I should return it. Walk into the bodega tomorrow morning and if he's there, hand it over and say thank you and establish some boundaries and ask the questions Tess told me to ask.
That's what I should do.
On Saturday morning, he's at the bodega.
I see him through the window before I go in—at the counter, his back to me, that specific posture I'd know anywhere now. The controlled stillness. The width of the shoulders. The way he holds himself like a man who's aware of every inch of space around him.
My heart does something violent. I push through the door.
He turns. Our eyes meet across Hector's counter and the air between us changes—thickens, charges, becomes something you could cut with a torch. He looks the same. Dark jacket, dark eyes, that face that gives nothing away.
Except it does give something away. Right now, looking at me, his eyes are doing the thing they did in the gallery—the involuntary opening, the crack in the composure. Brief. A flash. Then it's gone, and he nods.
The nod.
Except it's not the nod anymore. It's the same physical gesture—brief, measured—but the content has changed. The nod used to sayI see you.Now it saysI've had my mouth on yoursand my hands in your hair and I know what sound you make when I pull you against me.
I nod back. My face is hot. I order my coffee from Hector, who is blissfully oblivious, and I stand at the counter and don't look at Damien Cross and feel every atom of his presence the way you feel a heat lamp—invisible, directional, impossible to ignore.
He leaves first. Doesn't speak. Doesn't linger. Just goes, the door closing behind him, the bell chiming once.
I stand at the counter and breathe.
That afternoon, a text arrives from an unknown number.
14 East 62nd Street. Apartment 19A. Tomorrow. 8 PM.
No name. No greeting. No "if you'd like to" or "would you want to." Just an address and a time and the presumption—the staggering, infuriating presumption—that I'll come.
I stare at the text for a long time. My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I should reply with something sharp—who is thisoryou can't just summon peopleorI don't take orders from strangers.
Except he's not a stranger. He's the man who kissed me in my studio and walked away without looking back and then disappeared for four days and then reappeared at the bodega and nodded at me like the nod contained the entire history of human desire.
14 East 62nd Street. The Upper East Side. The kind of address where apartments cost more than I'll earn in a lifetime.
I should not go. Tess would tell me not to go. Every rational instinct I have is telling me not to go—to a stranger's apartment, at night, alone, a man I can't even Google because I don't know enough about him to construct a search query.
I save the number in my phone. I don't reply.
I go to the studio and work until midnight and the new piece takes shape under my hands—two steel forms, angled toward each other, the space between them narrowing but not closing. Tension without resolution. The metal knows what I'm feeling before I do.
Sunday morning, I wake up. I shower. I dress. I go to the studio and work all day. I eat a sandwich. I check my phone eleven times.
At 6 PM, I go home. I shower again. I stand in front of my closet—the rail with the work clothes and the green dress and the jacket that still smells like him.
I put on the green dress. I pick up his jacket, folded over my arm.
I'm going.
I know I'm going. I've known since the text arrived. I was always going to go, the same way the metal was always going to give, the same way the kiss was always going to happen.
Some things are inevitable. You can resist them, delay them, argue with them in your head for thirty-six hours while pretending to work on a sculpture.
But you can't stop them.
I lock my apartment. I walk to the subway. I ride uptown with a jacket on my arm and a dress on my body and my heart in my throat.
14 East 62nd Street.
