He stops at a door I would not have identified as a door — it's flush with the wall, no visible handle, no frame gap, just a seam so fine it disappears in the dim light. He does something with his hand that I can't track, and it opens, and beyond it is a small room — metal shelving, locked cases along one wall, a single overhead bulb, the particular cold of a space that never quite warms up.
He pulls it shut behind us. In the smaller space, he is more — more everything, more there, filling the room in a way that I am not going to think about too closely because thinking about it too closely leads somewhere I am not going. I step back, attempting to put any increment of distance between us. Until my back hits the shelving and I’m forced to look up at him.
"Your clothes," he says.
I stare at him. Not understanding.
"Take them off," he says.
For one full second, I just stare at him.
“Excuse me?”
“Did I stutter?” He says, irritation seeping into his voice over the accent. “Take your clothes off.”
I feel the heat climb my cheeks so fast it's almost impressive, a full, furious blush that I am completely powerless to stop and deeply resentful of, as I object. "Absolutely not. I am not going to sleep with you. What in the world is wrong with you? There’s a dead man out there, and the police will be here any minute!"
He looks at me for a moment — really looks, past the blood on my clothes at the woman beneath – and mutters something under his breath in Russian once more. Too quiet and too fast for me to catch.
“Ty menya pogubish.”
Something happens to his expression, almost an edge of humor crossing it. Not quite a smile, just a very slight shift at the corners of his mouth, the wrinkles beside his eyes, that manages to communicate amusement without committing to it. He nods downward, at my clothes.
I look down.
Blood. On my jacket, my shirt, my pants — the knees from where I was cleaning, the cuffs, a smear across the front I didn't notice in the dark of the main floor. Considerably more than I would have guessed, considerably more than a convenient explanation will cover. I look back up at him, suddenly so furious I could scream, which would be inadvisable for approximately eleven reasons, so instead I stand there being furious in frustrating silence.
I should be scared of him. I know I should be scared of him. Every instinct I have spent years developing is pointing at this man, and sayingdangerousin terms that couldn't be clearer. But my body has apparently decided that the correct response to all of that is to be angry at him, which is a spectacular failure of self-preservation.
"Turn around," I demand.
"No."
"Turn. Around."
"I don't turn my back on people I don't know, and frankly don’t trust," he says, simply, without apology, like it's a principle he arrived at through experience and has never found reason to revisit. His eyes stay on my face. "Take your jacket off first. Then the pants. Maybe we can salvage your shirt."
I hold his gaze for three full seconds. He holds mine back with no visible effort whatsoever, the effortless stillness of a man who has won more staring contests than he's lost and knows it. I look away first, which I am adding to the growing list of things I will be scolding myself for later.
With a relenting sigh, I shrug off my jacket and shove it at him. He takes it with one hand, unbothered. Then takes off his own jacket — dark grey, clearly expensive, clearly built for a man with considerably broader shoulders than I have — and he holds it open between us, a curtain of fabric blocking his sightline to mylower half, without comment, which is somehow more irritating than if he'd made a production of it.
Because it requires him to step closer.
Very close. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him and smell his cologne. A musky, intoxicating smell that I shouldn’t even be noticing, given my current circumstances. I am shrugging my pants off and pulling on the pair of coverall pants he hands me, which I have no idea where he pulled from, and frankly don’t care, in the fastest thirty seconds of my life.
"You're blushing," he comments.
"I am not."
"You're extremely red for someone who isn’t going to sleep with me."
"Stop talking." I hop slightly as I get my second leg in and pull the waistband up. "Just stop talking."
He lowers the jacket. Steps back. His expression settled back into its previous unreachable shield, but the very edges of it are slightly softer now. He holds the grey jacket out, offering it to me. I take it because I have no better option, when I shrug it on, it falls to my mid-thigh. Still warm from being on his shoulders only moments ago, and it smells like that intoxicating musky smell that I’m already associating as uniquely him.
He turns to the back wall of the room and does the same thing he did with the door before — a precise, practiced movement — and a panel opens outward to a passage so narrow it makes the service corridors look generous. Cold air breathes out of it, damp and close.
"Walk," he says, nodding to indicate I step out before him.
