Page 17 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

My eyes have gone hot. I look hard at the tea.

"He'd hate that," I manage.

"He'd deserve it." She lets go of my wrist and picks her mug back up. "Which isn't going to happen, incidentally, because that man has been in love with you since the wedding."

I let out a snort. "You don't know that."

"Delilah, he drinks his coffee black. Everywhere. Eduard's kitchen, the yard, my house at Christmas. Black, no sugar, like a Federov. He comes in here and you hand him whatever you've been experimenting with in a mug shaped like a cat's face and he drinks the entire thing and says thank you." She counts it off on her fingers. "He remembers your supplier problems. He knows which of the cats will sit on him and tolerates it, because it means he gets to be here. He asked Eduard in March what the café's insurance covered, and then he had it upgraded and never mentioned it to either of us."

"He did what? Why?"

"Valeria has a bet with Natan," she goes on, ignoring me completely. "Fifty on it happening before the summer. She's going to be unbearable, I'm so sorry. And Eduard has known since roughly the day after the wedding, and he's enjoyed every single second of watching Jasper torture himself."

I laugh, wetly, and wipe my face with the heel of my hand.

"You could have said something."

"I said something constantly. I said it with my eyebrows for a year." She points at her eyebrows as if to prove the point. "Was he good to you?"

The blush floods my face before I have the chance to even try and stop it.

Sammie laughs.

I think about the paper bag on the counter and the vanilla inside it. About the way he walked me home without once making me feel like I was being escorted. About the fact that he opened up with me this morning and fed the cats he's still a little intimidated by, and put his hand over mine before making his way out the door like he was leaving something behind for later.

"He kept me safe for six months without telling me," I say. "He sat in a car park in the cold, all winter."

Sammie is very still for a second. "Then that's the whole conversation," she says.

It isn't. She asks about forty questions over the next twenty minutes while we restock the pastry case, gets exactly two honest answers out of me, and considers this a personal triumph. Somewhere in the middle of it the weight I've been carrying goes, and by four o'clock I'm humming again.

Sammie leaves at five, but not before giving me a tight hug and telling me to have fun.

I close up alone at six. I do the tables east to west, stack the chairs in pairs, mop, feed the cats, and take a long moment over Lemur, who has decided the mop is his enemy and must be defeated. Every. Single. Night.

At home I change out of my work clothes and don't put my running things on, which feels stranger than I expected. I stand in my kitchen instead, in the room where Jasper stripped me bare under a light that's far too bright, and I put the oven on. Baking will help keep my hands busy. Maybe I’ll try another apple loaf and see if I don’t burn this one.

At half past seven I text him. Not running tonight, so don't sit in any car parks. There's an apple loaf with your name on it and I mean that literally, I wrote it in the icing.

The reply doesn't come for nearly two hours; Sounds good. Working late. Lock your door.

I read it three times, standing in my socks in the middle of my own kitchen with the smell of apples and cinnamon around me. Then I go through to the hall and turn the key, and slide the chain across as well, which I've never felt the need to use in four years of living here.

Whatever he's doing tonight, he doesn't want me to know about it.

I get into bed on the side nearest the wall, which is not the side I have slept on since I was nineteen. I lie there for a while listening to the gulls arguing on the roof of the building opposite. I'm not frightened. That's the part I keep turning over. I'm lying in the dark with a chain on my door and a man somewhere out there in the night doing something he won't put in a message, and what I feel is closer to being held.

I think that probably says something about me.

I'm asleep before I work out what.

Jasper

Somebody has painted a mural across the roller door of the carpet showroom. A wave that was possibly meant to be hopeful and has weathered into something closer to sinister. Four floors of apartments sit above it. The stairwell light on the second landing has been dead long enough for the glass to fill with insects, and the service road behind the building runs between two blind walls before it comes out on a stretch where the only camera points at a scrapyard gate.

It’s a good building for a man who doesn't want to be watched coming home.

I park across the road and turn off the engine.