I heard the footsteps about two blocks in.
Not at first as a thing. At first just as sound, behind me, the ordinary scuff of someone else out in the cold, and I didn’t think anything because why would you. But I slowed at the corner to let a car pass, and the footsteps slowed. And I crossed, and they crossed. And when I picked it back up, brisk, head down, they picked it back up too, matched, the same distance behind, neither closing nor falling away, and the back of my neck knew before the rest of me did, the animal part, the part that’s older than the speech I’d just given Despina.
Someone was behind me.
Next time won’t be gentle. The thug’s voice, soft, conversational, picking up his patience like a coat.
My heart had gone up into my throat. My breath came short and white and too fast. I wouldn’t run. Running would tell him I knew. Running was danger. I would not flinch.
Three more blocks. The grocer’s was dark, closed hours ago, no still here, still here tonight. The plywood block, the cowed block, every shuttered storefront with the same nothing signage, not a lit window in a quarter mile, not a soul to shout to. My keys were in my pocket and I got them out without slowing and threaded them through my fingers the way my father never taught me but the world did, the cold metal points sticking out from my fist, and I felt how little they were against a grown man and hated how little, hated the whole arithmetic of beingsmall and alone on a dark street that somebody was eating one mouthful at a time.
There was nobody to call. I stood in that fear.
And then, before I could stop it, my whole stupid body reached for someone. One person. Instinct, fast, ahead of thought, the way your hand goes to the railing on a stair that isn’t there. Not Despina. Not the law. Not my father.
The dog man.
The grinning idiot with the broken nose. The eleven-dollars-of-bread, leans-on-the-counter-like-a-bar, having-a-wonderful-night nuisance. I wanted him there. I wanted the car at the curb and the shape in it and the dog’s head in the glass. I wanted the door coming open and the cold coming in and the way he’d had the thug against my window before I’d understood he was moving, no shouting, no show. I wanted his hands. The steady scarred ones I’d looked at and hated myself for looking at. I wanted, in the worst spiking middle of my fear, to turn around and have him be there, and the wanting was so total and so fast and so far ahead of anything I’d have allowed that it appalled me even as it happened, even with my heart in my throat, even with the keys in my fist—
No. Not him. Not him of all the—
The footsteps turned off.
A door. A scrape of a key, a real key in a real lock, and I made myself glance back, finally, fast, ready, and it was a man. Just a man. In a parka, a phone lit up against his ear, talking low and laughing at something, fishing his keys out at the bottom of a stoop two doors back, a man going into his own building after his own long day, who’d been walking the same direction I was because people do, because it’s a street and that’s what streets are for. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t know I existed. He went up his steps still laughing into his phone and the door shutbehind him and the lock turned and that was all. That was the whole of it. A man going home.
Nothing.
The adrenaline went out of me all at once, the way it does, leaving the shakes behind. My legs felt like someone else’s. I stood there in the orange dark with my keys still threaded through my fist and made myself breathe, in, out, white in the cold, until the slam in my chest came down to something I could live inside.
Nothing.It was nothing. A neighbor. A friend.
And then, in the wash of it, in the long ebb after the fear, came the worse thing.
I’d reached for him.
Out of everyone in the world, when my body thought it was going to die, it had reached for the grinning idiot with the broken nose. Not because he was useful. Not because he was strong, though he was. I’d wanted him there. Him. The man I’d thrown out. The man I’d built a whole speech against just half an hour ago.
I stood very still on the sidewalk, keys loose in my hand, and let the thought arrive. There was no stopping it.
Oh no, I thought.
Oh no.
I like this man.
Chapter 5
Tonio
Theoldmanhada mouthful of pins and an opinion about my shoulders, and he was sharing it.
“Too much here,” he said around the pins, jabbing his thumb into the muscle below my collarbone like he was testing fruit. “You fight. You carry. You sit wrong. Stand still.”
“I’m always standing still.”
“Stop talking, you move when you talk.”
I grinned at him in the long mirror and he glared back at me in it, this tiny ancient Sicilian who’d been sewing Carusos and their allies into suits since before any of us were a problem, since Dante’s grandfather, since a Chicago that doesn’t exist anymore. There were photographs on his wall going yellow at the edges, dead men in good wool. The shop smelled of chalk and pressed cloth and the espresso the old man kept going on a hot plate in the back, and on a little plate by the mirror sat the biscotti his wife baked, hard as knuckles, and I’d been working my way through them since we walked in because I couldn’t keep myhands still and you can’t deflect with your mouth full of pins so I’d put something else in it.
