Page 41 of Graceless

CHAPTER 12

RAQ

The streetlight stayed dead all night. I stood at the window with the room behind me and the street in my eyes, and I did not see one thing that happened on that street.

She was asleep eleven feet away and I could feel her.

Not hear. Not sense the way I sense a room. Feel — the slow tide of her breathing arriving somewhere behind my sternum, steady, uninvited, the warmth of a sleeping body registering in mine as if her skin were still against it. Every time she turned over, something in my chest turned with her.

I have stood watch on four continents. I have not been touched with any tenderness in longer than this city has existed. I did not know what to do with my hands.

Nothing came. The block thinned toward morning, patient, unspent, and I stood in a dead woman's kitchen with her granddaughter's saints watching me from the wall and no name for what was happening in me.

She woke at seven. No gradient. Asleep, then armed. I heard the quilt thrown back, bare feet on cold floor, and then her voice from behind the curtain.

"You stood there all night."

"Yes."

"At the window. Like a curtain rod."

"The curtain rod faces the room," I said. "I face the street."

Quiet. Then the curtain moved and she came out in my shirt.

Only my shirt. Sleeves past her hands, hem at her thighs, hair a catastrophe, and the marks I had put on her throat sitting above the collar in the gray morning light where anyone could read them.

I looked at the street. The street had nothing in it. I kept looking at it anyway, because the alternative was crossing eleven feet of linoleum and putting her back through that curtain, and something had come to her gate at one in the morning and worked the latch.

She went past me to the stove without looking at me. Close enough that her sleeve caught my arm. Neither of us mentioned it.

She made coffee. The terrible kind, the only kind, the tin with the price sticker worn to a ghost. She poured two cups without asking and put mine on the sill by my hand.

"Keep buying this one," I said.

She stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth. "The coffee?"

"The terrible one. I like it."

Something crossed her face. "Sure," she said. "God forbid you suffer good beans."

She hoisted herself up to sit on the workbench, feet swinging, cup in both hands, and I stopped being able to look at the street entirely.

"Your name," she said. "The real one. Not Barrett. Barrett's a laminate. I earned the real one somewhere around two in the morning, and don't make me itemize where."

"You did."

"So."

"The name is old," I said. "It's in books. Not good books. When you have it, you'll have everything attached to it, and it doesn't come one page at a time. It arrives whole."

"That's a no."

"That's a not yet."

"I don't — what does that even mean?" She set the cup down beside her. "It's a name, Raq. People are born with them. Your mother gave you one, and you're acting like I asked for your social security number and a blood sample. What books? Are you — what, famous? Wanted? Is there a warrant?" She was building momentum, one bad theory stacking on another because I wasn't stopping any of them. "Is it a mob thing? Witness protection? Because if you tell me you're in witness protection I'm going to lose my entire mind, I have been feeding a man in witness protection soup⁠—"

"It's not witness protection."