Page 126 of Graceless

"Raq." I pulled my hands out of the water and dried them on my jeans and turned to face him. "I do surfaces for a living. I watched you leave and I watched you come back. Where."

He looked at me for a long moment. And then, maybe because the couch had taught him something, or maybe because of the doghouse, he answered.

"There is a place in my memory where nothing is."

"What does that mean?"

"My recall is perfect, Caterina. That is not pride; it is anatomy. Every face I have ever seen. Every cup ever handed to me. All of it, all the way down, every hour since the first hour." He folded the towel, edge to edge, exact. "Except one place. When I reach for the reason I fell — the moment of it, the why — there is a flash. Hands. In water. And then nothing, where something should be."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"Whose hands?"

"I don't know." The words came out of him like teeth. "I cannot tell you the one thing a creature like me should always be able to tell you. There is a shape where something stood. Grief with no object on it. And your hands were in the water just now, and for two seconds I was — " he stopped. "Somewhere with no floor."

I stood in my kitchen and looked at him, and the conservator in me — the one who's spent twenty years with a loupe against things people buried — got there before the rest of me.

"That's not forgetting."

"Caterina—"

"No, listen to me. I know what forgetting looks like, I work on forgetting. Forgetting is soft. It fades at the edges, it blurs, you get less and less until you're not sure. You're describing an edge." I took a step toward him. "A hard edge, with a flash on one side and nothing on the other. That's not rot, Raq. That's a treatment." My trade, coming out of my mouth and turning my stomach over. "Somebody painted over it."

He went very still. Still the way the kitchen goes before he does something. And something moved behind his eyes that had never once occurred to him in all the long dark of carrying it — because you can't see the varnish when you're the panel.

"That is not possible," he said. "Nothing reaches into what I am."

"Okay."

"Nothing has that — " and he stopped. And did not finish it. And we stood in my kitchen with the pan dripping in the rack, in the space where the end of that sentence should have been, and neither of us went and got it.

"Someday," I said, quietly, "when this is all — whatever this is going to be. We're going to find the edge of that. You and me and a raking light. That's what I do, Raq. I find out what's under."

"I believe you," he said.

My hand was on his chest. I never decided that. Under my palm his heart was going like something enormous taking a hill, and his skin through the shirt ran hot — hotter than human — and then his mouth was on mine and the whole season detonated.

Heat went through me like a dropped match in August. Down my throat, across my breasts, low into my belly where it pooled and pulled and ached — all those days of walls and doors and a body pretending it had forgotten, and it had forgotten nothing. His hand fisted in my hair and dragged my head back and he kissed me like there was a war on, and I made a sound into his mouth that I will deny in court.

He walked me back into the counter. The edge hit my spine. I did not care. I could feel every inch of him against every inch of me, the sheer mass of him, all that leashed catastrophic strength wrapped around me like it was afraid of its own hands — and that's the thing nobody tells you about being wanted by something that levels cities. You can feel the leash. You can feel exactly how thin it's worn. My hips rolled against him without one word of permission from me, and the sound he made — low, wrecked, dredged up from some century before manners — went straight through the floor of me.

I got a grip on his collar and started walking us toward the bedroom door.

He stopped.

Stopped like a wall stops. His mouth tore off mine and his forehead came down against my forehead and he stood there shaking — actually shaking, this creature who carried me across Long Island without breathing hard — with both hands closed on my shoulders, and his fingers flexed once, careful, catastrophically careful, a man holding stemware in a fist built for siege.

"Two weeks," he said. Ruined. "The doctor said two weeks."

And the word doctor did what nothing else in that kitchen could have done.

My hand went low. His came off my shoulder and covered it, both of us holding the same small fact, and the heat didn't go anywhere — it banked, the way his eyes bank, still burning under the dark — but the war was over. There was never going to be a war. Not with this.

"I know," I said, against his chest. "I know. Nine more days."

"Five."

I pulled back and looked up at him. Pupils blown black, jaw tight, pulse slamming in his throat like a hazard light — the most dangerous thing in the tri-state area, standing in my kitchen counting down my discharge paperwork.