Chapter 11
RAQ
The phone lit at the south end of my circuit.
I answered running.
"Away from the window." I kept my voice level, which is a skill I have not needed in a very long time. "Interior wall. Lights stay off. I'm there."
"How fast is—"
I was already off the street. Rooftops are faster — no crosswalks, no witnesses, no pretending. I went over six buildings in the time it took her to finish the question, and I did not finish it for her, because the answer was not one a man gives.
Her block from above: the dead streetlight, the alley gate hanging open six inches — six inches, it had opened her gate — and the smell.
Wet stone and doused embers, heavy on the alley wall, heaviest at her window bars.
It had touched the house. It had read the ward I'd set over her threshold, tested the edge of it the way you'd test a fence for current, and withdrawn.
It did not run. It concluded.
One trace led south, unhurried, toward the water. The same direction. The same patience. And it had smelled me on the ward. It knew whose word was holding the door. It knew, now, that the Watcher's nights had a purpose, and the purpose had an address.
I came down off the roof and walked the last block at human speed — she was at the window, I could see her shape behind the glass — and a man arriving from the sky was not something I could build a lie around.
The lie. I built it on the walk. A man casing the block. Moved along. The report will say. I have lied to her every day since the bell first rang, and every lie has been a wall between her and the dark, and I have laid every brick with my bare hands, and I am not going to stop.
I checked the laundromat doorway. Empty — the old surveyor trace stale, days cold. I put my hand flat on the alley brick where the new smell was thickest. South. Unhurried. Gone.
Then I rang her bell. Twice.
CATE
I opened the door with the chain on. One in the morning, you open the door with the chain on.
He looked at me through the four-inch gap with the dead streetlight behind him. He wasn't breathing hard. The phone had rung once.
"How are you HERE?" I said. "I called you thirty seconds ago."
"I was doing a walk-through. Late check on the property."
"At one in the morning."
"That's when people case houses, Miss Fontana."
"Do you live around here?"
"Close enough." He said it the way he says everything — flat, ungenerous, a sentence with no doors in it. Then, before I could try another: "He's gone. A man was casing the block. He's been moved along."
"He was at my gate, Raq. The chain was moving."
"I know. I checked it. Gate's shut, alley's clear." The voice that makes you believe things. "Chain up. Set the alarm. I'll be on the street."
"It's freezing."
"Good night, Miss Fontana."
I looked at him through four inches of chain gap, and his coat was open, and the dead streetlight made the street behind him look like the end of the world, and I took the chain off the door.
"Get in here," I said. "There's a couch."
He looked at me. Something in his face shifted — not softened, shifted, the way a load shifts when a beam takes it — and he came inside, and I locked the door behind him, all three locks, and set the alarm, and stood in my hallway at one in the morning with a man who was staying the night, which had not happened in this house since Joey moved out.
He didn't go to the couch. He went to the windows.
Every one — kitchen, living room, the little one in the bathroom that hasn't opened since Clinton — checking the locks, checking the sills, running his hand along the frames the way he'd run his hand along the alley brick.
I stood in my kitchen with my arms crossed and my heart still going and watched him work.
"Sit down," he said, without turning around.
"I'm fine."
"You're shaking. Sit."
I sat. He finished the windows, checked the alarm panel, came back into the kitchen and stood there, too large for it, looking at me.
"Tea," I said, because my hands needed a job.
I got up. He didn't stop me. I made two cups of the terrible tea that lives in the cabinet for exactly this kind of occasion — somebody at your gate, a man in your kitchen who shouldn't fit but does — and I put his on the counter and he picked it up and his fingers brushed mine, and in the dark kitchen after the worst hour of my year that small touch held more weight than the whole week of coffee cups.
"It was probably nothing," I said. "Right? A guy. Checking car doors, looking for packages, whatever."
"Probably."
"Because people do that. This neighborhood, the gates — people try gates."
"They do."
"So it was nothing."
He looked at me over the terrible tea. "It was nothing. And I'm staying tonight."
"I wasn't going to argue with that."
"I know." Almost a smile. Almost. "Couch?"
