Page 19 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

I can. Not all of it, because there are limits imposed by anatomy and I have run into most of them, but I take him until my nose is nearly at his stomach and my eyes water behind my glasses, and he says something in Russian that I’d very much like translated at a later date.

He warns me. Of course he does. “Kimmie, I’m going to—”

I stay where I am and do it faster, and he comes with his hand fisted in my hair and my name coming out of him in pieces. I am so pleased with myself that I have to put my forehead down on his thigh for a second and get my face in order.

When I look up, he has one forearm over his eyes. He moves it. He looks wrecked and enormous and about nine seconds from unconsciousness.

“Come here.”

I crawl up and he hauls me the rest of the way, kissing me without any hesitation about where my mouth has just been, which is the sort of information I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

“Good morning,” I say.

“It is.”

We leave late, as a direct result. He uses my shower after me and fills the entire cubicle in a way I find hilarious, and I put on jeans and a shirt with a paint stain on the cuff that I’ve decided is a design feature.

In the kitchen he stands with his coffee at the exact spot on the counter where the light comes in. My journal is still on the table where I shoved it last night, and I go past and put it in the drawer with what I hope is casual efficiency.

“I wasn’t going to read it,” he says.

“I know. I’m protecting you. There are four pages in there about your forearms. You’d never recover.”

At half past six, we leave. Mrs. Horace’s curtain moves at number nine as we pass, which I clock and choose to gift to her as a treat. Natan walks on the road side of me. I don’t think he decides to, I think it’s simply where he goes.

“Right.” I hook my hand through his arm, because his arm is there. “Three questions. You said starting now, and it’s now.”

“Go.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“City side. Eight streets back from the second yard, above a place that fixed washing machines.” He says it evenly. “My mother still lives four floors up from a bakery that Eduard bought so nobody would bother her.”

“Siblings?”

“One sister. Tasia. She’s ten years younger and she’s been sending me houses on this side of the river since March.” He glances down at me. “Four a day. She sent one at two in the morning once because she loved the kitchen.”

“Last one,” I say. “What do you do all day?”

He doesn’t slow down and he doesn’t dress it up.

“The family brings freight into the city and moves it across that bridge. Eduard runs it and we all do stuff to help. When somebody steals from us, or lies to us, or puts something in one of our trucks that we didn’t agree to, I go and see them, and afterward they don’t do it again.” A pause of about half a step. “Yesterday morning I broke a man’s finger in a body shop on the eastern road because he’d been selling access to our night gate. That’s what I do all day.”

I keep walking, and I keep hold of his arm. I think about how easily he could have said transport, or logistics, or that it’s complicated, and how he chose not to make me work for it. He chose not to lie to me.

“Okay,” I say.

“That’s it?”

“You told me the truth. Do you know how rare that is?” I bump my shoulder into him, or as close as I can reach. “I’ll have opinions later. Some of them will be long. Right now I’m going to be pleased that you didn’t lie to me this early in the morning.”

The café’s front is dark, though the kitchen light is on at the back and I can hear the extractor running, which means Delilah is already in there baking for the day. There’s a white van parked up by the old laundry with its lights off.

“Oh, someone might finally be doing something with the laundry,” I say, nodding at it. “It’s never been open since I’ve been here.”

Natan looks at the van for exactly as long as it takes to walk past it and says nothing at all.

At the gallery I get the shutter halfway up before he takes it off me and puts it the rest of the way, and while I’m turning on the lights he goes through to that back past the mop and the bubble wrap. I hear him working the back door handle twice.