I didn’t argue. I drank. The bossing of it, thedon’t argue,went down as easy as the water.
Then he settled back against the headboard and brought me with him, my head on his chest, the blanket around me, and his hand came up into my hair and stayed there, slow, stroking, no hurry, nowhere to be, and somewhere across the room a great gray weight heaved itself up and resettled with a judgmental grumble, the dog choosing the foot of the bed, and Tonio laughed low in his chest under my ear and I felt it more than heard it.
I went down into it now. Small. Held. The blanket and his chest and his hand in my hair and no armor anywhere, none, not a scrap. Nothing to keep. Nothing to measure.
I cried again.
Not the way you cry at a thing. Just—it came up and out, against his chest, soft, shaking, no reason I could’ve given him, and he didn’t ask. That was the whole of him, that he didn’t ask. He just held on, his hand steady in my hair, his arm a wall around the parcel of me, and he let it come and let it go and didn’t fill it with words or try to fix it or ask me what was wrong, because nothing was wrong, that was the thing, that waswhy I was crying. Nothing was wrong. For once in a whole year, nothing was wrong.
“I’ve got you,” he said, into my hair, when it had passed. “You don’t have to hold anything. Not tonight. Not the loaf. Not anything.”
“I can’t make the loaf,” I said. Small. My voice came out small, younger, a voice I hadn’t used in I didn’t know how long. “I don’t know how.”
“I know.”
“My baba made it every Sunday.”
“I know, my darling.” It felt so good to have him call me that. “We’ll figure the loaf out. Not tonight. Tonight it’s not yours.”
And then—I don’t know where it came from, except that it came from very far down, from a place I’d boarded up so long ago I’d forgotten the room was there—I felt myself go soft and silly and warm, a thing I hadn’t been since I was small enough to ride my father’s shoulders through the old market, his big hands on my ankles, the whole loud world going by under me and me safe up high above all of it, laughing at nothing, at everything, because I was small and held and somebody else was carrying me and the carrying was the whole of the joy.
I burrowed deeper into the blanket. I put my cold feet against his warm leg on purpose, just to be a menace, and he yelped and laughed and didn’t move them away.
“You’re freezing,” he said. “Your feet are ice.”
“Mm,” I said, supremely unbothered, the most unbothered I had ever been about anything in my life, and pressed them closer, and felt him laugh again, and felt the dog grumble, and felt his hand keep moving slow through my hair, and thought, from the warm dark behind my eyes, that if heaven was a place it was probably this—a blanket and a heartbeat and a man who checked twice and a word that stopped everything and a kitchen in your head finally, blessedly, gone quiet.
I was so tired. I was so tired and for once it didn’t frighten me, because I didn’t have to do anything about it, I didn’t have to push through it, I didn’t have to be on my feet at three. Someone had me. Someone had the counter.
I slept.
Right there against his chest. Just down into the dark and held all the way through it.
And he let me. He held the line so I didn’t have to. He held it all night long.
Chapter 11
Tonio
Iwokebeforethedarkthought about going gray. There was a woman asleep on my chest and a great gray heap of dog at the foot of the bed. His eyebrow twitched. Maybe he was dreaming of sparrows. Maybe of chasing cats. I wanted to let him dream.
Katerina was heavy on me in the good way. Dead weight, total weight, the weight of a person who has finally, blessedly, let go of holding herself up. Her face was turned into my neck. Her breath came slow and even against my throat. Under the blanket I had her foot trapped between my calves where she’d jammed it last night to be a menace, and it had gone warm against me hours ago, and she had not stirred since.
Last night had been magical. Feeling her go small, finally let go of it all and just being. She needed this sleep, and I didn’t want to wake her.
Ovens at three. That was the rule of Filoxenia, the iron rule. Three o’clock, every day, no exception, because the bell goes atfour and people need to rely on us. And it was already past four now, the dark already old, and the ovens were cold and the proofing rack was empty and the day was going to be short.
Good.
I made the decision lying right there, with her breath on my neck. Today the ovens went on late. Today the bus driver could have his loaf at six instead of four. The woman on my chest had not slept a full night in a year and she was sleeping one now, and I was not going to be the one to end it.
I eased out from under her by degrees, the way you ease a sleeping child off your arm, one inch at a time, swapping my chest for a pillow so slow she never surfaced. She frowned in her sleep, hunted for the warmth, found the pillow, and accepted it. At the foot of the bed Olimpo opened one amber eye, regarded me wearily, and closed it again with a grumble that was a whole sentence.
I stood in the gray and looked at her a minute.
Her face, asleep, with no armor on it. This was just a woman, dark hair loose across my pillow, mouth soft, the tired around her eyes finally getting a chance to dissipate. I’d have stood there an hour. I made myself go cook.
The kitchen’s small and the stove’s bad and I cook on it anyway, because cooking is life. Eggs. I cracked four into the pan and went slow with them, low heat, the way you have to or they go to rubber, and I cut a hunk of her bread, a heel of yesterday’s that I’d carried home like a thief—and I put the kettle on and I watched the eggs come together soft and yellow.
