CHAPTER 4
Gael
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I haven't slept and I'm pretending I have, which is its own kind of lie I'm good at.
The record's been turning for an hour. I put it on at four because the quiet was doing that thing where it gets loud, and now the needle's riding the dead air at the end of the side, crackle-hiss, crackle-hiss, a sound like a small fire that never decides to be a fire.
I should get up and lift the arm. I don't.
I lie on the unmade bed over the stable with the weights stacked in the corner casting long shapes in the gray, and I look at the ceiling beams the way men in stories look at God, and I think about a woman I met yesterday for the length of a dinner.
That's the problem, right there in the open where I can't pretend I don't see it.
I have rules. Most of them are about other people's blood. But the one I keep for myself is simple: don't think about a thing you can't have, because thinking is just bleeding with extra steps. And here I am, bleeding all over the ceiling about Mateo's wife.
Mateo's wife. I roll the words around like a chipped tooth. They should taste like a closed door, like not yours, never was, walk on. Instead they taste like the inside of my own mouth at two in the morning when I'm too tired to keep up the act I do for everybody including me.
I sit up. The room's a wreck, the way I like it — knives laid out on the dresser where another man keeps cologne, the switchblade closest to hand, a heavy bag I've hit so often the chain's gone smooth, three records out of their sleeves because I'm an animal, and the mirror fogged at one corner where the radiator breathes.
I stand in front of it to dress and there it is, the thing I forget I carry until the glass remembers it for me.
The falcon. Inked over my heart, wings half-open, a hunting bird caught the second before it drops.
I had it done at twenty-two and told the man make it look like it's about to kill something, and he did, and what I've learned in the years since is that the bird does more than kill — it picks one sky and stays in it.
Mates for life, somebody told me once, probably Emil, who knows useless true things the way I know exits.
The ink catches the lamp and I look at it longer than a man should look at his own chest.
"No," I tell it, out loud, because talking to a tattoo is healthier than talking to the actual woman. "Absolutely fucking not."
I pull a shirt over it. Problem solved. That's how feelings work. You cover them and they go away.
She's in the dress-form room at the end of the master wing.
I know before I see her because I hear the machine — that fast stuttering chatter, needle eating thread, a sound I've never heard inside this house in my life.
Sokol House makes the sounds of money and dread: doors that don't squeak because somebody's paid for the hinges, Nadia's kettle, the wind worrying the Sound at night like the sea keeping time for the dead.
It does not make the sound of work. Honest, small, made-with-hands work.
And there it is, coming out of the master wing like the house grew a new organ overnight.
I tell myself I'm doing a security pass. I tell myself a lot of things.
The workroom door's open and she hasn't noticed me, which means I get the unfair advantage of a few seconds of her not performing either.
People think I read a room because I'm dangerous.
Truth is I read it because I learned young that the second before someone clocks you is the only second they're real. So I take it.
She's converted the place. One night, and it's hers — a war won while everyone slept.
The bolts of cloth are stacked against the wall like sandbags, deep blues and a black and one length of something ivory and heavy that swallows the light instead of throwing it back.
A dress form stands by the window like a headless guest.
Her machine's set up on a table that did not used to be there, and she's bent over it in a robe the color of weak tea, her dark hair shoved up off her neck with a pencil, a few pins held between her lips like a woman who keeps her weapons close.
Her hands move. God, her hands. They feed the cloth under the needle with absolute certainty, the certainty of somebody who has done a thing ten thousand times and still respects it.
She's soft everywhere the morning touches her. The robe's gaping a little at the front and I can see the slope of her, the heavy fall of her breasts, the round of her belly where the sash pulls, and let me be clear, I'm a man who stares without apology, always have been. Staring is a hobby.
This is some other thing entirely, and I hate that it's some other thing, because for once I've stopped cataloging a woman like a job and started looking at her like she's the warmest thing in a cold house, something I want to put my hands out to.
"You can come in," she says, around the pins, not looking up. "You've been breathing in my doorway like a furnace for a full minute."
