I put the kettle on for her tea. I pulled the small pan she liked. I turned the burner low because I was going to do the eggs the way Yelena did them, slow, the butter taking its time in the pan, the yolks given the room to come together the way an egg comes together when the person eating it matters to you.
I felt her watching.
"Hot," she said.
I did not turn around.
"Careful. One more compliment and I will fuck you in this kitchen until you can't stand."
"Scary."
"That did not sound scared."
"It was not supposed to."
I turned. I crossed the small floor to her and bent over her chair and flicked the soft of my finger against the center of her forehead.
"You are becoming a problem."
"You started it."
She caught my hand on its way back. She brought the back of it to her mouth and pressed her lips to it and let it go. She did it without ceremony. She did it the way a person does a thing she has been doing for a long time.
I went back to the eggs.
They came out the way Yelena would have wanted them to come out. Soft. Bright. The toast was the toast you got when you let the heel of a loaf finish in the butter the pan had been ready to give up. I plated her food, set it down in front of her, put the tea at the corner of the placemat so she would not knock it over, sat down across from her in the other chair with my own plate.
She put a forkful in her mouth. She closed her eyes.
"You are a problem," she said, around the egg.
"That is what I said about you."
"I was first."
"You were not."
"I was."
"Eat your eggs, Chloe."
She ate them. I ate mine. She told me about the woman on her floor who had been arguing with her boyfriend through the wall for a week and how she could not tell anymore whether the woman wanted him to leave or wanted him to stay. I told her I would handle it if she wanted me to. She told me I was not handling anything. I asked her if she had slept well. She said she had slept like a person who had been broken into pieces and putback together correctly. I did not have an answer to that. I drank my coffee.
She set her fork down. She wiped the corner of her mouth with the side of her thumb.
"Can we go to the mall? I want to buy something."
"I cannot say no to a woman in my shirt."
She got up to dress. I cleaned the dishes. I did not look at the door of the bedroom while she dressed, because if I had I would not have made it to the car.
I drove her myself. The Maybach took the parkway smooth and quiet the way it takes anything. She put her hand on the console between us at the on-ramp, and I did not look at her for the length of the parkway because I had a feeling that if I looked at her she would take it back, and I was not ready for her to take it back.
She did not take it back.
I parked on the third level of the deck because that side of the building put us close to the atrium, and she liked the atrium because of the light. She had told me that once in passing weeks ago and I had not forgotten it.
She walked me into the store like she had been walking toward it for a year, because she had. I saw it on her face before we reached the counter. She had been wanting that specific phone for as long as I had been driving past her at the coffee shop window, and she had been putting away whatever a girl puts away who has been saving for a thing on her own, and today was the day. She saw the model on the display along the back wall. The corner of her mouth moved.