I got him the afghan — Nonna's ugly one, because the good blanket was mine and some battles are not negotiable — and a pillow that smelled like the closet it had been in since Joey left, and I stood in the doorway of the living room while he sat on the couch, and I went to bed before my face did something I couldn't take back.
I did not sleep.
I lay in the dark listening to the sounds a house makes with someone in it.
The couch spring when he shifted. The particular silence of a man trying to be quiet in a space too small for him.
The kitchen faucet — he got water at two; I heard the cabinet, the tap, the glass set down with a care that made no sense for a glass — and every sound rewrote the architecture of the house, which had been mine and empty and fine, and was now mine and occupied and something else entirely.
At three I gave up pretending.
I got up. I walked to the doorway of the living room in Nonna's robe and bare feet, and he was sitting on the couch in the dark, not lying down, not sleeping, just sitting there with the afghan across his knees and his head turned toward the window, watching the street.
He'd taken his shoes off. I don't know why that undid me. The shoes.
"You're not sleeping," I said.
"I don't sleep much."
"That's not the couch's fault?"
"The couch is fine."
I stood in the doorway. He sat on the couch. The hallway between us was dark, and it was three in the morning, and I was so tired of being careful.
"You're not sleeping on that couch," I said.
He looked at me.
"You heard me."
He stood up off the couch.
Three steps of dark hallway. He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the robe, and he looked at me the way he'd looked at me through the chain gap, and through the doorframe, and across the basement for two weeks — except now there was nothing between us.
"Tell me to go," he said.
"No."
"Caterina—" and it was the beginning of some sentence full of reasons.
"Cate," I said. "My name is Cate. You have been in my house every day for two weeks and you know that, so stop it."
Something happened in his eyes. "Cate," he said, and my name in his mouth sounded like a word he'd been holding behind his teeth for a long time.
I reached up and pulled his mouth down onto mine.
The stoop kiss had been adrenaline — a knife and a dark street and two people shaking. This was different. Slow. His mouth on mine, then off it — my jaw, the corner of it. Under my ear.
My leg went. Just went. I grabbed his shirt and held on.
He smiled against my throat. I felt it — the first smile I'd ever gotten out of that man — and I laughed, breathless, stupid with it.
"I'm fine," I said. "I'm completely fine."
"You are very far from fine." His mouth on my collarbone. His hands sliding down my ribs.
"This is dangerous," he said. Low. Against my skin.
"So is the gas stove." I got the first button open. "I manage."
Buttons. His shirt had more of them than any shirt has a right to, and my hands weren't cooperating. I got them open. I pushed the shirt off his shoulders.
Under it he was warm. Furnace-warm, wrong-warm.
And built the way the marbles are built, which I already knew, I have eyes, but knowing and touching are different disciplines entirely.
His skin under my hands felt like standing too close to something electric — not a shock, not pain, just a hum my whole body leaned into before I told it to.
My hands went up his back. Shoulders, the hard ridge of muscle along his spine — and then my fingers hit something else. Raised skin. Two lines, long, both sides, running down his back.
He sucked in a breath.
I looked at him.
"Scars," he said. "Old."
"How?"
"Battle."
His hands found my hips and pulled me against him. He picked me up — one motion, nothing wasted — and I got a fistful of his hair and told him the bed was through the curtain, that if he tore Nonna's curtain—
His hand slid up my spine, spread wide, covering half my back. The curtain survived. I don't know how.
The box spring announced us to the building. I laughed. He lifted his head and looked at me.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that. Like the laugh was the point.
"Do that again," he said.
"Make me."
I reached for his belt. He let me — held still, watching my hands, his stomach muscles jumping under my knuckles — and when I pushed everything down his hips he kicked the rest off and the weight of him settled over me, skin to skin, nothing between us, and the hum I'd felt when I touched his chest was everywhere now.
He untied the robe. Slowly. Watching my face while he did it, and the watching was almost worse than the touching — his eyes tracking every inch of skin as the robe fell open, and I have never been looked at like that, like I was the first uncovered thing in five hundred years and he was the restorer now.
He pushed the robe off my shoulders. It hit the floor. I was underneath it in nothing, because I sleep in nothing, which I had not thought through when I got out of bed, and which I was now viciously grateful for.