Page 26 of Babies for the Boss
She smiles. “That’s what I do. Come to me with anything, I have the answer. I have all the answers. A pity there are so few who listen to me.” With that, she wanders back to her desk.
And me? I’m still sighing at my monitor, wondering how I’ve gotten to the point with Pavel that I’m standing on his ground and it’s still shaking.
Then, on a Thursday evening, Pavel stops by my desk as the office empties and quietly tells me he would like me to come to his apartment after work. Tonight, if I’m free.
I look up at him. In three months of this, whatever this is, I have never been to his penthouse. We have kept to the office, always, with the city burning through those eighth-floor windows, thecouch, the desk, the geography of a space that belongs to his professional life and therefore feels, I think, like less of a concession.
An invitation to his home is something different. So, I tell him I’m free.
He nods, and then he tells me how to get there, and this is when it gets specific in a way that sits interestingly alongside everything Vet said at lunch three weeks ago. I am to take a cab, not a rideshare. I am to give the driver an address two blocks from his building and walk the rest of the way. I am to pay cash. If I notice anyone following me at any point, I am to go into the nearest busy public space and call the number he gives me, not his regular number.
He says all of this in the calm, matter-of-fact tone he uses for operational instructions, the tone that means these are not suggestions, and he watches my face while he says it to make sure I’m taking it seriously.
I take it fucking seriously. What Vet described is sitting right there at the edge of my mind, giving context to his every word.
How much danger am I in by being with Pavel?
But I follow his instructions to the letter. The cab, the cash, the two-block walk through cold air that cuts right through my coat, checking the street behind me with a casualness I have to work to manufacture. Nobody follows me, as far as I can tell.
The building is quietly expensive, the kind of place that doesn’t need to announce itself. The doorman is expecting me. The elevator is fast and silent, and I watch my own reflection in its mirrored doors and notice that I look nervous, which I am, though I couldn’t cleanly say about which part.
Pavel. The person or people who might have followed me to him. Hell, even Vet at this point.
Operations, my ass.
Pavel opens the door himself. He looks at me for a moment with those pale, careful eyes, reading me the way he always does, and then he asks me, specifically and without preamble, whether I took a cab or a rideshare, whether I paid cash, whether the address I gave was the one he specified, and whether I noticed anyone on the walk over.
“I followed every instruction to the letter. You know I did.”
Something in his posture settles by a fraction. “Good.”
The penthouse is spare and immaculate and very high up, and the city spreads out beyond the windows like something spilled, all light and dark and cold geometry. I stand in front of those windows for a moment and look out at it and think about the fact that he lives up here above all of it, and I feel the question I haven’t resolved shift and settle in my chest like a stone finding the bottom.
He comes to stand beside me at the window. Close, but not touching. Looking out at the same city. “Care for a drink?”
“No. I’m fine.”
After a moment, he says my name, quietly, and I turn to look at him, and his expression is the one I have no clean word for, and I stand there with the city blazing below us and everything Vet told me still somewhere in the back of my mind.
I think, I know what you are. I know it more clearly tonight than I did a month ago. I know what lives on the other side of that line you draw, and I know that you draw it carefully, and I knowthat I am standing on the safer side of it because you put me here deliberately.
I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t know if it should be.
He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair back from my face, unhurried, with those careful, rough fingers, and the stone in my chest doesn’t go anywhere, but the question quiets. I let him pull me into his arms, and the city burns on below us indifferently, and I stop thinking about dark corners the moment his lips land on mine.
“Pet, you worry me.” His voice is low and soft in a way that feels like a caress over my skin.
“I worry you?” Laughable, considering our circumstances.
But there’s some faraway look in his eyes, and his jaw flexes. “Every time I am not with you, I worry.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
“Da.” Those thick fingers smooth over my cheek, then hook around the back of my neck in one quick motion as he pulls me to him again. His tongue pries into my mouth, and just like that, my mind quiets.
He takes my clothes off one piece at a time until I’m naked in front of that tall window wall. All of Manhattan could see me now, if only they were as high up as his penthouse.
They are not.
