"Do not apologize. I liked it. It is you I am thinking about."
"Such a gentleman."
"Trust me. I do not want to be a gentleman right now."
She laughed. The laugh shook against me where my mouth was still close to hers, and she leaned the last inch back in and pressed one quick light kiss to the corner of my lips, fast, almost shy after what we had just done, and then she pulled back and tipped her chin at the side table.
"Finish the soup."
"I am full from kissing you."
"Finish or I go home."
"Finishing it."
I picked the bowl back up. I sat back against the headboard. She tucked her feet up under her on the bed and laid her hand flat on my thigh through the sheet, palm down, light, and she watched me eat. The barley had gone the rest of the way soft. The dill was darker now in the broth. I ate every spoonful. I scraped the bottom of the bowl and I set it back down on the cloth on the tray and I let my hand close over the small one she had left on my leg.
6
CHLOE
The bench had a knot in the wood under my left thigh that I had started to find affectionate. I had picked it the last three times. It sat under a maple at the edge of the playground, far enough back that the noise of the kids came in soft, close enough that I could watch them without looking like I was watching them.
The sun was doing that low autumn thing where it lay across everything like a hand. A toddler was holding a melting orange popsicle in one hand and her mother's coat in the other and refusing to choose between them. The ice cream truck on the corner was playing the same eight notes on a loop, and a boy in a red shirt was negotiating with his father about a second bar. I had spent two dollars on a paper cup of strawberry sorbet twenty minutes earlier just to feel like I was a person on a day off, and I was eating it slowly enough that it had gone to liquid at the bottom.
My grandmother used to take me to a park like this one in Queens when I was small, and she would tell me, in her short way, that the air would be good for my heart. I think that was thefirst time anybody told me that air had anything to do with the heart.
My phone buzzed in my lap and his name on the screen did the thing his name had started to do, which was move my pulse up half a step before I had even answered.
"Where are you?"
"At the park."
A pause. I could hear the city behind him, a horn and an engine.
"Can I come?"
"Yes please. I want to see you."
The pause this time was different. Lower.
"You are killing me with that sweet voice."
"So dramatic. Get here now."
"On my way."
I hung up and I let the smile come. The one I had kept off my face while he was on the line. I tipped my chin up to the maple and let it sit there, the kind of smile that does not really have a place to go.
I did not turn when he came up behind me. I did not need to. The air at my back changed the way air changes in a room when someone you have been thinking about steps into it. Then his mouth, warm, at the spot under my ear and along my cheek. A kiss that was nothing like the kiss at the seafood restaurant and somehow exactly like it.
"Come sit with me," I said, low, and I caught his arm and pulled him down onto the bench beside me.
He sat. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into him, and the weight of him going down into the wood was not the usual weight. It was the weight of a man who had been on his feet for a long time and had not put himself down anywhere.
"Tired?"
"Yes. I have been gathering information on someone we think is a threat."
