Page 38 of Graceless

"They do."

"So it was nothing."

He looked at me over the terrible tea. "It was nothing. And I'm staying tonight."

"I wasn't going to argue with that."

"I know." Almost a smile. Almost. "Couch?"

I got him the afghan — Nonna's ugly one, because the good blanket was mine and some battles are not negotiable — and a pillow that smelled like the closet it had been in since Joey left, and I stood in the doorway of the living room while he sat on the couch, and I went to bed before my face did something I couldn't take back.

I did not sleep.

I lay in the dark listening to the sounds a house makes with someone in it. The couch spring when he shifted. The particular silence of a man trying to be quiet in a space too small for him. The kitchen faucet — he got water at two; I heard the cabinet, the tap, the glass set down with a care that made no sense for a glass — and every sound rewrote the architecture of the house, which had been mine and empty and fine, and was now mine and occupied and something else entirely.

At three I gave up pretending.

I got up. I walked to the doorway of the living room in Nonna's robe and bare feet, and he was sitting on the couch in the dark, not lying down, not sleeping, just sitting there with the afghan across his knees and his head turned toward the window, watching the street. He'd taken his shoes off. I don't know why that undid me. The shoes.

"You're not sleeping," I said.

"I don't sleep much."

"That's not the couch's fault?"

"The couch is fine."

I stood in the doorway. He sat on the couch. The hallway between us was dark, and it was three in the morning, and I was so tired of being careful.

"You're not sleeping on that couch," I said.

He looked at me.

"You heard me."

He stood up off the couch.

Three steps of dark hallway. He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the robe, and he looked at me the way he'd looked at me through the chain gap, and through the doorframe, and across the basement for two weeks — except now there was nothing between us.

"Tell me to go," he said.

"No."

"Caterina—" and it was the beginning of some sentence full of reasons.

"Cate," I said. "My name is Cate. You have been in my house every day for two weeks and you know that, so stop it."

Something happened in his eyes. "Cate," he said, and my name in his mouth sounded like a word he'd been holding behind his teeth for a long time.

I reached up and pulled his mouth down onto mine.

The stoop kiss had been adrenaline — a knife and a dark street and two people shaking. This was different. Slow. His mouth on mine, then off it — my jaw, the corner of it. Under my ear.

My leg went. Just went. I grabbed his shirt and held on.

He smiled against my throat. I felt it — the first smile I'd ever gotten out of that man — and I laughed, breathless, stupid with it.

"I'm fine," I said. "I'm completely fine."