Page 67 of Graceless

"It is not enough." Something in my chest did a thing I didn't have time to supervise. "Standing outside all night like a fire hydrant is not an address."

"I don't feel the cold, Caterina."

"That is not the point and you know it." I put the plates down, because this needed both hands. "And hold on — never? You've been here since before Rome had plumbing. You never once kept an apartment? A house? A kick-ass loft in Manhattan, something? That can't be true. That long, and nowhere, ever?"

"It was not always true." He was quiet a moment. "I have kept rooms. Houses. Land, once, for a long stretch — I was good at it. A home is a place you keep what you want, Caterina. And nothing about me ages, and everything about everyone else does. You furnish a life, and you watch it empty, and you leave it, and you do it again, and again, and at some point the keeping stopped making sense. So I stopped. A post asks nothing. A post holds nothing. A post cannot be emptied."

I stood there with my dish towel and my heart breaking in a brand-new place.

"And now?"

"Now there is a house I stand outside of."

"No," I said. "Now there is a house you live in."

He went still.

"You're staying here. I'm not taking no for an answer, so don't bother building one. And don't make it weird — yes, I know we haven't known each other long enough to live together, I can hear Nina already, believe me. But this—" I waved the dish towel at the table, the night, the whole impossible inventory of him "—is not exactly a normal situation. So you'll stay. And you won't argue."

He said nothing.

He said nothing in a way that had a great deal in it, and I decided it was agreement, because deciding is a thing I'm good at.

"Good. So. Since you're staying — we're going to have some house rules."

"Rules." His mouth did the eighth-of-an-inch thing, closer to a real smile than I'd ever seen it get. "I am older than Rome. As you said."

"And you're going to have house rules. Just shut up and listen." I swatted his enormous shoulder with the dish towel on my way past, and got the legal pad off the counter, and slapped it down between us, and said, "House rules," in Nonna's exact cadence, because in this house that phrase has a liturgy.

Then I clicked the pen, and looked at the yellow page, and it stopped being funny, because there was one thing I actually needed in writing.

"First. And this one's serious."

No disappearing, I wrote. The pen pressed too hard on the period.

"If you go, you say you're going. Even one word. I've done the other kind." I didn't look up. "It's not negotiable and I'm not discussing why."

"I know why," he said, quietly, and didn't make me discuss it. "Agreed."

After that they came easy, half of them laughing, all of them true. No lies, not ever — his word, the binding kind. Dangerous answers get named. I decide what I take; his line stands. Nights inside the house, like a person — it's March, and Donnie upset is a public-address system. Sunday is Nina's, and you'll eat, I don't care what you run on. He watched the list grow with an attention that had no business making the kitchen feel warm.

"Anything for you?" I asked. "It's your house too, now."

"One thing." He'd been ready. "When I say run, you run. No questions, no rolling pin, no forty-dollar solvent cans. There may come a moment when the distance between you and a door is my whole world, and in that moment you are not a negotiator, you are the thing I cannot do this without." He said it flat, the way he says the true ones, and the flatness put the cold down my arms, because a man who moves the way he moves was telling me there were things on the board that made him count doors.

"You explain after," I said, when my voice came back.

"After. Every time."

I wrote it down. When he says run — run. My handwriting went smaller on that one, the way it does when I mean it.

"Deal," I said, and put out my hand across the pad, formal as a closing, because if I didn't make it a joke I was going to make it something else entirely.

He took it. His hand closed around mine, warm and enormous and careful.

"That's the deal, Raq."

"Caterina," he said.