The customer was a student. Tall, easy in his skin, parked on the counter stool like he owned real estate there, and while Valerio watched, the boy said something else and reached across the counter and touched her hand where it rested next to the coffee pot. Touched it like he'd done it before. Like he intended to do it again.
She pulled her hand back, pleasant and practiced. The boy laughed and let her. And offered, loudly enough to carry through glass, to walk her home, since it was late, since the neighborhood was what it was, since somebody ought to.
Somebody ought to.
The Italian was out of him before the thought finished forming, low and vicious and entirely involuntary, three generations of his father's blood expressing an opinion, and by the time Valerio caught up with his own body he was already through the door with the bell still ringing behind him.
"She has a ride," he said.
The diner went quiet. Aislinn's face swung wide open, the way it always did around him, and then immediately tried to arrange itself into something casual, which failed everywhere at once. The boy on the stool turned, took in the suit, the shoulders, the expression, and demonstrated the first good judgment of his evening by remembering he'd left something in another building.
"That was Franklin," Aislinn said, when the bell had rung him out. "He tips in exact change and he's been offering to walk me home for a month."
"He's done offering."
"Valerio." She was fighting a smile and losing, wiping down a counter that was already clean. "Were you jealous just now? You were. You came through that door like a repossession."
"I came," he said, with what remained of his dignity, "to talk to you."
"Mm. And what did you come to tell me this time?"
He looked at her. Apron, pen behind her ear, one shoelace untied because some things in this universe were constants, smiling at him across a chipped counter in an empty diner at eleven at night like he was the good news.
The speech died the way the last one had. Quietly, and unmourned.
"Get your coat," he said.
He walked her home through streets he'd already had checked, to a building he already hated, and at the bottom of her stairs she stopped, and turned, and didn't let go of his hand.
"You keep coming to tell me something," she said, "and you keep not telling me. So I'm going to say my thing first, because one of us has to be brave, and you're clearly the muscle of this operation, not the brains."
"Aislinn—"
"Stay."
One word. She said it with her chin up and her heart in her voice and both of them completely undefended, no strategy anywhere in her, this girl who apologized to radiators, standing on a cracked step asking the most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard to stay like it was a small thing. Like it was tea.
And Valerio, who had ended it twice now and gotten a kiss and a jealous fit for his trouble, understood at last that there had never been a version of this where he left.
"Ma chérie," he said, against her hair, and felt her shiver at the sound of it. "I was never going anywhere."
Her apartment was a single room that had been apologized for in advance the entire way up the stairs, it's small, it's really small, the radiator sings, ignore the ceiling. He didn't look at any of it. He looked at her, backing slowly into her own home with her eyes on his and her courage finally running out of words, and then there was no more counter between them, no table, no orange, nothing at all.
He kissed her the way he'd wanted to since the library, without an audience and without a speech, and she came up on her toes and answered it, and the radiator sang, and neither of them heard.
He undressed her slowly, carefully, like she might vanish if he moved too fast. She laughed once, nervous, wobbling, "I've never, um, with a stuntman," and then his mouth found her throat and the joke and the nerves went wherever words go, and when he finally laid her down on a bed that was too small for him by a foot and a half, she reached up and put her hand over his heart, the exact way she'd stood in an intersection once, no self-preservation anywhere in her.
"You're shaking," she whispered, wondering.
"I know."
"You saved my life. You're not scared of anything."
"I know," he said, and kissed her palm, and let her see it anyway, all of it, everything he'd rehearsed away twice, and when he made her his at last, slow and thorough and reverent in that terrible singing radiator heat, she cried out, and clung to him, and said his name like she'd known it forever.
Mine, he thought, consumed, final, a man signing something. Mine.
Afterward she lay tangled across his chest in the dark, tracing shapes on his skin, one shoelace of a girl who'd rearranged his entire existence in five weeks, and he stared at her water-stained ceiling and did the only math that mattered now. He would tell her the truth soon. Not tonight. Soon. He'd find a way to make his world safe enough to hand her, and then he'd give her his real name, all of it, and she would do that thing her face did. She'd open the door.
