"Yes."
"Tell me you understand."
"I understand. Step back means step back."
"Good."
He moves behind me but doesn’t touch me.
He’s six inches behind me. Maybe four. The heat is coming off him through his shirt and through my cardigan and through the small column of November air between us, and the column of air has gone the temperature of his body, and his body is the temperature of a man who has been running close to red since he walked into my apartment and is, this morning, holding it in. I can feel him hold it in. I can feel it the way you feel a generator in the next room.
Then I smell him.
Bergamot. Leather. Smoke from a cigar he’s not smoked recently, but which lives in the wool of his jacket. And underneath all of it, the scent I have not smelled in three years and would have known in any room of any city in any year of my life. The scent of his actual body. The smell of him. I had forgotten I knew it. My body had not.
"Bring the weapon up."
I bring the Glock up. Two-handed. Feet shoulder-width. Slight forward lean. Elbows soft. Eyes on the imagined target on the dining room wall.
"Your shoulders are tight."
"I know."
"Drop them."
I cannot drop them. He’s been behind me for thirty-one seconds and my shoulders have set themselves at the level of my ears, and the part of me that knows how to drop my shoulders has been replaced by the part of me that is tracking the heat of his body and the smell of his skin and the small specific way his breathing has changed in the last seven seconds.
His breathing has changed.
The breath at my left ear has slowed.
"Maeve, relax."
His mouth is closer than it was a second ago. I have not turned my head. I do not need to. The breath is at the side of my neck, in the space below my ear, and it is the temperature of breath that has just been inside a man, and I can feel it on the small fine hairs at my nape that have stood up.
"Drop your shoulders."
I drop my shoulders.
It costs me. I do it because Lex Konstantinos has just said to in a voice that is no longer the teaching voice, dropping an octave.
"Good," he says.
Then his hands move.
They come up under my arms. His left hand finds my left forearm. His right hand finds my right hand on the grip. The motion is professional. It is the motion of a teacher reaching to correct a grip from behind. It is also the motion of a man wrapping his arms around a woman, and the two motions arehappening at the same time, and there is no way to do one without doing the other, and Lex has decided to do both.
His chest comes up against my back.
Not pressed but touching. The weight of him at my shoulder blades, his sternum just below the ridge between them, the heat of his torso along the entire length of my spine. The cardigan I am wearing is two layers of merino and it is no protection. He’s six-three and I am five-four and his chin is at my temple, and his right cheek, tilted to the sight line, brushes the side of my hair.
"Watch your sights," he says, quiet.
My pulse is in my throat. My pulse is in my wrists. My pulse is in places I do not name.
"Maeve. Sights."
I look at the sights.
