Page 7 of Worshipped by the BRATVA Grump

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.