I go to the kitchen. Make coffee with the ancient machine that takes fifteen minutes to produce two cups of something barely drinkable. The kitchen is cold. The wood stove has burned down to ash, and I don't know how to restart it, which is a gap in the survival skills of my new persona that I'm choosing to ignore. I wrap my hands around the mug and stand at the counter and look out the window at the trees.
My body aches. Not bad. The good kind. The kind that comes from being used well by someone who paid attention, who asked before he touched, who stopped the instant I said stop and only moved again when I pulled him back. Muscles I forgot I had are making themselves known, and there's a tenderness between mythighs that I press into slightly when I shift my weight, just to feel it, just to confirm it happened.
It happened.
I slept with him. I kissed him first. I pulled him in. I said yes and more and harder and his name, I said his name, and the way it sounded in my mouth was nothing like the way I say it in daylight. In daylight, his name is a fact. A label. Last night, it was something I gave him that I can't take back.
You're overthinking this. It was sex. Good sex. Great sex. Possibly the best sex you've ever had, which is a low bar given that your only frame of reference is a man who treated foreplay like a chore and your body like something he was entitled to. Stop making it into something it isn't.
But his hands were shaking. Afterward. When he held me against his chest and his arm wrapped around me and his face pressed into my hair. His hands were trembling, and Claudio DiAngelo's hands don't tremble. Those hands disassemble weapons in the dark. Those hands killed three men in a corridor without a wasted movement. And they shook against my skin like he'd touched something he didn't know how to hold.
I take a sip of coffee. It's terrible. I drink it anyway.
He appears in the doorway a few minutes later. Jeans, henley, yesterday's clothes. His hair is wrecked from sleep and my hands, and he hasn't bothered fixing it, which is either adeliberate choice or the first sign that I've broken something in his operating system. He looks at me. I look at him.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning."
"Coffee's done. The machine might be older than both of us combined."
"As long as it works."
He crosses to the counter. Pours himself a mug. Black, no sugar. Holds it awkwardly. We stand three feet apart in the kitchen where he pinned me against the counter yesterday and I told him to let go and he did and I kissed him anyway, and neither of us mentions it.
"You left the bed," he says.
"I don't sleep well next to people."
"You slept fine."
"I slept fine for three hours. Then I woke up and your arm was across my waist, and I forgot where I was. For about four seconds. Those four seconds were bad."
His mug stops halfway to his mouth. He doesn't ask what I mean. He already knows. I told him enough last night, in thedark, in pieces. Enough that he can fill in the blanks without me painting the full picture.
"I'm sorry," he says. Simple. No performance.
"Don't be. It wasn't about you. It's about the position. My body has a memory my brain can't override. Arms, weight, proximity. It takes me a second to sort out where I am." I shrug. "It's better than it used to be. Used to take me a full minute. Sometimes longer."
He sets his mug down. Looks at me with those pale eyes, and I can see the gears turning. Not cold. Not clinical. The focused attention of a man who is understanding something he thought he already did and realizing the math is more complicated than he calculated.
"I'll sleep on the couch," he says.
"I didn't say that."
"You said my arm on you triggered a panic response."
"I said it took me four seconds to sort out where I was. That's not a panic response. That's a filing error." I take a sip. "If I didn't want you in the bed, I'd tell you. I told you to stop yesterday and you stopped. I trust that. I trust that more than you know."
He's quiet. His eyes narrow and his nostrils flare. Then he nods and picks up his mug and drinks, and the conversation is over.Not because it's resolved. Because we both understand that some things are better left in the space between words, where they can exist without being examined into something fragile.
He moves to the living room. I hear him unzipping the duffel, pulling out a burner phone. A new one. He swaps the SIM from last night's phone and dials.
I stay in the kitchen. I can hear his side of the conversation through the open doorway. His voice drops into the clipped, flat register he uses for business calls. The Claudio I've been getting to know over six days folds up and the soldier clicks into place, and the shift is fast enough to give me whiplash.
"Status," he says.
I can't hear Emilio's response, but I can hear the rhythm of his voice through the phone speaker. Fast, animated, punctuated by the occasional silence that means Claudio is absorbing something he doesn't like.