Caught. I lean on the frame instead of fixing it, because the only thing to do when you're caught is act like you meant to be. "I was admiring the renovation. Very ambitious. Lev's going to want to know who approved a structural change to the master wing."
"Lev can take it up with the structure. " She lifts the presser foot, draws the cloth free, bites the thread.
Spits the pins into a little dish, one, two, three.
Then she finally lifts her gaze to mine and I feel it land somewhere under the ink.
Hazel eyes, green when the window catches them, and not one ounce of the fear I'm used to seeing on people who know what I am. "You're the youngest."
"I'm the fun one."
"You're the one they send when fun's over. " She says it mild, like she's reading a label. Hundred percent silk. Dry clean only. Will end you in an alley. "Gael."
"Trouble," I say, and grin, because she said my name like she was filing it and I needed to throw a little sand in the gears. "That's what I'll be calling you. You've got the look."
"Of trouble."
"Of a woman who's about to be a lot of it for everyone in this house, yeah.
" I push off the frame and come in, slow, hands loose, and I touch the ivory bolt by the door because I can't not touch fabric in a room full of it, the same way I can't walk past a knife and leave it lying wrong.
The cloth is — Christ. I don't have the word.
It's got a pile to it, a direction, and dragging my fingers one way it goes pale and the other way it goes deep, and it does something to the light that's almost rude. "What is this."
"Silk-velvet. " She watches my hand on it and something flickers, gone before I can name it. "Don't pet it the wrong way, you'll bruise the nap."
"It bruises?" I laugh, real, surprised out of me. "Cloth that holds a grudge. Perfect house for it."
"Everything that's worth anything does. " She comes around the table and takes the bolt out of my hands, not unkind, just sovereign, the way you'd take a blade off a kid.
"It holds a mark. You touch it and the cloth remembers where.
That's why people pay for it. That's why I work in it.
" She sets it back, smooths it with two passes of her palm, and the pile lies down obedient under her hand the way nothing in my life ever has. "It's for the gown."
"What gown."
"Mine. " She says it like a wall going up. "I'm building my own wedding dress."
"You're already married. I was at the part with the dead bell and the cold priest. I had the worst seat. Best view, worst seat."
"I'm married on paper. There'll be a real one.
A proper one, in front of people, the kind your uncle wants so he can stand in a pew and admire his own handiwork.
" Her mouth does something flat. "I'm not wearing a bought dress to my own sale.
If I'm the merchandise, I'm at least the one who cut the cloth. "
And there it is — the thing that undoes me.
The robe and the give of her hips when she turned are just scenery; the line is what lands the blow.
If I'm the merchandise, I'm the one who cut the cloth.
A woman handed a cage who picks up the bars and asks what they're made of so she can decide whether they'll hold.
I know that move. I invented a version of it.
Mine's just got more jokes and fewer pins.
"That's grim, velvet," I say, light, because the light's where I live. "Grimmest thing anybody's said to me before noon, and I once watched a man find religion at gunpoint."
"You asked about the dress."
"I did. I regret it. Tell me something cheerful. Tell me you hate it here so I can agree with you."
She makes tea on a hot plate she's also somehow acquired — this woman, one night, has built an empire of small competent objects — and we talk, and it's a fight.
It's a knife fight where nobody bleeds. I give her a line and she gives it back sharper, takes the cocky out of it and hands me the bones.
I tell her the house is a museum of dead men and she says then I must be the gift-shop.
I tell her Mateo's about as warm as the bell that married them and she says she noticed, and that bells are louder than they look, you just have to hit them. I don't have anything for that. I cover the not-having with a grin.
Here's the thing nobody understands about me, including my brothers: I play at not caring so I can survive caring.
I learned it the way you learn to fall — by hitting the ground enough times that your body figures out how to do it without breaking.
Lev broke Emil into a calculator. Lev hardened Mateo into a wall.
And me, the baby, the leftover — I watched both of those happen across a dinner table and decided I'd be too slippery to break. You can't shatter water. You can only watch it go around you, grinning, and into the cracks.