Daisy
>The paper goes to bed at five on Thursdays, and by twenty past I’m standing in the hardware place on Anders Road buying sugar soap, two pairs of rubber gloves and a scrubbing brush, while Gordon behind the counter tells me about his sciatica.
He’s been telling me about his sciatica since I was seventeen and came in here for poster putty, and there’s a comfort in that continuity I’m not going to pretend I don’t need this week.
Bohdan quoted eleven hundred dollars to wash and prime that ceiling, and eleven hundred dollars is a lot of paperbacks.
It’s also, more importantly, a job that any person can do.
It doesn’t need a trade. It needs somebody with a bucket, an evening and no particular plans, and it turns out I am all three of those things.
The shop at night has become my favorite place in the world, which is a slightly humiliating thing to know about yourself at twenty-seven.
I let myself in with my own key now, and the smell has changed completely since work began: it’s sawdust and new oak and the faint chemical sweetness of the varnish they’re using on the treads.
The shelving carcasses are in along the left-hand wall, floor to ceiling, unfinished and pale and standing there like something waiting to be told what it’s for.
The counter is still in pieces. The stairs go up to the mezzanine with a temporary rail.
Under them, the low frame of the children’s section sits in the dark but I can already see the colorful lights I intend to put under there.
I turn the radio on and set up the tower.
It’s Bohdan’s, a waist-high platform, and I’ve watched Yusuf move it around this floor about forty times so I know how it works.
The wheels have brakes and I do put them on.
The ceiling is fifteen feet up and it is filthy in a way that has taken forty years of commitment to never cleaning it.
Sugar soap, hot water, and every square foot of pressed tin gives up its pattern in a grubby gray wave that runs down my arm and into my sleeve.
Grapes. It’s grapes and vine leaves. Nobody has been able to see that since the eighties, I’ll bet.
Now I’m standing on a platform at half past eight at night with my mouth open, looking at grapes.
I’m two hours in and my arms have stopped belonging to me when the door opens.
Mechislav stands there with his keys in his hand and looks up at me on the platform.
I watch him take it all in. The height. The bucket.
The fact that I have hooked one hand around the rail and leaned out about eight inches further than the rail was designed for, because the last panel is over the stairwell.
“Come down,” he says.
“I just want to do this last bit.”
“Daisy.” He crosses the floor and puts one hand flat on the tower. “Come down.”
I heave a sigh but decide it isn’t worth the argument. I peel the gloves off and drop them in the bucket before climbing down the ladder. I stand there with gray water drying to a tidemark at my elbows.
He looks at me for a long moment.
“It’s a nine-foot drop onto that stairwell,” he says.
“I put the brakes on.”
He takes his coat off and puts it over the counter, and then he starts turning his cuffs back, one and then the other.
I clench my jaw a little and ignore the flutter in my lower stomach.
“The tower has a stabilizer leg for that corner. It’s in the van.
If you’d gone over that rail tonight nobody would have found you until Bohdan came in at seven. ”
“Delilah would have found me. She’d have heard the thump.”
“That isn’t funny. The café closed hours ago.”
“It’s a little bit funny.”
“No,” he says.
There’s a pause, and I fully expect him to keep going, to tell me it’s a trade job and the quote exists for a reason.
I’ve got about four hundred words ready about how a person should be allowed to do one single thing to her own shop with her own hands.
Instead he goes out to the van in the rain, comes back with the stabilizer leg, fits it, then tests it with his whole weight.
He moves to the back of the room and returns with another bucket. “You do the low half,” he says. “I’ll do the top.”
He does the ceiling from the platform with his forearms bare and his sleeves shoved up past the elbow, and I do the tin down the sides of the beams and the tops of the walls from a stepladder.
I don’t know when I stop noticing the grape vines on the ceiling and start sneaking glances at him. The shape of his shoulders while he reaches, the way his arms flex as he scrubs, how I know what he looks like naked. How I know what he feels like inside me.
“You’re staring, Daisy,” he says without looking at me. It snaps me out of the memory of the night we spent together, which I’m half thankful for and half miserable about.
