Page 65 of Graceless

Under my palms his back was iron cabled with the effort of gentleness. A thing that could fold girders, holding itself to the pressure of a hand smoothing gold leaf.

And behind the heat of him — through every place we touched — there was cold.

Not his skin. His skin is a furnace. Behind it. All that dark, an open door at my back with all of history’s winters on the other side.

And every time I pulled him closer, every time I said his name — his real one, his short one, mine — the door swung a degree.

Warmth going through it the wrong way. Into the winter. Out of me, and losing me nothing.

There was more where it came from. There was more every time.

“Harder,” I said.

The look he gave me then was not a look a man gives a woman. It was the look of something enormous being told it no longer has to be careful.

And then he stopped being careful.

The bedframe hit the wall. I held on with my nails in his back and my mouth on his scarred shoulder and gave the winter everything it asked for, gladly, at volume — Donnie banged the pipe; the pipe can file a grievance — and the hum came up through the floorboards and my bones until I could feel how enormous the cold was, the sheer acreage of him, and instead of terror what came was the thing that always comes when I finally see the whole extent of the damage.

Everything in me rolled up its sleeves.

“Look at me,” he said.

I did.

I broke apart looking straight into all that burning blue, and he watched every second of it, and when he followed me he broke silently, which I was learning is how the oldest things break — his whole strength shaking over me, his face buried in my neck, my name said into my skin.

He came down onto his forearms, careful even wrecked, and stayed, his heartbeat going slow and enormous against mine, the lamp still burning.

"I still have questions," I said into his shoulder, when I could talk again.

I felt him smile against my neck. The real one, the one nobody else gets.

"I know," he said. "Ask me everything."

CHAPTER 18

CATE

We surfaced, eventually, because Nina's veal existed and I am my grandmother's granddaughter. I reheated it at nine o'clock and set it in front of him on the good plates, and across the steam I collected on my promise.

"Questions," I said. "I told you. But before I ask one more thing — I need a promise. You're going to tell me the truth. Always. Even when you don't want to. Especially then."

He put the fork down.

"I cannot make that promise."

The floor tilted under the whole conversation. Twelve hours of everything, his vow still warm in my ears, and this is where he balks?

"Why the hell not?"

"Because my word is binding." Flat. Absolute. Not an excuse — a fact, the way the stove is hot is a fact. "Not the way yours is, Caterina. When I give my word, it does not bend, it does not expire, and it does not care what it costs either of us. So I do not hand it around. And some things are too dangerous for you to know. If I promise you always, the promise will one day put something in your hands that kills you. I will not build that."

I was quiet for a minute. I flattened both hands on the table, and I looked at him — at everything I now knew was sitting across from me on a kitchen chair — and I made the oldest decision there is, which is to trust the thing you love, on purpose, with your eyes open.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Then here's what I want instead. You don't lie to me. Not ever. Not once. And when an answer is dangerous, you don't dodge — you say that one's dangerous, and I decide if I want it anyway."

"No."