Page 8 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"If anything tonight does not feel right. Anything. Call. Do not think about whether it is worth the call. Make the call."
I nodded. I did not trust my voice with more than that.
I opened the door. I got out. The sidewalk was warm under my shoes after the cool of his car. I took the two steps to the curb and turned back before it had finished closing on its own hinge.
He had his hand on the wheel and his eyes on me through the open window, the lock back over the rest of his face, the joke set neatly across the front of it.
"Thank you," I said, again.
I leaned in through the window before I let myself think.
I put my mouth at the corner of his jaw. The stubble was rougher than I had let myself imagine. The skin under it was warm. I kissed him there, once, light, where the jaw met the throat, and I felt him go still the way a man goes still when he has been waiting a long time to be touched and has not allowed himself to want it out loud.
I pulled back before he could do anything with the stillness.
I turned and went up the three steps to my building. I did not run. I almost did. I made my hand find my keys at the bottom of the bag and my key find the lock and the lock turn, and I did not look back at the curb, because if I had looked back I would not have made it through the door.
The door closed behind me.
I put my back against it.
My chest was working faster than the walk up the steps had earned. The hallway light buzzed once and settled. I could hear a neighbor's television through a wall. I could hear my own pulse louder than the show.
My hand lifted on its own and found the side of my own face, the place my mouth had just been. As if his cheek had left something there I could feel from the inside out. As if I could find the shape of his jaw on my own skin.
Oh no.
That was the sentence. That was all of it. I leaned my head back against the door and let it be the only one.
3
DANIIL
The block had two cameras and one of them had been pointed at the same brick wall for nine years. I had checked. The other lived under the carriage lamp of the brownstone three doors down and it lost its angle on the sidewalk halfway across the Halverson stoop. I knew the gap by heart.
My watch said forty minutes since I had cut the engine across the street. The cabin had cooled. The coffee in the holder with it. I had not touched the cup.
The upper windows of the Halverson place went dark in the order they always went dark. The small one first, the boy who slept with the door open. Then the bigger one across the hall, the boy who needed two stories. Theo. Owen. I knew their names the way I knew the names of men I had buried.
She has been inside since six.
The porch light came on.
I waited for the door to open. I waited for it to close behind her. I let her come down the four stone steps with her hand on the iron rail before I touched the handle of my own. I had told Yuri to take the rest of the night for himself. I was driving. I haddriven myself to her twice this week already and I did not want a witness for the third.
I crossed the street at a slant.
She was reading her phone. The blue of the screen sat on her cheekbones in the soft way light sits on a face that has not been sleeping enough. She had her bag strap across her body the wrong way. She had not seen me yet.
I set my hand on her shoulder, light.
She came off the sidewalk an inch. Her whole body turned on the heel of one boot and her free hand flew flat to her chest with the fingers spread like a starfish.
"Easy."
"Gosh..." Her breath caught and went and caught again. "You’re giving me a heart attack."
"I did not mean to."
