Page 4 of Graceless

This man was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and no one had made him on purpose, and it cost me something to look at him — a pressure behind my sternum, a catch in the breath I was already failing to catch, standing too close to a painting you can't afford and knowing you'll think about it for weeks.

The part of my brain that was still working — a small part, the emergency generator — said: Cat. The bus. Focus.

"What just — how am I — I was at the corner." My voice came out wrong. High. Cracked. I pressed my back harder into the granite and pointed down the street toward the intersection I could still see, where the bus had stopped and someone was honking and the whole thing was carrying on like I hadn't almost died in it. "I was there. A second ago I was there."

He looked at me the way you look at a problem that has just gotten more complicated than it needed to be.

"You should watch where you're going," he said.

That — of all things. After all of that.

"Watch where I'm — there was a bus." The outrage arrived like cavalry, and I have never been so grateful for a bad personality trait in my life because it got between me and the shaking. "You — did you pull me? How did you — we're two blocks away. We are two blocks away. You can't — people don't just —"

"You're fine," he said. The way you'd say it to a parking meter.

"That is not an answer to the question."

"It's the only one that matters."

I stared at him. He stared back. He had the absolute immobility of a person who could do this all day — all year — who had never once in his life been outstubborned and was not about to start now. I had paint thinner on my hands and a four-hundred-year-old angel crushed to my chest and absolutely no cards left to play, and I played them anyway, because that is what I do when I have no cards.

"You saved my life. I'm — thank you. I mean that. But you moved me two blocks in — I don't even know, a second? Less? That's not — how is that a thing that happened?"

Something changed in his face. I almost missed it. His eyes dropped to me — not the way they'd looked before, that flat annoyed scan, but something quicker and less controlled, something that started at my face and went — I don't know where it went. Somewhere he pulled it back from. A fracture in the marble, there and gone so fast I couldn't swear to it in court but I could swear to it everywhere else. His jaw tightened. One hand, at his side, closed and opened.

Then it was gone and his face was stone again, and he stepped back like I was something he'd set down on a shelf.

"Go home," he said. Quiet. Not unkind, but not negotiable.

"You don't get to just —"

He turned to walk away. Every reasonable thing in me said let him, run, go home, call Joey, call Nina, call anyone. But I had just been moved two blocks by a man who looked like a Caravaggio and talked like a traffic sign, and I was not ready to let the only evidence of the most impossible thing that had ever happened to me walk down Fifth Avenue without an explanation.

So I did the stupid thing. I grabbed his sleeve.

Good wool. Expensive — I'd only ever touched wool like that on paintings. Underneath it, his arm didn't give. Not a fraction. Grabbing a banister. He went still.

I held on. My hand was shaking but I held on.

"Please," I said. "I'm not crazy. I'm not going to call the cops. I just — I need to understand what happened to me."

He looked down at my hand on his sleeve. Then up at my face. And for one second — one — his expression did something I couldn't read. Not softening, not exactly. More like something behind his face leaned toward the glass and then caught itself and stepped back.

"You can't," he said. "Not yet."

And then he moved — the same impossible blur, the same lurch in my stomach like the floor dropping out — and I was holding empty air.

I caught a flash of dark coat half a block south. Then gone — around a corner or into a doorway or just faster than my eyes could track. No footsteps, no cab pulling away. Just a man who had covered fifty yards in the time it took me to blink, and my hand still closed around the shape of his sleeve, and my whole arm tingling where he'd held me.

People moved around me like water. Nobody had seen anything. There was nothing to see.

I stood in that doorway for a long time. I didn't even know what street I was on. My heart was still hammering. The angel was still crushed to my chest. A woman walked past me talking on the phone about her divorce, and the light changed, and a cab honked, and the city just — kept going, not caring what had just happened to me in it.

I should have been thinking about the impossible thing. The speed, the blur, the two blocks with no in-between. And I was, a little. The emergency generator was running that problem on a loop, filing it under things that can't be real, where it would not stay filed for long.

But that wasn't what I was thinking about.

I was thinking about his face. The light catching those dark eyes and turning them blue for half a second. His jaw tightening when he looked at me — that quick, pulled-back thing, the fracture in the marble. The way he'd said not yet, like there was a yet, like this wasn't over, like he already knew something I didn't.