She took a step in, got close enough to kiss or kill, then grabbed my right hand with both of hers. I let her. She jammed my thumb into her mouth and bit, hard. The pain was white, blinding, bright enough to make my eyes water. She let go, wiped her mouth, and looked me dead in the face.
Then she said, “Don’t touch me.”
The bite throbbed. I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move. I just watched her turn and walk away.
She disappeared into the dark.
I stood in the alley, hand pounding, taste of her still in my mouth.
I watched until I couldn’t see her anymore, and then I waited a long time.
I was still smiling when the first snowflake landed on my nose.
Chapter 4
Angela
Iwalkedforanhourwith the taste of him still in my mouth.
Two o’clock in the morning in a part of the city I had never been in before, the kind of neighborhood where the streetlights came on every third pole and the rest stood dark like teeth knocked out of a smile.
My boots hit concrete in the rhythm I had walked in since I left him in the alley—not fast, not slow, the pace of a woman who did not want to be remembered by anyone watching from a window. Cold air worked its way under the collar of my coat. My ribs hurt from where the second man had slammed me into the wall, a dull plate of bruise spreading under my left breast that I could feel every time I took a breath. None of it registered the way it should have.
What registered was his thumb.
The meat of it, between my back teeth. The give, then the resistance, then the give again. The fact that he had not pulledaway. The fact that he had not made a single sound when I bit down. I had bitten him hard enough to break skin. I knew because I could still taste the iron of it, faint, mixed with the soap on him, which was a soap I had never smelled before—clean and slightly bitter, the kind men who had money wore without thinking about it. The two flavors were sitting on my tongue like two acetate sheets laid over each other, and I could not get either of them off.
I turned a corner I had not planned to turn.
A man who does not flinch when bitten, the analyst in the back of my head said, in her dry careful voice, has been hurt worse than you can do to him. A man who does not flinch when bitten and does not look surprised has been hurt worse than that, and recently.
Shut up, I told her.
I kept walking. There was a closed liquor store on the corner, the security gate down, a small red light blinking inside that was either an alarm or a credit-card reader pretending to be one. I clocked it without meaning to. I clocked the alley between the liquor store and the laundromat next door. I clocked the second exit at the back of the laundromat where the dryers vented onto the street in a column of warm air that smelled like wet wool and dryer sheets. I walked through the column of warm air and felt my face thaw for a second and then refreeze.
What kind of man was he?
But deep down, I knew what kind of man. That was the worst part. I had spent eighteen months in a federal courtroom telling other men, very carefully, in very dry language, what kind of manthis onewas. I had wired myself for sound and sat in conference rooms with men who held themselves exactly the way he had held himself in the corridor, and I had testified against them, and I had ruined my life to put a smaller, paler,less competent version of him in prison. I knew exactly what kind of man.
I crossed another street.
The wind picked up off the lake somewhere to my right, and I felt it find the seam at the back of my collar and travel down between my shoulder blades and I shivered, and the shiver did something to me I was not prepared for. It went past my ribs. It went lower. It settled.
No. No, no.
I walked faster.
The thing that the analyst was now saying, in her dry careful voice, was that I had been very afraid in the corridor for approximately eleven seconds—the eleven seconds in which the first man’s hand had been on my wrist—and then I had stopped being afraid the moment his hand had been on the first man’s wrist instead. My body had registered him and reclassified the situation, and what it had reclassified the situation into was not safety, exactly, because nothing in me was capable of registering safety anymore, but it was something close enough to safety that the rest of my body had taken the opportunity to do something else.
The something else was what I was now walking off.
How, I asked myself, how is it that I am thinking about the taste of that mafioso’s skin and not the two men who tried to put me in a van?
There was no answer.
ThedineronLincolnwas open, thank god.
I took the booth at the back, the one against the kitchen wall, because the kitchen wall was the only wall in the room I could not be approached from. The waitress was the kind ofwoman who had worked nights for thirty years and did not waste energy on a face like mine. She poured coffee into a cup that had been in the rack so long it was warm, and she did not ask if I wanted anything else. I ordered a piece of toast I would not eat, because ordering food in a place like this at this hour was the price of being allowed to sit in the booth.
