Page 13 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
She wrote it without writing it down and walked her pencil away.
He took off his coat. He laid it across the back of the booth the way you would put a cat down without waking it.
"You stare," I said.
"I look." He set his forearms on the table. The candle in its short jar put a small flame in each of his eyes. "Staring is what a man does when he wants something. Looking is what he does when he already has it."
I drank my water because I had no available answer to that.
The platter came in a steel bowl with paper crumpled in the bottom, a small pot of melted butter beside it, a lemon wedge that had been cut by somebody in a hurry. The shrimp were a heap of pink against the steam. The scallops sat dark gold against the white of the plate, two crisp brown edges, a spoon of something green at the side. He pushed half the scallops onto my plate without asking. I pushed half my shrimp onto his without asking either. That was how we were going to eat tonight.
"Theo bit Owen today," I said.
"Bad?"
"On the forearm. He left teeth. Owen cried for the principle of it more than the pain."
"And you?"
"I told Theo we do not use our teeth on people we love."
His mouth went up at the corner. "Did he take the lesson?"
"He filed it under negotiable."
He laughed with teeth this time. I logged it.
The four men sat down at the booth next to ours when I was halfway through the scallops.
They came in loud, the way a group comes in when they have been somewhere louder first. Two drinks in already, maybe three. Suits and ties loosened the right amount to feel like loosening was their idea. The bench creaked when the heaviest of them dropped into it. They ordered bottles and another round of bottles and the bottles came fast and went down faster. Their eyes went around the room out of habit and stopped on me out of choice. One of them, the one nearest the aisle, kept his there long enough to want me to notice him keeping it there. He set his glass down without taking his eyes off me and spoke loud enough for his friends to hear and not pretend he had not meant me to.
"Look at that," the one nearest the aisle said, low. "Look at all of that. Tell me you would not put her over the bar." The man across from him let a laugh come up through his nose, slow, like he was tasting it. "Mouth like hers, you would not have to ask twice. And that waist on her."
I kept peeling.
Across from me, Daniil's face changed without changing. The flirt that had been threaded through his mouth fell away first. The amusement at the corners of his eyes went after it. The layer beneath that, the one I had been pretending he kept folded somewhere I would not have to see, climbed to the surface. His shoulders went still in the way I had learned to read in the last month, the kind of still that comes before motion, not after it. The hand at the side of his glass went very white at the knuckles.
No. Not tonight. Not over a table of nothing.
I set the half-peeled shrimp on the rim of my plate. I wiped my fingers on the paper towel. I made my voice warm and I leaned across the table on my forearms so my face was the only thing in his sightline.
"Tell me about the shrimp," I said. "Are they always this good or did we get lucky?"
His eyes came to mine. Slid past me to the booth over my shoulder. Came back to mine. He had heard me. He was somewhere else.
"Did you sleep last night?" I tried. "You look like you did not."
"Enough." He said it without looking at me.
"Who did you see today?"
"Mikhail."
I slid a peeled shrimp toward his plate.
"Eat one. They are better than they should be."
He did not look at the shrimp.
