Page 59 of Graceless

Nobody warns you about walking back toward a man whose skin you know. The body doesn't care what the rest of you is going through. I was still furious at the sky, still carrying the couch and the grief and a word I couldn't say in Nina's kitchen — and my body wanted him anyway. The hands. The mouth. The heat he throws without trying. I stood on Nina's steps being angry about that too. Two days since I'd touched him, and my skin had been counting.

Nina walked straight up to him.

She is five-four in her work clogs, and she stopped inside arm's reach of a man built like a garage and looked him up and looked him down and took her time about it, because fear has never once made the list of things Nina Costanzo does in front of witnesses.

"I watched you all night," she said.

"I know."

"You know." She nodded, slow, the nod she gives a client who has just admitted to box dye. "Okay. Then know this too. That woman has people. She's got me, she's got a block, she's got a church she's mad at, and if you hurt her — I have scissors, and I cut for a living."

"Understood," he said, with the same gravity he'd have given the archangel Michael, and possibly more.

Nina held his eyes another second. Whatever she was looking for, she found enough of it, because she looked at me next, and I answered the question before she could load it.

"I'm okay, Nina. I'll be alright. I'm walking home."

She looked between us — me in yesterday's clothes, him fresh off a whole night on her corner — and then she went up her steps and came back down with the bag and put it in my hands, veal and bread and whatever else she'd decided grief requires.

"Sunday," she said. To both of us. "My table. Both of you. I'm not asking." And she stood on her stoop with her arms crossed and watched us all the way off her block.

We walked. Six blocks, side by side, not touching, him shortening that enormous stride to mine like he'd been doing it his whole life, and the neighborhood waking up around us — the gates going up on 86th, the bakery exhaust, two guys arguing about the Mets like it was their job. Nobody looked twice at us. A woman and a man walking home in the morning. The most ordinary thing in the world, and my whole left side felt him the entire way home.

We were two blocks in when he spoke.

"Your friend threatened me with scissors."

"She means them."

"I believe her. I have been threatened by principalities." He didn't look down at me, but I heard it in his voice, the thing that lives next to the flatness. "That was the most credible one this century."

I laughed before I meant to, and the rest of the walk went easier.

At my gate I stopped, keys in hand, and looked up at him — the whole impossible height of him, patient on my sidewalk in the morning light like he had nowhere else in creation to be, which, it occurred to me, might be exactly true.

"Inside," I said, before the thing in my sternum could get any ideas about doing this on a sidewalk. "We're having a conversation. A long one."

CHAPTER 17

RAQ

She sat me at the kitchen table, put the coffee on, and took the chair across from me with both hands around her cup.

"Everything," she said. "That was the deal. I swore to the saints."

"Everything." I filled a chair built for smaller lives. "Ask."

I have been interrogated before, by things with ranks, in rooms with no doors, and I gave nothing to any of them. She had a cup of coffee and a list in her head, and I was going to give her all of it.

"I have questions. A list longer than your roster. Some of them are going to be stupid, and you don't get to laugh."

"I don't laugh."

"You've laughed once."

"Twice," I said, and felt something that had been rigid in me since the stoop come off its guard by one degree.

She asked.