Page 16 of Night of Shadows
"Yes. The lock is operational. I checked it yesterday. You can lock the door from inside if that is what you need to feel safe."
He’s registered that the woman who walked across a room at the Greek consulate three years ago is now a woman who is going to need to be able to lock a door against him in the night. Without asking me to confirm it. He’s prepared the locked door. He’s not, in any of his preparations, made any assumption that I am going to want anything other than complete control over the geography of this house.
"All right," I say.
"I will carry her up. If you want me to."
I look at him. I look at my sleeping daughter. I look at the staircase, which has fourteen steps and a banister and which I cannot, with a duffel and a sleeping toddler, navigate alone without putting at least one of the three of us at risk.
“Ok.” is all I can manage to say.
He takes Nora from me. He does it gently. She doesn’t wake. He carries her up the stairs the way he put on her boots. I follow with the duffel.
In the upstairs bedroom is a queen bed. A small bed beside it, made up for a toddler. A nightlight already plugged into the wall. The same shape as the moon nightlight in her room at home. Not the same nightlight. A new one of the same shape. Petrov has three nieces and is, apparently, very good at his job.
Lex puts Nora in the small bed. He arranges Brontos under her arm. He pulls a blanket up to her shoulders. He doesn’t pause at the bed for longer than the action requires. He turns and leaves the room.
I sit on the edge of the queen bed. I look at my daughter for a full minute. I count her breaths. Eight. Ten. Twelve.
Then I go downstairs.
? ? ?
Lex is in the kitchen. He’s making coffee. One mug on the counter, set at the spot at the island where I guess I’ll be sitting in the mornings. Not for himself, then. For me.
I sit. He hands me the mug. The coffee is the way I take it, which is black with one sugar. This is not information he willl find in a federal file. All I can say at this hour is he figured correctly and I’m thankful for the coffee. He is, for the second time tonight, going to make me cry, and I am not going to let him.
He takes his suit jacket off.
This is the first time I have seen him without a jacket since the Greek consulate three years ago. The shirt underneath is white, and it is doing nothing to hide what is under it. The sleeves are rolled to the elbow. The Greek script on the inside of his left forearm is fully visible in the kitchen light, several lines, the ink very black against olive skin that has not seen much summer in a long time. And underneath the script, there are forearms — corded, the muscle shifting when he sets the mug down, the kind that come from work and not from a gym, from manual labor and lots of it.
The cotton pulls across his shoulders when he reaches for the sugar, and I can see the shape of him through it, the flat plane of his chest, the way his weight sits low and easy and entirely under his control, the way a loaded gun sits quiet.
I remember that body. My own body remembers it before I give it permission to. Heat moves through me, low and unhurried, settling behind my navel and sinking lower, and my skin comes awake along my arms and the back of my neck. My pulse climbs into my throat where I can feel it beat. My mouth has gone bone dry. There is a tightening, deep and specific, in a place I have not let myself think about in three years, and none of it cares that I am thirty-one and exhausted, that I am his protective detail, that I am the mother of his child. I did not ask my body to do this. It does it anyway.
He is just a man in a kitchen, sleeves rolled up, making coffee for the woman whose daughter is asleep upstairs. I have a job, a child, and a federal indictment to testify in. I do not need to catalog what the sight of him is doing to the rest of me.
I catalog it anyway. Thoroughly. For the record.
"Lex," I say.
“Yes.” It’s always yes with him. One word, no weather in it.
"Sit."
He sits across from me at the island.
"This was very fast," I say. "All of it. You arrived seven hours ago. I am in your house. My daughter is in your guest bedroom. There is a dinosaur plate on your counter. We have not slept. The ground has not been level under either of us for any of it. So I want to say something while we are still in the part of this night where we are being honest."
"All right."
"I am not going to fall back into bed with you because you bought my daughter a dinosaur plate and a moon nightlight. I am not going to soften because you are doing the right things. I am not, in any way, in the headspace where this is a romance. We have a contract. You are her father. You are my protective detail. We are not the people we were three years ago in a hotel room. Are we clear?"
He doesn’t smile. "We are clear."
"All right."
"Maeve?"
