Chapter 12 #2
If he wouldn’t be honest, I wouldn’t be good.
So I worked, kept working.
I worked past the point where it does any good.
Past the point where a tired body starts making more work than it finishes, dropping things, mismeasuring, the bad economy of exhaustion.
The shake came up in my hands around three, the fine bad one, the deep one, not the end-of-day tremor but the one that says the body has spent everything and gone into the walls for more.
I knew that shake. I’d nearly hit the deck on it once. He’d put me in the chair over it.
I kept going.
I kept going on purpose, is the thing, and I knew I was doing it, and I watched him watch me do it from across my kitchen, and there was a low ugly satisfaction in it, the satisfaction of laying my own destruction out on the marble where he’d have to look at it.
You want to manage me? Manage this. The room did the small tilt it does and I caught the bench and locked my knees and told it to hold still and reached for the next thing with a hand that wouldn’t be still, and I dared him with my whole body, the way I’d dared him this morning with what’s on the curb.
He waited until the bell went silent.
He’s good that way—he didn’t do it in front of the bus driver or the last straggling customer, didn’t make it a scene with an audience.
He waited until the door was locked and the front lights were off and the ovens had started their long tick down into quiet, the warm gold settling into the gray, and then he set a plate at my elbow.
Bread, cheese, the herbs. Sideways. The way that gets past me.
And then he stepped in close, and his voice came down to the soft-steel, the calm one, the one with no anger anywhere in it.
“Katerina. Stop.”
I didn’t.
“You’re shaking.” He said it flat, certain, a fact laid down.
“You’ve been shaking for an hour. You’re gray.
That’s the rule. No working past the shake.
You wrote it in your own hand last night—I watched you write it, you didn’t even fight that one.
So you’re done. Sit down. Eat. I’ve got the counter. ”
I’ve got the counter.
The words that had set me down a dozen times now, the warm-water words, and I felt them reach for the place they always reached and I shut the door on them.
I put my shaking hand flat on the marble and I turned around and I faced him, and when I spoke it came out the way I’d meant it to come out, like a blade laid down on the bench between us.
“The rule.”
He went still.
“You want to talk to me about the rule.” My voice didn’t shake even though my hands did—I had that much, at least, I had the voice.
“You went cold in the dark an hour after I signed that paper. You took a call in a language I don’t speak with your back to me, and your face went flat, and you stood in front of my window like there was a gun in the street, and you told me to trust you.
And this morning you read a threat off an empty curb and stepped in front of it and told me nothing was there.
You’re managing something behind my back right now—don’t, don’t shake your head, your grin’s flat, it’s been flat all day, you’re the worst liar I ever met and so am I and that’s the one thing we’ve got in common. ”
“Katerina—”
“You don’t get both.” I was louder now and I didn’t care.
“You don’t get to hold every weight I carry and keep a secret about a thing that’s hunting me on my own block.
You don’t get the rules and the secret. Pick one.
You want to be the man who feeds me sideways and checks my binding twice and tells me to sleep—then you tell me what’s on the curb.
You want to keep your locked door—fine, keep it, but then you don’t get to lecture me about a shake in my own kitchen. ”
He was quiet a moment. The ovens ticked.
“Kataifi,” he said.
Soft. Even. Not a wall this time—an out, a door held open, the gentlest thing.
“That stops all of it,” he said. “You know that. The rules, the dynamic, all of it. You say the word and it’s just two people in a kitchen and there’s no line for me to hold and nothing you owe. It’s yours. You don’t have to earn it. If this is too much—if you need it off—say it and it’s off.”
And he meant it. That was the maddening, the unbearable thing—he meant it all the way down, he’d have unhanded the whole of it in a breath if I’d said the pastry.
But I didn’t want it off.
I picked up the plate.
And I pushed it off the bench.
It went over the edge slow, the way things go over an edge when you’ve decided, and hit the chipped tile and broke, bread and cheese and a shard of white going across the floor into the gray, and Olimpo lifted his great head and looked at it and looked at me and decided, wisely, to stay exactly where he was.
