Chapter 17 #2
"The ones I answered to, once." The kitchen was very quiet.
"They notice everything, eventually. The less I say of them tonight, the safer this kitchen — and I will say more when saying it is survivable.
That is not a corner coming off. That is the one door I am asking you to let me hold shut until I can hold it shut properly. "
"That's two," she said. "And you're still counting. Who else?"
"My brothers."
The kitchen went silent enough to hear the floor above us creak.
"Your — you have brothers."
"Two hundred of us came down. What's left of us is scattered.
We don't gather; gathering draws eyes. And not every fallen thing on this earth is of the two hundred.
Some of my brothers came down later. Different road.
Same landing. One of them guts fish on a boat out of Sheepshead Bay, and that is the entire glamour of the fallen life. "
"And the ones who didn't fall," I went on.
"Still winged. Still employed. The graced, if you want the official word — grace being the thing they kept and we spent.
One of them checks on me. He has for a long while.
He calls it inspection, and he pretends it's duty, and I pretend to believe him.
" I looked at the window a moment. "He is the only one of them who still comes.
He is not a danger to you. He watches me, not you.
Of everything on the list, he's the one item you can cross off. "
"Does he know about me? Your brother?"
"Yes."
The yes sat on the table being enormous.
"And what did he say?"
"He told me to leave. The job, the city." I held her eyes. "You. He was emphatic. He has never once, in all this while, been emphatic."
"And you're still here."
"I am still here."
"Okay." She picked the cup back up, and her knuckles were white on it. "Why? Why me? I fix paintings. I feed the cat that isn't mine. Why is anything watching me?"
"Because this is my fault." I had held this one at her window for weeks, and now I set it down where she could see all of it. "All of it. And I will handle it. I promise you that."
"What do you mean it's your fault?"
"Fifth Avenue. The bus. I broke the rules of the world in the open, in daylight, in front of everything that can feel the rules break — to keep you in it. A thing like that is a flare, Caterina. It goes up, and everything in the dark looks at where it landed."
"Wait." Her hand came down off the cup. "The demon. The watcher on my roof. The whole list. All of this is happening because you saved my life?"
"Yes."
She didn't move.
"People would call that a choice. It wasn't one.
I saw both futures whole while I was crossing the avenue — you alive, with everything in the dark holding your address.
Or you gone, and me in my doorway, having watched it happen.
I am a Watcher, Caterina. I have watched cities burn.
I have watched the water take whole coastlines and I did not move, because watching was the work and the work was all I was. "
Her eyes were bright and she did not look away, and neither did I, because this one she was owed to the last word.
"You are the one thing I have ever met that I could not watch end.
So I moved. And then I stood in one doorway for weeks, looking at one lit window, and confirmed for anything still wondering exactly what the flare had been for.
I made you visible. Twice. That is what my attention costs, and you never agreed to pay it. "
"I may not have agreed to pay it, Raq." Her voice was very quiet and completely level. "But I wouldn't be here at all if you hadn't saved me. I'd say I'd pay anything for that. Wouldn't you?"
I did not answer her. And then the old move arrived — the practiced one, the one that has kept me above ground since the fall, the one I know better than my name.
"The correct thing — the thing I have done every time before — is distance. I leave. The attention follows me, and in time you become nobody's business again. I should—"
"No."
Her hand came down flat on the table like a judge's, and she was on her feet, shaking, and every alarm in her was ringing at once, and I heard which alarms they were, and not one of them was about the demon.
"Finish that sentence and I swear to the saints, Raq.
You don't get to detonate my whole understanding of the universe and then evacuate.
You made me visible? Fine. Then you stand in the light with me.
You stay, and you fight, and if there's more than one of them, you tell me that too, and we handle it.
But the leaving — no. The leaving is off the table. Forever. Say you understand."
I have heard no from things with authority over the hinges of the world.
It has never once landed the way it landed from a shaking woman in yesterday's clothes, forbidding me to join the inventory of everyone who ever left her.
Something in me that has been braced since the fall came off its guard, all the way.
