Page 42 of Graceless

"Then WHAT."

I said nothing.

"You're doing the thing." She pointed at me with two fingers, coffee in the same hand. "Where every answer is boring so I'll know it's true. You taught me that rule yourself, first night, on my stoop with a badge in your hand. I remember everything you've ever said to me, Raq. That's my whole problem. Try again."

I crossed the room.

I did not decide to. I was at the window and then I was in front of her, close enough that her knees came apart to let me stand there, close enough to feel the heat of her through two feet of cold morning, and I put my hands on the workbench on either side of her and gave her the truth in the only size I had.

"When I hand you the name, you'll look it up. You verify things. It's the best thing about you — I've watched you do it to every person in your life." I was close enough to see her pupils go. "What you find will change how you look at me. I've had twelve days of how you look at me."

"That's not possible."

"It is."

"No — Raq." She got a hand around my forearm and held on, and her thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist. "There is no name in any book anywhere that changes how I look at you. Not after last night. Do you understand what I'm telling you? You could tell me anything."

Her breath had gone short. I heard it change. I was close enough to feel the heat come up off her skin, and the air between us was doing what it does when I stop holding it still.

"Whatever that is," she said. Unsteady. "That thing you do. It's not going to distract me. I want a name."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You are. And you know you are." Her hand slid up my forearm. "You've been doing it since the day you walked in here, and I thought I was losing my mind, and I want you to know I'm not falling for it⁠—"

I kissed her.

She made a sound against my mouth and pulled me in by the arm she was holding, and for a while there was no name and no Monday and no thing at the gate — just her mouth, and her hands, and my shirt hanging open on her shoulders where I'd gotten it out of my way.

She broke off first. Forehead against my collarbone, breathing hard.

"That's cheating," she said.

"Yes."

She pushed back off me, both hands flat on my chest, and looked up with her jaw set — and I watched her put herself back together in about two seconds, which is a thing I will never stop finding remarkable.

"Fine. Here's what's happening. Monday. That's the offer, take it or don't. It's Saturday, that's me being generous, and it's a one-time deal. And then I swear on the saints—" she caught herself at the word, and her mouth did something complicated — "which is insane, since I don't believe in a single one of them, but apparently that's a thing I do now. I swear on the saints, Raq. I don't know exactly what I'll do if you don't tell me. But I find things under surfaces for a living, and I will find out what your name is one way or another. So you might as well agree, because you're not winning this."

"Monday," I said.

Strange, in my mouth. I could count on one hand the appointments I have ever dreaded, and every one of them was with management. Now there was this. A Monday, in a basement, with a woman in my shirt who was asking me to hand her a loaded gun and trust her not to use it on either of us.

"Good," she said. "Glad that's settled."

Then she took a handful of my belt and walked backward through the curtain, and I went where I was taken.

Nonna's afghan ended up on the floor. So did the shirt.

Afterward she lay across my chest with the afternoon light coming gray through the curtain, drawing something on my sternum with one finger, and I let myself have it: the weight of her, the smell of her hair, the ridiculous industrial hum of a refrigerator in a basement in Brooklyn.

"You're doing the thing where you go quiet and I can't tell if it's good quiet," she said, into my skin.

"It's good quiet."

It was past noon when we came back out. She picked up the two cold cups from the sill on her way past and ran them under the tap.

I made myself look at the street.