Chapter Eight Mateo
The power goes at nine forty-three. One second, the oven clock is glowing, the next it’s a blank black rectangle.
The mixer dies mid-rotation. The overhead fluorescents cut out.
Half the station drops into a dim, amber-tinted quiet that feels almost respectful, like the building itself is taking a breath.
I stand at the counter for a moment, flour on my hands, and listen to the station adjust.
The emergency strips kick in along the baseboards, casting everything in low, warm light. Somewhere down the hall, Rico shouts something dramatic and unintelligible. A door opens, then closes.
Boots on the staircase. The usual percussion of twenty people recalibrating to an unexpected change in their environment.
I wipe my hands on a dish towel and look out the kitchen window.
The brownstones across the street are fully lit. Windows glowing amber and gold, Christmas lights still running along stoops and window boxes, the whole block quietly radiant despite whatever just happened to our grid. That’s New York for you. The city doesn’t go dark. It just redistributes.
I glance back at the mixer full of half-finished dough and make a pragmatic decision.
Hand stir it is.
I’m rummaging through the third drawer looking for the wooden spoon that is never where it’s supposed to be when I hear footsteps on the stairs. Bare feet, light and quick. I don’t even have to look up to know it isn’t one of the guys.
She stops in the kitchen doorway. I stay where I am behind the open cabinet door and wait.
She doesn’t see me at first. That’s the thing about her. She’s so focused on what she’s doing that the rest of the world genuinely ceases to exist for her.
Right now what she’s doing is crouching in front of the industrial coffee machine with her head tilted sideways, peering at it like it’s a crime scene.
The machine is still running, humming quietly on the half of the circuit that didn’t flicker, but the cabinet lights above it are dead and she’s trying to read the display in the dim.
Her hair is down, all that copper and bronze loose around her shoulders. She’s wearing leggings and the Columbia sweatshirt, the one she seems to rotate through every couple of nights, and her feet are bare on the kitchen tile.
The dead string of lights along the top cabinets hangs dark above her head. The whole kitchen smells like cinnamon and brown sugar from what I was baking before the flicker, sweet and warm against the cold seeping in through the window.
I find the spoon. I lean against the counter and wait.
“I know you’re still running,” she tells the machine, in a tone that I would describe as negotiating with a hostage situation. “I can hear you. So whatever you’re doing right now is a personal choice and I need you to reconsider it.”
The coffee machine continues doing exactly what it wants.
I lose the battle with my own face entirely.
The laugh comes out before I can do anything about it, and she spins around so fast she nearly loses her balance on the tile.
Her hand shoots out and grabs the counter.
Her expression moves through approximately four distinct phases in under two seconds.
Startled, embarrassed, irritated, and then something that is trying very hard to be dignity and not quite getting there.
“How long have you been standing there?” she demands.
“Long enough,” I tell her.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Long enough to hear the part about personal choices.”
She straightens up and crosses her arms. The tips of her ears are pink. Whether that’s the cold or the embarrassment I genuinely cannot tell, but either way it’s extremely endearing and I know better than to say so.
“The display is dark,” she says, nodding at the machine. “I can’t tell what setting it’s on.”
“It’s on the same setting it’s always on. Kowalski hasn’t touched it since 2019.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It will make coffee. Give it a minute.”
She gives the machine one last look of measured suspicion, then turns and leans back against the counter beside it, arms still crossed.
Outside the window, the brownstones glow.
A cab rolls through the intersection at the end of the block, headlights cutting bright through the dark. Someone in the apartment building directly across has their Christmas tree positioned right in the window, lit up in multicolored lights, fully visible from here.
“It smells good in here,” Noelle says, not looking at me.
“Snickerdoodles. Last batch made it out of the oven before the power quit.”
“At nine forty-three PM.”
“The best time. No one’s around to steal them before they cool.”
She glances up at that. “Is that a problem? People stealing your cookies?”
“Rico has no boundaries and no shame. You’ll learn.”
She almost smiles. Actually, almost, this time. I can see its shape before she pulls it back.
