Page 133 of Graceless

The back door clicked at half past one, and I came off the pillow like a struck match — bolt upright in the dark, heart slamming, hands already over the middle of me, every cell of my body reporting for a war that was over.

The boiler. The joists. The ordinary house.

And him, in the hall, gone absolutely still at the sound of me moving — because of course he'd heard my heart change from the yard.

"It's me," he said, through the dark. "It's only me."

"I know." My pulse did not know. I sat there in Nonna's bed with the quilt fisted in both hands, listening to my body refuse the all-clear, and the couch springs shifted as he lay down on the far side of a wall, twelve feet and one door away, and everything in me said wrong.

"Raq."

He was in the doorway before the second syllable. "You should sleep."

"Come here." I moved over. The empty side of the bed made the shape it's made for a season. "I'm not — nothing's happening. I just don't want the door between us tonight. Come here."

He stood in the doorway a long moment, and I couldn't see his face, only the size of him against the hall.

"The couch⁠—"

"The couch is retired. It served with honor." I patted the quilt. "Sleep next to me. That's all. I want your weight in this bed and your ridiculous furnace arm over me, and I want to close my eyes without listening for every sound on the block, because you'll do that for both of us."

He came in. The mattress dipped under all that weight, and I rolled into the heat of him, my back to his chest, his arm coming over me slow, careful, asking permission the whole way down — and then, when I pulled it tight, just an arm. A heavy one. Mine.

"When you were up there," I said, into the dark. "On the roof. Before everything. I saw you."

Stillness behind me. "I know."

"There was — behind you, on the brick, I could have sworn—" and then the sentence arrived at where it was going, and I didn't want its answer at half past one, or maybe ever. "Never mind. It was shadows."

His arm tightened by one degree, and he did not correct me, and neither of us said anything else, and somewhere between his heartbeat and the boiler cycling my body finally believed the all-clear.

Dr. Russo's office called at ten on a Tuesday, five days later — the practice on 86th I'd marched us into the week we got home, because whoever caught this baby was going to do it in Brooklyn, walking distance, above a bakery, the way God and my grandmother intended.

"Follow-up on this morning's scan," the receptionist said, in the tone they save for good news, the one that lets you breathe before the sentence finishes. "Everything's resolved. The bleed's reabsorbed, textbook. Baby's measuring right on schedule, heartbeat's strong. Doctor says all restrictions lifted, resume normal activity — and she says next time you don't wait five days to book the follow-up."

"The hospital doctor told me the same thing about the first visit."

"Then they're both right, hon. Congratulations."

I stood in my studio with the phone against my ear and my hand low on the small hard curve that had started being a curve, and the ten o'clock light came through the gate, and down the hall a man who does not sleep was performing coffee for a woman who couldn't have any.

"Raq."

He was in the doorway before the cup landed. He'd heard every word of the call — pointless to pretend otherwise, his hearing is a municipal resource — but he stood there anyway, waiting for me to say it, because he has learned that some things are mine to hand him.

"Everything's resolved. All clear. All restrictions lifted." I set the phone on the bench. "She's fine. I'm fine."

"She."

"I'm trying it out this week. Last week was he. The week before it was the tenant." Across my studio — the drop cloth, the muslin, the raking light on its arm, all my ordinary tools in their ordinary places — stood this impossible thing in my doorway, holding a coffee cup like a hostage. "Say something. You're being weird."

He set the cup down on the shelf by the door. Carefully. Then he crossed the studio and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to look up, and he took my face in both hands the way I'd taken his in the yard.

"I thought protection was a door," he said. "My whole existence, that is what it was. A wall. A perimeter. A place to put what you love where nothing can reach it — and I built you one, and it nearly broke us both. So." His thumbs moved along my cheekbones, once. "No more doors. Protection is this. Standing where you stand. Whatever comes, it comes to both of us, and it goes through me, and I stand there because there is nowhere else I want to exist. I love you, Caterina. I have loved you since Fifth Avenue, and I loved you on the corner, and I loved you every hour of the couch, and I will love you when this borough is a reef. That is the whole of what I am now. The rest is details."

I stood there in the ten o'clock light with my heart doing something enormous and unscheduled.

"You love me."