Page 62 of Graceless

"He told me to leave. The job, the city." I held her eyes. "You. He was emphatic. He has never once, in all this while, been emphatic."

"And you're still here."

"I am still here."

"Okay." She picked the cup back up, and her knuckles were white on it. "Why? Why me? I fix paintings. I feed the cat that isn't mine. Why is anything watching me?"

"Because this is my fault." I had held this one at her window for weeks, and now I set it down where she could see all of it. "All of it. And I will handle it. I promise you that."

"What do you mean it's your fault?"

"Fifth Avenue. The bus. I broke the rules of the world in the open, in daylight, in front of everything that can feel the rules break — to keep you in it. A thing like that is a flare, Caterina. It goes up, and everything in the dark looks at where it landed."

"Wait." Her hand came down off the cup. "The demon. The watcher on my roof. The whole list. All of this is happening because you saved my life?"

"Yes."

She didn't move.

"People would call that a choice. It wasn't one. I saw both futures whole while I was crossing the avenue — you alive, with everything in the dark holding your address. Or you gone, and me in my doorway, having watched it happen. I am a Watcher, Caterina. I have watched cities burn. I have watched the water take whole coastlines and I did not move, because watching was the work and the work was all I was."

Her eyes were bright and she did not look away, and neither did I, because this one she was owed to the last word.

"You are the one thing I have ever met that I could not watch end. So I moved. And then I stood in one doorway for weeks, looking at one lit window, and confirmed for anything still wondering exactly what the flare had been for. I made you visible. Twice. That is what my attention costs, and you never agreed to pay it."

"I may not have agreed to pay it, Raq." Her voice was very quiet and completely level. "But I wouldn't be here at all if you hadn't saved me. I'd say I'd pay anything for that. Wouldn't you?"

I did not answer her. And then the old move arrived — the practiced one, the one that has kept me above ground since the fall, the one I know better than my name.

"The correct thing — the thing I have done every time before — is distance. I leave. The attention follows me, and in time you become nobody's business again. I should⁠—"

"No."

Her hand came down flat on the table like a judge's, and she was on her feet, shaking, and every alarm in her was ringing at once, and I heard which alarms they were, and not one of them was about the demon.

"Finish that sentence and I swear to the saints, Raq. You don't get to detonate my whole understanding of the universe and then evacuate. You made me visible? Fine. Then you stand in the light with me. You stay, and you fight, and if there's more than one of them, you tell me that too, and we handle it. But the leaving — no. The leaving is off the table. Forever. Say you understand."

I have heard no from things with authority over the hinges of the world. It has never once landed the way it landed from a shaking woman in yesterday's clothes, forbidding me to join the inventory of everyone who ever left her. Something in me that has been braced since the fall came off its guard, all the way.

I stood up. I came around the table. She tipped her head all the way back and did not step back, not one inch.

"You don't understand," I said, and this close she felt the words as much as heard them. "How dangerous⁠—"

Her hand came up and landed flat on my chest.

"Stop. You think you're offering me a choice between danger and safety? Nobody ever offered us that. Not once. Not anybody, not ever. We drive on the Gowanus. We find lumps. We cross Fifth Avenue against the light. My parents left for dinner one night and never came home. Nonna did everything right her entire life and I lit candles for eleven months anyway." Her voice stayed level, and I could hear what it cost to keep it there. "Everything is dangerous for us, Raq. Everything has always been dangerous for us — and we get up and make the coffee anyway. That's the whole trick of being human. There is no safe. There's only what you're willing to love in the meantime." She looked up at me. "You're not bringing danger into my life. You're the first thing that ever offered to stand in front of some of it."

Then I made the most dangerous vow I have ever made in my existence:

"Then I will stand between you and it until I can no longer stand. If that is what it takes, Caterina, that is what it takes."

Her hand was still on my chest. I felt my words happen under it.

And every leash I own broke at once.

I kissed her — my hand in her hair, her back meeting the counter, every hour I had ever stood in that doorway and the whole cold night under a streetlight coming down at one time. She rose up into it and made a sound that redrew my maps, and I made one that was not human at all, and she heard it, and pulled me closer. The cup went over. Nobody went after it.

Mine. It came up out of the oldest part of me, the part that predates asking — nothing wise in it, nothing careful, nothing civilized at all. Mine to hold. Mine to guard. And the thought of the thing at her gate — of anything in the dark putting its eyes on what was in my arms — went through me black and total, and my hold on her tightened, and I did not apologize for it in any language I know. I was not leaving her. Not ever. They could send the whole roster.