Page 48 of Graceless

"No, I need a minute — a man that size — Cat, is he — is everything⁠—"

"NINA."

"I'm a married woman, I'm allowed to be curious in a scholarly way⁠—"

I told her some of it. Not the scars, because those are his. Not the way the room felt at the end, because I don't have words for that yet and I'm not handing it over half-built. And not much else, because there was one wall between me and a man who hears everything, and I am not an idiot.

"Okay," she said finally. "Now the important part. How do you feel."

I looked at my kitchen. The two cups in the rack. His coat on the back of my chair like it lived there.

"Nina, I don't know one single true thing about this man."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know what you asked."

"So answer it."

"I'm happy," I said, and my voice did something on the second word, and that was the whole phone call right there. "I'm so happy I can't stand up straight, and I'm terrified, and both of those are about the same thing, which I would like on the record as deeply unfair."

"Yeah," said Nina softly. "Welcome. That's the deal."

Then she made me swear on the saints again, because apparently the first two times were provisional.

He didn't leave on Sunday either. Neither of us mentioned it.

Monday morning I told him I was going to Manhattan.

"The painting stays," I said, pulling my good coat on, the interview coat, the one that says this woman has never once been behind on her taxes. "No active work today until I'm back, which makes this a you-and-the-alarm-panel situation. Bond with it. It has a little green light."

He was standing by the window with his coffee — his coffee now; the man had a cup, we'd become a two-cup operation, I wasn't examining it — and he put it down.

"Where in Manhattan."

"Uptown. Columbia. Consulting an expert."

"I'll take you."

"You will not. It's iconography, Raq. It's the kind of meeting where two broke women split one pastry and argue about the fifteenth century for forty minutes." I found my scarf. "You follow the painting. The painting is staying on the easel. Connect the dots."

"Then I'll come as far as the building."

"Why?"

He didn't answer that.

"Uh-huh." I wound the scarf. "See, that's the thing. You want me to take you seriously, but every time I ask why, you get very interested in the window." I looked up at him, and he was doing exactly that. "What are you actually worried about? Say it out loud. Say the sentence."

Nothing. The whole big silent architecture of him, standing in my kitchen, not saying the sentence.

"That's what I thought." I got up on my toes and kissed his jaw, which required commitment. "You're cute when you're worried about me. Little odd, but cute."

"Cate—"

"I'm going to Morningside Heights, you big dummy. In the daytime. On the subway. With about nine hundred graduate students." I was laughing by then, and getting my bag, and he was watching me the way he watches the street. "I'll be fine."

He followed me to the door and said, grimly, "Take the avenue to the station. Crowded cars. If a stranger is kind to you, walk away from him."