“The tape is why I’m still alive, probably.” I say it light. It doesn’t come out as light as I ordered. “You keep what you can hold. The rest belongs to the house.”
“The rest belongs to the house,” he repeats, slow, like he’s checking the fit of it, and the corner of his mouth moves, because if anybody in Nevada is the house, it’s him. Then he holds out the cloth. “Show me your circles.”
“My what?”
“You want to sit in my garage at two in the morning, you work. House rule.”
So that’s how I end up waxing a murderer’s Rolls in my socks. The wax goes on thin, he tells me, no pressure, let the cloth do the work, and apparently my circles are a crime in this jurisdiction. He watches me butcher a square foot of immaculate paint with his arms crossed, suffering out loud in Russian. Then he comes around behind me, and his hand closes over mine on the cloth.
The garage gets very small.
He’s warm all down my back without touching me anywhere except the hand. He smells like wax, like clean cotton that’s been working. His hand moves mine in slow circles, no pressure, around, around, and I stop being able to hear the work light over my own pulse. Neither of us says anything.
There’s nothing performative left to say it in. The paint comes up like dark water under the cloth, our hands in it together, his ring cool against my knuckle, the heat of him one inch off my shoulder blades, and I understand that I will be feeling this exact nothing-touch for days, which is ridiculous, which changes ridiculous nothing. When I finally get a section right, his breath comes down warm beside my ear.
“There,” he says. One word, low, and it lights me up from the spine out.
I turn my head. It’s a mistake, or it’s the point, I’ve stopped being able to tell my mistakes from my points. His face is right there. The stubble, the mouth, the eyes already on me like they arrived first and waited. We are one bad decision from the count room all over again, except there’s no money down here, no audience, no deal to hide inside. Just two people in shirtsleeves and socks at the hour when true things get loose. I watch him understand it the same second I do.
This wouldn’t be like the other times. This would matter.
His hand comes off mine like the cloth went hot. He steps back, a full step, puts the work light between us, and the shutter comes down over his face, that flat smooth nothing I’ve watched him close over himself before.
“It’s late,” he says. “You should sleep, Cynthia.”
The name with the edge back on it. I know this move. I’m earning a degree in this move.
“Sure.” I slide off the stool, keeping my voice easy, because the alternative isn’t easy, and he doesn’t get that from me twice in one night. “Thanks for the lesson. I’ll invoice you for labor.”
I’m at the door with my hand on the cold metal when his voice comes again, quiet, aimed at the car.
“You did the last section right.”
It shouldn’t help. It does anyway, the whole way back down the breezeway, which tells you exactly what kind of trouble I’m in. Seven years of customers telling me I’m gorgeous never once got past my teeth. One sentence about wax technique from a killer in his socks, and I float down a hallway like the prom worked out.
Back in the guest room, the bed and I look at each other. We both know it’s over between us. The sky past the glass has gone the color that comes before the color that comes before dawn. My hands smell like wax. I can still feel the print of his palm across my knuckles, which is nothing, which is a hand, which is somehow more than everything that happened on a steel table under a casino. I am not going to lie here in the dark doing laps about that too.
So I pull the gray blanket off the couch in the sitting room, the soft one that’s technically furniture, and I take it out to the back terrace, because if I’m going to be awake I’d rather be awake under something enormous.
The lakebed lies out there flat to the edge of the world, holding the last of the night. The cold is real. The blanket mostly argues it down. Somewhere behind me in the big quiet house is a man who builds walls all day, takes them down with a cloth at twoin the morning, puts them back up the second anybody sees. Somewhere in the same house, if my gut is right, is a liar with a sad loyal face, and nobody believes me yet, including me, most hours.
I wrap the blanket tighter and keep both of those where I can see them.
The sun isn’t up yet. I decide to outwait it.
17
SEVASTIAN
Ifind her at dawn on the back terrace, wrapped in a blanket she stole off a couch, watching the sun come up over the lakebed like it owes her money.
I’ve been awake for hours. I don’t sleep much, never have, lately even less, because the war runs under everything like a current I can’t switch off. Because there’s a woman three doors down whose presence I feel through the walls of my own house like a second pulse. So I’m up, the smell of wax still on my hands. I’m dressed. I come out onto the terrace with coffee I don’t intend to drink, and I find her there, coiled too tight, shoulders up around her ears, coiled around herself the way she gets when the fear has its teeth in her.
She’d hate to know how plainly I see it. I see everything about her. That’s the problem.
I should leave her alone. I should go run my empire. Instead I look at the line of her tense shoulders against the pink desertsky, and a thought arrives in my head, fully formed, completely insane. I’m going to act on it before I’ve finished deciding to.
“Get dressed,” I tell her. “Real shoes. We’re going out.”
