I turned my face a little toward him. He was looking out at the slide, not at the slide.
"Your work is dangerous."
"Are you worried?"
I let a breath go through my nose. "Of course. Who else am I going to kiss if you are gone?"
His arm at my shoulders tightened a quarter inch. The kind of tightening that is not a hug, it is a claim.
"Nobody. Stop talking about kissing anybody else."
"Just a what-if," I said, laughing into his shoulder.
"I do not like what-ifs."
"Then be careful. Do not die on me."
"I will not. Nobody will touch my girl."
I leaned back a little so I could look at him sideways. "Your girl? You are presuming a lot."
"Do you want me to kiss you right here to settle it?"
"There are children watching."
"Then stop arguing with me."
He put his head down on my shoulder. Right there in the open. A man I had watched walk into a restaurant like he owned the block, putting his head on my shoulder under a maple tree. He let out a breath that had three days of work in it, and then he went. Not in pieces. All at once. The way a person goes when they have not let themselves go in a long time and the body finally takes the chance.
I did not move. I sat with the cup of melted sorbet in my left hand and his head on my right shoulder and I listened to him breathe. Slow. Slower. A small tendril of hair at his temple had stuck to the skin there with sweat from the walk over, and I wanted to tuck it back, and I did not, because moving would have woken him.
The ice cream truck played its eight notes again. Somewhere a small dog complained at a pigeon. I sat with him while the sun moved a finger's width across the path.
The first drop hit the back of my hand and I thought, no.
The second hit the bench between us. The third was on his temple, on the white scar I had learned to look for there. He came up out of sleep the way he did everything else, all at once, his eyes finding mine before his head was even off my shoulder.
The sky cracked. Not warning. Decision.
"Shit."
We were up. He had my hand and my bag in one motion and we were running, the wood chips spraying, the ice cream truck shutting off mid-note as the man inside slid the window down. I was laughing by the time we hit the path. He was not. He was scanning. He had not put down the part of him that scanned, even half asleep, even running.
The Maybach was at the curb. He got the door for me and got around the hood in three strides and we were in, doors thumping closed against the noise of the rain on the roof. He turned the wipers on. The world outside the windshield went underwater.
"Your place," he said. Not a question.
I gave him the nod he did not need. He pulled into the street.
By the time we hit the green door of my building the rain had soaked us both through the shoulders and down the back. I got the three locks in the order I always got them, top middle bottom, fingers a little clumsy with the cold of the water on my skin. The hallway light on the second floor buzzed once when I flipped it, settled. He came in behind me and shut the door and threw the deadbolt himself without asking.
We stood in the small front hall, dripping. The water from my hair was making a slow line down my back. His jacket was adarker color across the shoulders than it had been an hour ago. There was a drop on his eyelash. I watched it fall.
I was going to say it before I could talk myself out of it.
I turned to face him. I put my palm flat against the wet front of his shirt, over his heart, which I could feel under there going at a pace that had nothing to do with running.
"You will catch cold. Shower with me."
