I did not take my hand off her shoulder.
"Why are you here?"
I let the question sit a beat. I let my face take the shape a face takes when a man wants a woman to wonder.
"Collecting on what you owe me."
The fear went through her eyes in a clean line. I saw it. I let her see that I saw it. I took one step forward. She took one step back. I took another. She took another. The small of her back met the iron rail of the stoop and she stopped because there was nowhere else for her to go.
"What do you want?"
I held there for one second more than was kind. Then I gave her the laugh. Two notes, short, low, the one Mikhail and I share with our mother’s mouth. It came out before I told it to.
"Easy. Dinner. I am hungry. That is the entire plan."
The breath she had been holding came out of her in one long shape. Her shoulders dropped two inches. She made a sound atthe back of her throat that was half a laugh and half something I did not have a name for yet.
Then she slapped my chest.
Open palm, flat, the heel of her hand right over my sternum. There was no force in it. It was relief looking for somewhere to land.
"Don’t scare me again."
My hand came up and caught her wrist before it could fall back to her side. I did not close my fingers in a fist. I did not pull. I held her wrist the way a man holds a small bird he is not planning to keep.
"Promise."
I did not let go.
"Where do you want us to eat?"
"My kitchen, then."
"Are you sure? You are not afraid to have me in it, Chloe?"
"Should I be?"
"You are allowed to."
She looked up at me for a long second. Her eyes went over my mouth, my jaw, the place at my temple where the streetlight was setting a small green shine in the gray. She was reading me the way I had been reading her for three months. It was the first time anyone had looked back at me in a way I could not duck.
The corner of her mouth lifted.
"I can feel you are good."
"That is what my brothers’ wives say."
"And a little smug."
"Sorokin blood."
I walked her to the Maybach with my hand still around her wrist. She could have pulled it back. She did not. I opened the passenger door. I let go of her only when she was settled and the belt was across her shoulder and the door was shut between her and the night.
Two nights back she slept in this seat. She did not get to look at me then.
She looked at me now.
I drove. I kept my eyes on the road, because if I turned she would stop looking, and I wanted her looking. I felt her watch the line of my jaw at the first red light. I felt her watch my hand on the wheel at the second. I felt her watch the small muscle in my forearm when I shifted lanes. I kept the joke set across my face like a coat. I did not let her see the heat at the back of my neck.
