"Your grandmother is not security."
"My grandmother is the reason I am going at all. Put two men on the block if it helps you sleep. Put four. I don't care. But you are not coming."
"I can work from the road."
"You can't work in her living room with the TV blasting Korean drama and her telling you to take your shoes off and asking if you are the rich one or the poor one."
His mouth did something at the corner that almost reached a smile. Almost.
"She would ask that?"
"That will be her opening line the first second she meets you, and you are not meeting her like this. Not in the middle of anoperation. Not when half your head is somewhere else. When this is done you can come. I want you to come. Just not now."
He looked at me for a long beat. His thumb finally came off the phone screen. He ran his free hand back through his hair, slow, and the lamplight caught the scar at his temple.
"Fine." A beat. "The moment everything here is done, I am coming for you. Not one minute longer."
"I know you will."
He lifted the phone again, but only to speak this time.
"Mikhail. Change of plans. The car still goes to Queens. I am not in it."
I exhaled. He hung up, set the phone face down on the desk, and stood there a second looking at me like he was trying to memorize the morning light on the side of my face.
Then he closed the distance, put both hands on my hips, and pulled me in against him. His chin came down on the top of my head. Neither of us said anything for a while.
The rest of the day, he was on me.
He was not pushy about it. He was just there. A hand at the small of my back when we passed in the hall. His thumb tracing my knuckles on the couch while I scrolled through something on my phone, slow and absent, like he didn't know he was doing it. When I stood up at lunch to refill my water glass, his arm came around my waist and reeled me back down, and I ended up sideways in his lap with my legs across his thighs and his fingers playing with the cuff of my sleeve.
"You're going to need to let me up eventually," I said.
"Eventually is not now."
In the late afternoon we ended up on the bed with a book between us that neither of us was really reading. I was on my side. He was behind me, his face tucked into the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and every few minutes he would breathe in slow like he was filing the scent of my hair away for later.
I twisted my head to look back at him over my shoulder, smiling.
"I'm not going to be gone forever."
His hand spread flat on my hip. Possessive in that quiet, settled way he had. He did not lift his face out of my hair.
"I am worried."
"You don't have to be. Put your men on me if it helps."
"I am putting my men on you whether you tell me to or not."
I laughed and turned the rest of the way around to face him, my forehead going to his chin, my hand sliding up to rest over his heart.
"I know how crazy you are."
"Good." His voice went low against the top of my head. "Then I do not have to explain it."
When the light started to turn that thin gold of late autumn, I finally got up to pack. I pulled a small duffel from the closet and set it open on the foot of the bed. He didn't move from where he was. He sat with his back against the headboard, one knee drawn up, watching me fold things into the bag the way another man might watch a fire.
Two sweaters. The soft pajamas. The toothbrush bag and the small case for my contacts. My charger. The cardigan my grandma had knit me a long winter ago, because she always noticed when I wore it.
