Page 85 of Graceless

"Okay, but — people fall out of records. Fires. Floods. Whole archives⁠—"

"Records fall out of records. One record. Ten." Paper moved on her desk. "This is every record I can touch, Cat. As far as anything I can reach says, this is a person who was never baptized, never taxed, never buried, never cursed on a wall by somebody they owed money. Nobody gets through a whole life without the world writing them down once — unless the world was never given the chance. Or unless every place it was written is somewhere no one like me can go."

"So what do we call a name no one ever wrote down?"

"Hidden," said Tara. "I'm not done. This is my white whale now. But I wanted you to know tonight: whatever you found down there, it's outside every record I can touch. And I've never once met anything outside all of them at once."

She hung up first, which she never does.

I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and the basement door in the corner of my eye, and the house felt very small, and the week felt very long, and I'd had exactly enough of both.

"Raq."

He was there before the second syllable finished.

"Get your coat," I said. "I want out. Out of this kitchen, away from that door, for one whole night. I want—" and it came out of me sideways, ridiculous, true — "I want to go to the beach."

"It is March."

"I know what month it is."

He looked at me for a moment. Then something moved through his face that I didn't have a name for — a yes that went deeper than the question — and he took my coat off the hook and held it open, and then he went into the bedroom and came out with every blanket we own under one arm.

"Then we go to the beach," he said. "Tonight I am not spending on walls either."

The boardwalk in March at ten o'clock belongs to nobody.

The rides stood locked in their winter shapes, the Parachute Jump burning red on the off-season schedule, and past the rail the beach ran down black to a white seam of surf. The wind came off the Atlantic like it had been saving up all winter.

It never reached me.

He walked on the ocean side with his arm around me, and the wind hit him and just — ended. Warm the whole way down the boards, warm in an unzipped coat.

"You're doing that."

"Yes."

"You could rent yourself out in January. Bus stops. Little old ladies. You'd never buy your own coffee again."

"I am spoken for."

We went down the ramp and out across the sand, past the reach of the boardwalk lights, to the dark middle of the beach where the whole black ocean went out forever. He spread the blankets with a watchman's judgment — lee of the wind he was about to become, sightlines to everything — and we lay down in the pile of them with Brooklyn glowing at our backs and the stars out hard and clean the way they only come in cold weather.

I should have been shaking. It was March on the Atlantic and I was in a coat and socks and a man.

I was not shaking.

"This is unfair to every other woman in this city," I said, up at the stars. "They're home with space heaters."

"Come here," he said.

I came there.

He pulled me over him and kissed me like the tide takes things — slow, total, no argument anywhere — and his hands went under my coat, under my sweater, flat against my bare back, and where they moved, heat moved.

"The cold," I said against his mouth. "My clothes. Physics, Raq⁠—"

"Give me the physics," he said, and undressed me under the blankets one decision at a time, and every inch he bared should have burned with wind and burned with him instead. His palm ran heat down my spine, over my hip, along my thigh — the warmth arriving like something he was writing on me — and I stopped negotiating with March entirely.