Page 25 of Graceless

She stood there with her arms crossed, looking from the steel monster to me and back, and I watched her build the argument and I watched the argument collide with the fact that the thing was rated, braced, guarded, and paid for, and I watched her switch weapons.

"What's next?" she said. "You going to buy me a crash pillow? Pad the floor? Bubble-wrap the saints? You're a bit extreme, Barrett, has anyone ever told you⁠—"

I considered the crash pillow.

I considered it one beat too long, and she saw me consider it.

"NO," she said. "No. That was a JOKE. Do not write anything down."

I did not write anything down. That day.

She made coffee, muttering to the saints about scaffolding, and the day began, and if she climbed the new stool four times that morning when the work only required twice, and tested the guardrail with her hand each time like she was checking it for insincerity, I saw it and said nothing.

She was already deep in the panel by mid-morning — the light rig repositioned, the lower section pulled into the raking light: an old scar, long, running through the angel's robe near the hem. Fire damage. Centuries old. Someone had painted over it once; someone else had scraped the overpaint off; the burn beneath lay exposed, dark, permanent.

She worked around it. Not on it. Around it — cleaning up to its edges and stopping, the way you'd sweep to the chalk line at a scene.

"You're keeping the scorch marks," I said.

Not a question.

Her hands stopped. She looked at the burn for a moment, and when she answered, her voice had put down its tools.

"Somebody tried to hide it once. Come here — look. You can see the ghost of the overpaint."

I left the chair.

I want it understood that the chair had held me for three days. Through the tests and the questions and the wrist passing an inch from my sleeve, the chair had held, because the chair was the perimeter and I do not leave a perimeter. She said come here and I was already moving, and I registered the already-moving the way you register a lock giving way somewhere below decks.

I came to the panel. I stood at her shoulder.

Close. Closer than the room required. Her head came to my collarbone and the warmth of her rose off her skin after a day of work, and under the solvents she smelled like herself, and the angel looked out at both of us from under its centuries of tea-colored varnish while she traced the scar in the air an inch off the surface.

"Some restorer two hundred years ago decided the fire never happened. Painted a lie over it — a nice smooth lie, matched the pigments and everything. But the panel knows. The wood remembers the heat, see how the grain drank the char? You can cover that. You can't undo it. And when the lie ages — and lies age faster than truth, that's chemistry, the overpaint always cracks first — you get both. The wound AND the lie about the wound. Twice the damage. So I keep the scorch marks. It survived a fire. That's not shameful. That's the truest thing about⁠—"

She turned to make the point to my face.

I was closer than she had calculated. I watched her recalculate — the swab hand coming up short between us, her chin tipping back to find my eyes, and the sentence dying somewhere in the eight inches between her mouth and mine.

Neither of us moved.

Her heart lost its rhythm. I heard it happen — the beat stumbling, catching, going fast and wrong — and her eyes dropped to my mouth, one second, involuntary, and came back up, and she knew I had seen it, and her pulse went faster still.

The lock of hair was down against her neck. Three days I had marked its position. Three days it had hung there while she worked, while she argued, while she fed me and tested me and built me a gentler story than I deserved.

My hand rose.

I did not send it. It rose the way water rises, and I took the lock of hair between two fingers — soft, softer than three days of looking had predicted — and moved it back, and my knuckles grazed the side of her neck.

Her breath caught. A small sound, barely a sound at all, and it went through me like a blade finding the gap in old armor, and I was leaning — a degree, another degree, everything I am paying out like rope through a slipping grip, her face tipping up, her lips parting, the warmth of her mouth already reaching mine across the last few inches —

They will take her. And they will do it in front of you.

I stepped back.

Too fast. The speed I use on threats — the room blurring, the full width of the basement arriving between us in under a second, and I stood by the stairs with my hand still holding the shape of her hair and my blood roaring in a register I had not heard from it.

She stood at the panel. Swab in her hand. Eyes enormous. Breathing like she'd come up from deep water.