"You are so naughty."
"And you like it."
I held her there with my hand at her jaw and my thumb at the corner of her mouth, and I let myself look at her, and the engine ticked under us in the dark of the deck, and outside the windshield the gray of the concrete pillar held the light the same flat way it had been holding it before she had touched me under that table.
My ptichka. I am yours, and I am not coming back from it.
8
CHLOE
The Halverson kitchen always went quiet in the same way at the end of the night. Theo was asleep on his stomach with one foot out from under the duvet. Owen was at the sink upstairs working at his teeth with the small electric brush his father had bought him, the buzz carrying down the back stairs the way every small sound in that house carried. I wiped the counter once because it needed it and a second time because my hands needed the second pass. I hung the cloth on the rail. I set the kettle off the burner. I lined the boys' two cups up on the shelf the way Mrs. Halverson liked them.
My phone buzzed on the island.
Daniil.
I picked it up before the second buzz.
"I cannot get you tonight. Something has come up."
"Okay. Come by my place after, if you want."
A beat on his end. Wind. The far thunk of a car door.
"Are you alright?"
"I'm fine. Be careful."
The line clicked off the way his calls always did when he was already half inside the next room. I pressed the phone flat to mychest for one breath. The kitchen smelled like the lemon spray Mrs. Halverson kept under the sink.
I pulled my coat off the hook by the back stairs. I let myself out the side gate. The brownstone steps were dark from a rain that had come down an hour ago and gone. The block smelled like wet leaves and the bakery two doors down.
My phone buzzed against my hip before I had reached the corner.
A name on the screen I had not seen there in over a year.
Jacob.
Landed at JFK two nights back. He had a window before he flew out again for another month. He had picked a small place a block off Atlantic and he was buying and I was not allowed to say no.
A warmth moved through the bottom of my ribs. He had been the cousin who held the back of the seat of a small purple bike on my grandmother's block in Queens when I was eight, who had run beside me for half a block after I had told him to let go because he wanted to be sure I did not fall. He had been gone for a contract in Singapore for over a year. I had missed him without letting myself notice I had missed him.
I typed back with my thumb on the rail of the stoop.
On my way. Order the banchan.
He sent a small flexing arm and a heart.
I walked.
Owen would be in bed by the time I sat down. The walk over took twenty minutes through air that had not made up its mind whether to rain again. The restaurant Jacob had picked was a small one with the front window steamed at the bottom. Brown wood at the counter. Posters on the walls in two languages, an old one for a film I had watched at my mother's table at twelve, a newer one for a singer Owen would have named in one beat.Garlic and bone broth at the door, the way that smell had hit me at my grandmother's table my whole life.
The owner was a man in his middle fifties at the host stand. Clean white apron. Gray at his temples cut close. His eyes went past me down the room and back to me and his mouth made a small kind shape.
"He's in the back booth."
"Thank you."
