"You look different in the morning," she says. Her voice is rough with sleep. Low. Intimate.
"Different how?"
"Less armored." Her thumb brushes my lower lip. "Like someone actually lives behind your face."
The observation is so precise it nearly breaks me. I close my eyes. Her fingers stay on my skin.
She pulls her hand back and sits up, holding the sheet against her chest. She looks around the room—taking in the space the way an artist takes in a gallery. The bare walls. The precise bed. The empty nightstands.
"Where's the bathroom?" she asks.
I point. She wraps the sheet around herself and pads across the floor, and I hear the door close and the water run and I lie in the bed that smells like her and stare at the ceiling and try to remember the last time another person used my bathroom.
I can't. Because there hasn't been a last time.
She comes back in my shirt—the black one from last night, buttoned unevenly, the hem falling to her thighs. She found it on the floor. The shirt without anything underneath changes her shape—softer, less contained. Her legs are bare, her hair flattened on one side from the pillow, and she looks like something I don't deserve. Something warm and real standing in the doorway of a room designed for no one.
"I need coffee," she says. "Where's the kitchen?"
I pull on trousers and follow her. She's already examining the espresso machine—pressing buttons experimentally, frowning at the display.
"This thing has more settings than my welder," she says.
"Here." I reach past her and press the correct sequence. The machine hums to life. She's standing at my counter in my shirt, frowning at a coffee machine like it's a structural problem, and the normalcy of it—the sheer, devastating normalcy—does something to my chest that last night didn't.
Last night was intensity. Heat and darkness and the raw collision of two bodies. This is something else. This is a woman in my kitchen on a Sunday morning, and the intimacy of it is larger than the sex, deeper than the restraint, more terrifying than anything I've done in two decades of operational work.
She opens the fridge. Studies the contents—milk, sparkling water, a block of cheese, a container of olives that the decorator's assistant stocked months ago.
"This is worse than mine," she says. "And mine is bad."
"I eat out mostly."
She gives me a look that says she's filing this information alongside every other piece of the puzzle she's been assemblingsince the hardware store. The empty apartment. The bare fridge. The man who lives in the most expensive part of Manhattan and doesn't own groceries.
The machine finishes. I pour two cups. I know she takes it black—I've watched her order it at Hector's dozens of times through the camera, and in person at the bodega counter. But a man who's crossed paths with her a handful of times might not remember a detail like that.
"Milk? Sugar?" I ask.
"Black."
The small lie—the pretended ignorance—sits in my mouth alongside the taste of her from last night. I hand her the cup and the deception is so minor, so ordinary, that it should barely register. It registers. It registers because she's standing in my kitchen in my shirt and she trusted me with her wrists last night and I can't even give her an honest cup of coffee.
She wraps both hands around the cup and leans against the counter and drinks, and the steam rises around her face and she closes her eyes and the pleasure of the first sip is written on her features with an openness that makes my throat tighten.
She opens her eyes. She's scanning the apartment from the kitchen—the living room, the hallway, the walls. The empty walls.
"You've never hung anything in here," she says. Not a question. A reading. Her artist's eye doing what it always does—looking at a surface and understanding the absence underneath.
"I had a painting," I say. "I put it away."
"Why?"
Because the things I took down were your sculptures, and the painting is in the study where you haven't been, and I'm lying with every breath.
"It didn't fit the space," I say.
"What kind of painting?"