He didn’t raise his voice.
Tonio just looked at the broken plate on the tile, and then he looked at me, and his face had gone calm in a way that put a stone in my chest—the calm of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wasn’t in any hurry to do it.
Never in anger. Structure, not punishment.
“We’ll deal with that later,” he said.
Just that. Quiet. And he bent and picked up the broken plate, the bread, the shard, swept the rest, set it in the bin, and went back to the counter and worked, and let the later hang over the whole afternoon like weather coming.
I worked too. We didn’t speak much. The shake went out of my hands eventually because he made me drink water and eat a roll standing up, and I let him, because I’d made my point about the plate and there was no point in fainting on top of it.
The radio played low. The light went out of the window.
And under all of it the later sat, and I felt it the way you feel a coming storm in your teeth, and somewhere in the middle of the afternoon the dread of it turned, the way these things turn in me now, into something else.
Something low and warm and humming that I was appalled at and did not stop.
When the bakery was dark and locked he took my hand and led me to the back office.
I was nervous. I’ll say it. My mouth had gone dry and my pulse was up in my throat. And under the nerves, threaded all through them, impossible to tell apart from them, was something else. Excitement, the low blue flame of it.
He turned the chair to face out, the way he turns a chair, and he sat in it, and he looked up at me.
“Tell me why I’m going to discipline you,” he said.
Low. The soft-steel. No anger in it.
“Because I broke a rule,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant. “On purpose. No working past the shake.”
“Why did you break it?”
“Because—” I made myself look at him. “Because you won’t be straight with me. And if you won’t be honest, I won’t be handled. You don’t get the half that suits you.”
He nodded, slow, like I’d handed him something he’d expected.
“That’s fair,” he said “We’re going to talk about the curb.
I promise you we’re going to talk about it, and you’re going to hate the answer, and we’ll get there.
But that’s not what this is.” He held my eyes.
“You told me you trusted me. And then you took that and you pushed it. You damaged yourself to make a point. You worked yourself to the bone to punish me, knowing I’d have to watch, knowing I couldn’t make you stop without breaking the one rule that says you can rip it back any time you want. ”
“Yes,” I said. Because it was true. All of it was true.
“So this isn’t because you asked the question.” His voice gentled, somehow, and got harder at the same time. “You get to ask the question. This is because you said you trusted me and then you acted like you didn’t.”
“Yes,” I said again, and my eyes were stinging, and I didn’t know why, except that being seen that clearly is a thing close to being held.
“I’m going to put you over my lap,” he said. “My hand. Only ever the hand. You can stop it any second. You know the word.”
“Kataifi,” I said. To prove I had it. To prove I wasn’t going to use it.
“Good girl.”
It went down me like it always did, warm water down the spine, and he reached out and took my wrist, gentle, and drew me over.
He arranged me over his lap with his hands, careful, unhurried, the way he turns the chair, and I went where his hands put me because there was nothing else to be, my hips over his thigh, my palms flat on the cold floor, my hair falling forward, and the position was so undignified and so absolute that the want spiked clean through the nerves and left them behind.
I felt his hand at the waist of my work trousers.
He drew them down. Slow. Over my hips, down my thighs, and the air of the office touched the backs of my legs, and then his fingers hooked the green lace—the lace he’d chosen this morning—and he drew that down too, and I was bare over his lap.
I knew what he could see. I knew my pussy was up at him, peeping, the most exposed I’d ever been, and I knew—because I could feel it, slick and warm and undeniable—exactly how wet I was.
He must be able to see it. There was no hiding it.
I was laid bare and dripping over a man’s lap, and the shame of it and the heat of it were the same thing, braided into one current, impossible to pull apart.
The tension was too much. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want it to stop.
His hand came to rest on my bare backside.
Just rested there. Warm, heavy, the work-roughened scarred palm I’d watched all day every day spread flat on my skin, weighing me, and I sighed—a sound I didn’t decide to make—and quivered, the whole length of me, a fine shiver running up from where his hand was.
“Look at you,” he said, low. “Already.”
And then the hand came up, and it came down.