Once the last panel is finished, he comes and sits on the floor next to me.
It’s a production, a man that size folding himself down onto the floorboards.
He does it with his knees up and his wrists loose over them, neither of us saying anything for a while.
The heater ticks in the back room, but there’s no other sound.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, “without you pulling the face?”
“I don’t pull a face.”
I turn my head. He’s looking at the ceiling, not at me, and I’m grateful for that, because I don’t think I could start this with him looking at me. “Yesterday, in the window…”
His jaw goes tight. That’s all. That’s the face.
“I just need to know what page you're on so I can be there too.”
He takes his time. Somewhere along this process, I’ve stopped finding it maddening and started finding it comforting, because I know whatever follows has been thought through and is the truth.
“I’m respecting your wishes,” he says, finally turning to look at me. “You made your feelings about me clear.”
For the first time ever, I don’t feel like he is telling me the truth. My eyes narrow before I can mask the expression and he notices.
“You said you didn’t want to be involved with me because you know what my family is. What I am.”
When he says it like that, I can hear the hurt.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant,” he says with a finality I’ve never heard from him before.
My breath catches with regret.
“I was wrong.” I swallow away the dryness in my mouth. “I woke up wrapped up in you and I panicked.”
His brows fold into a frown as he looks at me over his knees.
“That night…” I trail off when I can’t find the words to say what I need to get out without sounding like a crazy woman. “I don’t regret it.”
“I know,” Mechislav says.
I turn my whole body toward him, my legs sliding over the duty floor. “You know?”
“You looked at me the entire time you were telling me,” he says evenly. “You didn’t look away once. People who regret something can’t do that. You weren’t sorry, Daisy. You were frightened, and those aren’t the same thing.”
Something goes through me at that, from top to bottom, and it isn’t gentle, because I know he is right.
I was afraid that I was attracted to a man who is part of the largest criminal empire on this side of the country. I was afraid that after that night, the attraction could grow into something more. I was afraid of what that would mean for me. About me.
“So you just let me leave?” I ask, not knowing what else to say.
His jaw clenches and I have to stop myself reaching out and grabbing it just because I want to know what his face feels like when he does that.
“I didn’t want to be the reason you were afraid.”
My mouth drops open. For the first time in my life, I’m speechless.
“I tried to stay away from you. But I couldn’t do it. Then everything started moving with the shop and I realized it might be the only way I can reasonably spend time with you without you feeling scared.”
“I’m not scared of you,” I say quietly, knowing it’s the truth. I take a slow breath as everything dawns on me at once. “I’m scared of wanting you more than you want me.”
Mechislav goes quiet then, and for some reason he looks confused.
“I don’t know how to tell you how much I want you.
I don’t have the words. That’s why I love the name you chose for this.
” He gestures around him. “All the words. All the words I don’t have.
All the words I want to say. All the words between us that are only ours…
” he trails off and shakes his head. “God, I sound like an idiot.”
A flood of relief washes through me. “No, you don’t.”
I get up onto my knees and shuffle towards him on the dusty floor as he flattens his legs to make room for me to straddle his lap and take his face in both of my hands.
“I want more than one night with you,” I say.
“I want forever with you,” he replies.
The words unlock something inside me and I bring my lips to his.
He doesn’t move for about half a second, which is the longest half second of my life, and then his hand comes around the back of my head and he takes over completely.
He kisses me like a man who has been keeping a list of grievances. His other arm goes around my waist as he leans forward and then we’re off the floor with my legs wrapped around him. He places me on the ply top of the counter at the same time his tongue slides over mine and I moan into his mouth.
“Say it again,” he says against my mouth. “The thing you said.”
“I want more than one night with you.”
His hands are in my hair, then under my jaw, tipping my face up so he can get at my throat, taking his time as he moves his lips over my pulse. There is an unbelievable amount of force in this man and he uses none of it. He pulls my sweater off over my head like he’s unwrapping something he’s owed.
He shivers when I get his shirt open and put my hands flat on his chest, this huge man actually shivers at my touch.
He goes down onto his knees in front of the counter.
“Mech,” I say.
“Lean back.”