“Why do you bake?” she asks. It comes out like it surprised her, like she didn’t mean to ask it out loud.
I think about that for a second. The real answer, not the easy one.
“My mom used to bake when she was stressed,” I tell her. “Every time something went wrong, the whole apartment smelled like sugar for a week. I think I just absorbed that. Something goes sideways, I make something.”
Noelle considers this. “That’s either very healthy or a sophisticated avoidance mechanism.”
“Probably both.” I grin. “My therapist thinks so, too.”
She snorts. Actually snorts, which she immediately seems to regret, pressing her lips together like she can take it back through sheer force of will.
I laugh again, quieter this time.
“You have a nice laugh,” she says, and then looks away fast, back toward the glowing window.
The kitchen feels smaller than it did a few minutes ago. I’m not sure when that happened.
“You have a nice snort,” I offer.
“Oh, God.”
“Very distinguished. Very—”
“Mateo.”
“Very you,” I finish.
She looks up at me.
The emergency strip along the baseboard catches the angles of her face from below, and the glow from the street comes through the window behind her, and there’s absolutely nothing complicated about the fact that Noelle Meadows is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life.
I’ve thought so since the moment she walked into the station with her bag over her shoulder and her walls already fully constructed, and I think so now, standing barefoot in the dark kitchen, arguing with a coffee machine and trying not to smile.
She knows I’m looking at her. She doesn’t look away.
“The coffee’s going to take a few minutes,” she says.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to wait.”
“I know that too.”
Something shifts in the quality of the silence. Not uncomfortable. The opposite of that, which is almost worse, because comfortable silence with Noelle Meadows is the kind of thing a person could get used to, and getting used to things is how you end up surprised when they go away.
I lean forward a little. She doesn’t lean back.
“Hi,” I say, for no reason.
The corner of her mouth curves. A real one this time, small and involuntary and completely unguarded. “Hi.”
I close the distance.
The kiss starts the way I intended it to.
Her mouth is soft, and she tastes like the spearmint gum she’s always chewing, and she makes a small sound of surprise against my lips that lasts approximately half a second before her hand comes up and finds the front of my shirt.
Then it isn’t light or easy anymore.
She kisses me back like she made a decision and she’s committed to it, her fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt, and I bring my hand up to her jaw and angle her face.
I feel the shift before I hear anything.
A change in the air, or maybe just a change in her. Some new awareness that moves through her like a current. Her mouth stills against mine. Not pulling away, just pausing.
I open my eyes.
Wes is in the kitchen doorway.
He’s in his off-duty clothes, gray henley, dark pants, and he’s holding a water glass and standing with the particular stillness that I’ve spent three years learning to read.
He’s not embarrassed. He’s not apologetic.
He’s just there, his gaze moving between us with an expression that gives away approximately nothing.
He doesn’t leave.
He doesn’t announce himself or make a noise or do any of the polite social things a person does when they walk into a room and find two people in a compromising position. He just stands there, calm and present, and looks.
Noelle has gone very still against me.
I can feel her pulse under my hand where it’s resting against her jaw. It was already quick from the kiss. Now it’s doing something different, something that has nothing to do with me, and I know it because I can feel the exact moment it changes.
I’m not oblivious. I never have been.
I lower my hand and step back, not because anything is wrong but because the moment has become something larger than what it started as, and I’ve always known when to give a thing room to breathe.
Wes moves into the kitchen. He crosses to the sink, fills his glass, and turns to lean against the counter a few feet away.
He looks at Noelle. She looks at him. Whatever that exchange is, it doesn’t require words and it doesn’t include me, which I find significantly more interesting than offensive.
“Power flicker still going?” Wes asks, to no one in particular.
“Half the station,” I say. “Should sort itself out.”
He nods. Drinks his water.
The coffee machine beeps. Done.
Noelle turns toward it like it’s the most important thing that has ever happened in this kitchen, and I watch her reach for a mug with hands that are almost completely steady, and I decide that she is significantly more complicated than I originally gave her credit for.
Which was already a high bar.
I push off the counter and leave them to it.