"Tiring." I switched my bag to the other arm. "Tolerable now."
His mouth did the thing where the corner went up before the rest of him caught on. "What makes it tolerable?"
"Not what." I stepped past him, close enough that the back of my hand brushed the lapel of his coat on purpose, and I went on toward the passenger door. "Who."
He stood one beat where I had left him. The two-note laugh slipped out of him, low and warm, the same one I had heard him share with his brother in another room. Then he came after me, easy, his stride matched to mine without effort.
I opened the door myself. I folded into the seat. The cabin closed around me with the smell of cedar and leather and something colder under it, like night air that had been let in once and stayed.
He leaned in the open doorway before he let me shut it. One hand on the top of the frame. The other along the inside of the door. He looked down at me with the small light from the cabin on the underside of his jaw.
"Keep being sweet and I will have to taste it off your mouth."
The laugh came out of me before I could route it anywhere useful. It hit my ribs first. My shoulders gave with it. I covered my mouth with the back of my wrist and the back of my wristwas not enough. He watched me do it like he was filing it for later.
"Yours?" he said. "Or do you have a detour for me?"
"A friend told me about a seafood place on Sackett." I tucked the loose strand behind my ear. It came right back out. "Can we?"
"Anywhere you want."
He closed the door for me anyway, the soft click of an expensive thing doing what it was made to do, even though I had not waited.
He came around the hood. I watched him through the windshield. Unhurried. He fixed the lapel of his coat once with his thumb. He had ten different ways of moving and not one of them wasted anything.
He took the driver's seat and reached across me to test the buckle. I let him. The back of his knuckle brushed my hip through the wool of his sleeve and the wool felt warm and the warm felt like a problem I was no longer pretending to mind.
He pulled into traffic with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gear shift, and I let my head tilt against the rest and watched him drive.
At the first red light I watched the line of his jaw. The streetlamp slid up his cheekbone, hesitated, moved on. There was a small muscle near his ear that worked once and went quiet. His thumb rested on the leather of the wheel. The forearm coming out of his cuff had a low ridge along it where the sleeve pulled when his fingers moved on the shifter. The light caught the place at his temple every other light, a pale shimmer where the hair started.
He broke first.
"Stop looking at me like that." He still had not turned his face. "I cannot keep my eyes on the road."
The warmth that had started at my collar climbed.
"Is that really how you wanted to kiss me?" I said. "Hard to control it?"
He let half a second pass. I felt it land.
"Do not ask, Chloe." His voice had gone low and even, the warmth pulled out of it and stored somewhere safe. "It only makes the wanting worse."
I laughed again. Different this time. Lower in my chest. It came out as half a breath and stayed in the cabin between us. My hand went out across the console and found his on the gear shift without checking with me first. My fingers laid themselves over his knuckles, light, easy, like they had been doing it for a year. He did not move his hand. The light went green and he shifted with my fingers on top of his and the gear caught anyway, smooth, like he had built that shift for two hands.
He did not look over. He let the small smile happen at the corner of his mouth and that was the only place it lived. The smile that did not quite reach. I had stopped waiting for it to reach. I had started liking the place it stopped.
He is going to be a problem. He has been a problem. He is going to be a worse one.
The seafood place sat between a laundromat and a closed bodega and you would not have found it if a friend had not told you. The window had fogged at the bottom from the steam off the open kitchen. The tile floor was old and chipped and clean. The booths along the wall were red vinyl with the seams resewn at the corners. A wall by the register held a hundred laminated menus on a string. The whole place smelled like Old Bay and garlic butter and crushed ice on a metal tray.
A woman with a pencil behind her ear waved us toward whatever we wanted. He put his hand at the small of my back and steered me to the booth in the back corner. He took the side facing the room. I did not have to ask why.
"The shrimp platter," I told the woman when she came. "Half pound. With the pan-fried scallops on the side, please."
He glanced at me before he ordered. He knew already. He had been watching me order for a month.
"Add the grilled fish," he told her. "Water with lemon."
