Page 28 of Graceless

I took the avenue there. Coming back, with a gallon can in each hand and the light gone and the cold funneling down the cross streets the way it does in March, I took the side street, because it's four minutes shorter and because he'd told me not to, in exactly that order.

They came off the loading dock of the tile place on 25th. Two of them. I heard them before I saw them — that's the part I keep, that my ears knew first, some frequency in the footsteps that said wrong while my eyes were still on the pavement ice — and then the taller one was in front of me and the world got very simple.

"Bags," he said. He had his hood up and a knife held low against his leg, casual, the way you'd carry keys. The other one moved behind me. My heart went off like something dropped in a kitchen, and my hands kept holding the cans, because they're forty dollars a gallon, which is the single stupidest thought I have ever had at knifepoint and I had it with my whole chest.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. They're solvents, they're nothing, they're⁠—"

I put the cans down. I was watching the knife. That's why I can't tell you where he came from.

There was the knife, and the space of one breath, and then the space was him — filling it, all of it, between me and the blade like a wall that had always been there, and I never heard him arrive. I'd left him in a chair three blocks away. The tall one's arm was up where the knife had been and the knife was in his hand now — Raq's, the wrong hand, the impossible hand — and he folded it closed with his thumb, one-handed, unhurried, like putting away his own pen.

"No," he said. To both of them. Just that.

It cost him nothing. No stance, no shout, none of the movie grammar. He stood there in his good coat holding a folded knife that had been open in another man's fist one second ago, and he looked at them with the flat patience of a man at the front of a very long line, and whatever they saw in that look emptied them both out through the soles of their feet. The tall one went back a step, then off the curb, then they were running, actually running, sneakers slapping ice, and the street was just a street again — me, him, two cans of white spirit sitting upright on the pavement like witnesses.

He picked up the cans. His face when he turned to me was terrible in a way I had no word for — not angry at me, not at them exactly, something underneath both, banked way down and held.

"You took the side street," he said.

"You were watching the painting."

"Yes," he said. "That was the arrangement."

We walked back to my corner in a silence you could have chipped with a chisel. My legs did the thing where they work fine until you're safe. By the stoop they were going, and my hands had started — the shake arrives on its own schedule, always after, always when it's least useful — and I got the key into the gate on the third try and then turned around to say something normal, something proportionate, thank you or don't tell Sal or forty dollars a gallon, and what came out instead, at volume, was:

"How were you there?"

He didn't answer.

"Three blocks. Chained door. You were in the chair, I left you in the chair, and you were — nobody walks that. Nobody runs that. I turned around for one second and you were already⁠—"

"You're not hurt," he said. Flat. A man reading the only line on the form that mattered to him.

"I know I'm not hurt!"

"You're angry that you were afraid."

And that — that went in like a blade going exactly where a knife hadn't. Because it was true, and nobody's supposed to see that, that's load-bearing, the whole apparatus stands on nobody seeing that — and he'd read it off me in the dark from four feet away the way I read overpaint under raking light, and there was one second where the street tilted and the March cold went straight through my coat and I was furious and alive and shaking, with the gate at my back and his impossible face above me looking down with something finally, finally moving in it —

And this time neither of us ran.

I don't know which of us moved. The doorframe hit my back and his hand was in my hair and his mouth came down on mine.

Not careful. Not a question. His lips were softer than anything that hard had a right to be, and then they weren't soft at all, and I opened for him because my body didn't ask me first — and he made a sound low in his chest that I felt through my coat, through my ribs, in my teeth. And the taste of him — warm and dark and faintly like a struck match, like something that had been burning somewhere a long time — went straight down my spine.

I fisted both hands in his coat and pulled. He let me move him — this man who doesn't move — and the weight of him pressed me into the doorframe, chest and hips and the hard heat of all of it, until my toes were barely holding the ground. One hand cradled the back of my skull off the brick. The other found my waist and gripped — spread rib to hip — and hauled me up into him, and the sound I made into his mouth was nothing I have ever made before, and his whole body answered it. A shudder. Deep. Like a struck string.

He kissed me the way I clean five-hundred-year-old paint — like there was something real under the surface and it had been dark a long time — slow, deep, his teeth catching my lower lip, and the cold was gone, the street was gone, there was brick behind me and furnace in front of me and I wanted his coat off, I wanted his hands under mine, I wanted —

And then he stopped.

All at once, entirely, the way the bus once didn't. He pulled back with his breath gone ragged — his breath, the tide table, ragged — and his eyes in the stoop light had gone wrong.

Not dark. That was the thing — they were always dark, dark past dark, with that blue banked way down under them like something burning behind smoked glass. The glass was gone. The blue was up — all the way up, surfaced, bright in a way one streetlight and a March night could not account for, blue like the bottom of a flame where it touches the wick — and for one full second the man on my stoop looked at me with eyes that were not, in any way I could defend to anyone, human.

Then he blinked, and the glass came back, and it was just a beautiful man breathing hard in bad light, looking at me the way men look at fires they have set and cannot afford.

"That—" I started.