Page 18 of Dressed to Kill
I had been behaving since the day the Italians put me in a van. Six months of being measured and useful and quiet enough to keep alive, and now I was in a Russian's apartment in handcuffs that I'd picked the lock of three nights running, and last night I'd lain on a single bed in the dark and listened to him perform for my benefit, and the only response I had available to me at half past four this afternoon was I'd like a different shirt please.
No. No, I would not.
I closed the drawer and crossed the hall.
His bedroom door was open. He'd left it open at dawn when he went out, the move of a man who didn't expect anyone in his home to wander, who'd never had a wandering prisoner. I was fully aware of the chain of should nots I was leaning on as I walked through it.
The bed was made. He'd done it himself, because a cleaner had no incentive to make a bed look like the previous occupants had been an honor guard.
The room smelled like his cologne and not like hers. She hadn't left a trace. He'd opened the windows after she'd gone.
The closet was a walk-in, and I gave myself the tour. The suits hung in a row, all dark, all the same wrong cut by the same wrong tailor, who I was going to have words with one day if I ever met him in a dark alley. A pair of Goodyear-welted derbies sat on the rack at the bottom, English, paid for, badly under-conditioned. The leather was thirsty, and I'd have told him if we were on speaking terms, which we were not, on account of the noise coming through the wall last night. The drawers were built into the side. Top drawer, dress shirts. Second, t-shirts.Third, socks rolled in pairs. Fourth, boxer briefs folded in thirds, because the man folded his pants.
I took a pale blue cotton shirt off the top of the dress-shirt stack.
I held it up to the light from the window. The cotton was soft from washing, the collar was unfrayed, and the cuffs had been ironed. The cologne had settled into the weave over years of being hung next to its source.
I pulled my own shirt off, dropped it on the floor of his closet because I was a small, petty man and proud of it, and put his on. The shoulders were too big. The collar gaped. The cuffs hung past my fingertips, which wasn’t useful for working, since you could push them back and they'd fall again the moment you stopped.
I looked like a kid who'd put on his da's good shirt without permission. Thin in the shoulders and short in the arms, swimming in cotton that smelled like a man who was not mine. The collar was gaping wide enough to show the hollow at the base of my throat. Aleksi had looked at that hollow too long at breakfast yesterday. The cologne was warming on my skin from the inside of the cotton, and I was an inconvenient amount harder in my jeans than I'd been thirty seconds ago.
So that was where we were.
I rolled the cuffs once, then thought better of it and unrolled them. The hanging cuffs were the better look. Theatrical.
On the way out, I picked my own shirt off the floor and dropped it in his hamper, because I was raised right. I walked back to the dining table with my hands in his sleeves and a head full of a perfectly reasonable plan that was about to detonate on contact.
The cuff was on the table next to the loupe. He'd unlocked me at dawn before he'd left, because the work needed me unrestrained, and he hadn't asked me to put it back on while hewas out. I wasn't going to put it on now either. Not making a point. Just couldn't be arsed.
I sat down, put the loupe back in, picked the brush up, and bent over the jacket.
The light was nearly gone when the elevator pinged.
I hadn't been listening for it. The doors opened. Footsteps in the hall. The key in the lock. The key didn't go in cleanly.
He had to try twice.
I bumped against the console table on the way past, hard enough that the wood knocked. The keys hit the floor and didn't get picked up. When he stopped at the edge of the dining room, he was breathing heavily.
I kept the loupe in. The brush moved.
"Is that my shirt?"
His voice was thicker than it had been at breakfast. The vowels were softening at the edges, and I knew that voice, my da's voice every Hogmanay by half eleven, the voice of a man who'd been at it since long before anyone in his life would have signed off on it.
"Aye."
A pause.
"Take it off."
"I'm working."
"Take it off, Fin."
It was the first time he'd used my name, and it landed at the back of my neck and stayed there. I kept my hands moving on the leather because if I stopped, I was going to have to look at him, and if I looked at him, I was going to have to make a decision about what came next. I wasn't yet ready for either.
"In a minute. Resin's setting."
