #3
For one second—one second—the counter was his and the weight was his, the weight I’d carried alone since the box and the church and the candles, every part of it with my own two hands. I’d just put it down. Because he told me to.
It felt good.
It felt good, and it wasn’t supposed to.
This was the leash. This was a man deciding things for me, telling me what to do in my own kitchen.
But it didn’t feel like a cage. It didn’t feel like being handled.
It felt like being set down. Like someone had reached in and lifted off a thing I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t just part of me.
The lightness where it had been was so enormous and so foreign that my eyes stung with it.
He put a plate in front of me. Bread split open and something soft inside it, cheese gone melting and a little oil and the herbs I keep by the stove, simple, made with hands.
There was a coffee beside it, and he set it down and then he stepped back.
He didn’t watch me eat it. He gave me the room, the way he’d given me the room all afternoon, and he turned to the counter and started in on the order I couldn’t finish, badly, slowly, but doing it, taking it, and left me alone with the food and the chair and the thing that had just happened to me.
I ate.
I felt undone. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what had just happened.
God help me, I wanted him to tell me to do something else.
I wanted him to do anything.
Something was building in me. A thrum. A buzz. A feeling of heat. It was strong—a wave, starting low down, spreading through me like dawn over a valley.
I couldn’t stay in the chair.
I crossed to the counter where he was butchering my order to take it back, to put my hands on my own work, to be the boss again, to draw the line back where the line went. That was the plan. I had a plan.
But the kitchen is small. I’ve said that.
The kitchen is built for one woman who knows where everything is, and crossing to the counter put me at his shoulder.
He turned to hand me the dough or to step out of my way—some small ordinary thing—and we arrived at the same space at the same time the way we had forty times since four in the morning, except this time neither of us moved.
He was so close. He’d pushed his sleeves up again at some point and the forearms were right there, the muscle and the ink and the scarred knuckles, the hands that had made me bread and lifted my flour and turned a chair with his foot, and his collar was open on a throat I could see the pulse in, and there was flour on his jaw he didn’t know about, dusted into the dark stubble, and his hair had come down over his forehead the way water falls over rock, and his mouth—the broken-nosed, ridiculous, devastating face of him—his mouth was right there, half-open on something he didn’t get to say, and I could feel the heat coming off him in waves, that furnace heat that had been crossing my kitchen all day, and I had spent the entire day cataloguing this man like inventory and telling myself I wasn’t, and the wall I’d built against him that afternoon and rebuilt that evening, the good wall, the speech-wall, the one I’d leaned on like it was holding—
It cracked from the inside.
I kissed him.
My body did it—I didn’t have a say in the matter. I went up on my toes and I took the open collar of his shirt in my flour-dusted fist and I pulled him down and I kissed him, hard, and he went absolutely still.
That was the thing I felt first, before the heat—his stillness, the shock of it, the held breath, because he hadn’t seen it coming, the charmer, the man who’d thrown his whole arsenal at me and watched it bounce, and the one thing he’d never tried was the one thing that worked because I was the one who did it, I moved, I was the lock that opened itself, and I felt the surprise go through his whole big body like a current.
And then he kissed me back.
God help me. His hand came up into my hair, the loose flour-dusted piece that always falls, his hand cupping the back of my head and tilting me into it and the heat of him everywhere at once, the furnace I’d been crossing all day pulled flush against me, his mouth opening over mine with a low sound that came up out of his chest, and the months of it broke open at once—every morning he’d leaned on my counter, every dollar of too much bread, every grin I’d thrown back and felt land somewhere low and inconvenient, every time we’d arrived at the same eighteen inches and I’d moved away too fast—all of it breaking over me at the same time, hot, the work-roughened closeness of him, the flour and the cologne and the storeroom and underneath it the warm animal smell of his skin, and I made a sound into his mouth I didn’t recognize and his other hand found my waist and pulled and I went, I went up against him like I’d been waiting a year to do it, because I had, I understood that now, I’d been waiting since the first morning he walked in and looked at me like I was the best thing he’d seen all week.
He was the one who was undone.
I felt it. The act was gone—the grin, the charm, the having-a-wonderful-night, all of it stripped right off him, and what was under it was a man kissing me like he couldn’t believe he got to, ragged, his breath gone short against my mouth, his hand fisting in my apron, the boxer’s steadiness shaking just slightly the way his hands had shaken that first night after he’d put the collector through the glass.
I’d done that. Me. I’d cracked the man whose whole life was charming locks open, and the power of it and the heat of it and the relief of it, the same enormous terrible relief as the chair, of finally putting it down, of finally not being the only one holding the wall—
I pulled back.
I got my fist out of his collar and my body off his and I stepped back into the bench hard enough to bruise, and we stood there a foot apart, both of us breathing like we’d run somewhere, his mouth open and his hair in his face and his eyes gone dark and stunned, and I put the back of my wrist to my mouth the way I had at the scorched wall, and I felt the horror come up through the heat like cold water through warm.
I’d done it.
The one thing. The thing I swore I wouldn’t.
I’d handed it over—the gratitude, the thank-you, the oh thank you my hero, I’d handed it over with my own mouth, I’d kissed the grinning rescuer I’d built a whole speech against not two days ago in a church basement, I’d let him set me down and feed me and tell me what to do and then I’d climbed him like a fence I’d sworn to keep, and now I owed, now it was his story, now I was the woman he saved and warmed and kissed in her own kitchen, and the dream stopped being mine and his and started being a thing a man did for me, and—
“Katerina,” he said. Just my name. Quiet, the steel gone soft, the same voice that had set me in the chair, and it was the worst thing he could have said because I wanted to walk back into it.
“Get out,” I said.
“I—”
“Get out. Go home. We’re done for the day.
” My voice wasn’t shaking. I made sure my voice wasn’t shaking even though everything under it was.
“Take your dog. Four a.m. tomorrow. Don’t—” I couldn’t finish it.
Don’t what. Don’t do that again. Don’t make me feel that again. Don’t look at me like that. “Just go.”
He looked at me a long moment, and he didn’t push.
He got his coat. He whistled Olimpo up out of the doorway, low, and the great gray traitor heaved himself up and went to him, and at the door he stopped and didn’t grin and didn’t make it a joke and just said, “Tomorrow,” not like a date this time, like a promise, and the cold came in and the bell went and he was gone.
And I stood alone in the warm gold middle of my shop with my father grinning at me from under the cracked glass and the kiss burning on my mouth.
Fuck.
I wanted him.
I wanted him so badly I could have gone out into the cold after him, and I hated that I wanted him, hated it with everything I had left, which by then was almost nothing at all.
“Oh no,” I said, to the empty shop, to the photograph, to nobody.
I’d known it was the door. I’d known from the start. And I’d thrown it wide open with my own two hands.