I stood up. I came around the table. She tipped her head all the way back and did not step back, not one inch.
"You don't understand," I said, and this close she felt the words as much as heard them. "How dangerous—"
Her hand came up and landed flat on my chest.
"Stop. You think you're offering me a choice between danger and safety?
Nobody ever offered us that. Not once. Not anybody, not ever.
We drive on the Gowanus. We find lumps. We cross Fifth Avenue against the light.
My parents left for dinner one night and never came home.
Nonna did everything right her entire life and I lit candles for eleven months anyway.
" Her voice stayed level, and I could hear what it cost to keep it there.
"Everything is dangerous for us, Raq. Everything has always been dangerous for us — and we get up and make the coffee anyway.
That's the whole trick of being human. There is no safe.
There's only what you're willing to love in the meantime.
" She looked up at me. "You're not bringing danger into my life.
You're the first thing that ever offered to stand in front of some of it. "
Then I made the most dangerous vow I have ever made in my existence:
"Then I will stand between you and it until I can no longer stand. If that is what it takes, Caterina, that is what it takes."
Her hand was still on my chest. I felt my words happen under it.
And every leash I own broke at once.
I kissed her — my hand in her hair, her back meeting the counter, every hour I had ever stood in that doorway and the whole cold night under a streetlight coming down at one time.
She rose up into it and made a sound that redrew my maps, and I made one that was not human at all, and she heard it, and pulled me closer.
The cup went over. Nobody went after it.
Mine. It came up out of the oldest part of me, the part that predates asking — nothing wise in it, nothing careful, nothing civilized at all.
Mine to hold. Mine to guard. And the thought of the thing at her gate — of anything in the dark putting its eyes on what was in my arms — went through me black and total, and my hold on her tightened, and I did not apologize for it in any language I know.
I was not leaving her. Not ever. They could send the whole roster.
I lifted her — she weighs nothing; she weighs more than the world — and her legs came around me and the kitchen went past and the curtain went past, and I ducked my head under the rod with her mouth still on mine and set her down in the lamplight, my control fraying along every seam, both of us listening to it fray.
Her hands were under my shirt, flat on my chest, and she pulled back an inch and said it breathless, against my jaw:
"I still have questions. A lot of them. This is not going to distract me."
"I didn't think it would." Her pulse was against my mouth. "But—"
Whatever I meant to protest died where it stood. She wanted me — I could hear it, feel it through every place we touched, louder than my objection, older than my discipline — and I stopped arguing with the only force in creation I have no argument for.
Cate
Before, I hadn’t known what I was holding.
That was what I understood, standing in the lamplight with my hands going up under his shirt along the furnace-warm impossible make of him. Now I knew. And my hands were steady.
I undressed him. He let me — stood there and let it happen, and I took my time, because taking my time is the one fluency I have.
When the shirt came away I walked around him. The full circuit.
Looking at him in light was not a comfortable thing to do.
In the dark my hands had told me beautiful and left out the rest. The lamp left nothing out.
He was made the way weapons are made — nothing spare, nothing soft, a symmetry so exact it stopped being handsome and became something my body filed under run.
And he stood absolutely still, stiller than people can stand, watching me circle him with eyes gone from near-black to burning.
Every prey instinct I own lay down flat. Every other instinct I own leaned in.
The terror and the wanting come off the same live wire.
“Cate.” Low. A warning with no enforcement mechanism whatsoever.
“Quiet. I’m working.”
The scars under lamplight were nothing like the scars under my fingertips in the dark. Long, silvered, symmetrical. Terribly clean. The work of somebody thorough.
I stood behind him and looked and let him feel me looking. That was the part costing him. I could see it in the set of his shoulders; in the way the stillness gathered along his spine like the moment before glass either holds or doesn’t.
Being seen, for this man, was the actual undressing. Everything else was buttons.
“Tell me if this—”
“Touch them,” he said.
It came out rough and fast, ahead of whatever usually processes his sentences. And then, quieter, and I felt him pay for it:
“Please.”
Please.