Page 9 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“Like the dead,” I say, to a cinnamon swirl. I stack the last of the now empty trays and hand them back to Natan.

There’s a pause. Jasper, who I am beginning to understand misses nothing, has wandered off toward the long wall and is standing in front of the Rebecchi with his hands in his pockets, giving us the room in the least subtle way ever.

“Kimmie,” Natan says.

“Eleven o’clock.” I flash him a smile with all of my teeth in it. “Come back at eleven, both of you, bring everyone, there’s wine and cheese. Thank you for the pastries. Thank Delilah. Thank Sammie. Thank the cats.”

He watches me for another second. Then he nods once, and picks up the empty trays.

At the door he stops. He looks at the floor beside my desk, for long enough that I feel it in my knees, and then he looks back at me.

“Good luck today,” he says.

The door closes. Through the glass I watch the two of them cross the street, Jasper saying something, Natan not answering.

Here is the thing about last night.

I haven’t slept. Not a single second. I went home at ten, I put on a face mask, I lay in my bed with the blackout blind down and the fan on, and at three in the morning I was staring at the ceiling with my hand pressed flat over my sternum, replaying the sound he made when he came, which is apparently just something my brain can do now, on demand, at will, forever.

At half past three I remembered that neither of us stopped to think about anything, and I did some brisk mental gymnastics about where I am in my cycle and the fact I’ve had a full panel done since the great and terrible era of Craig. Then I noticed that I was completely calm about it, and that lack of panic was somehow more alarming than panicking would have been.

And now it’s seven twenty on the biggest morning of my professional life, and I am standing in the room where it happened.

I can see it. That’s the problem. I look at my desk and I see my heels braced on the edge of it. I look at the floor and I see the exact place where I obviously lost my mind, and I have to walk past it approximately nine hundred times today while talking people about brushwork.

I’m so annoyed with myself. Six artists trusted me with twenty-two pieces of their hearts. Bea is going to arrive at half past ten looking mysterious in the corner. Some collector from the city has emailed me twice about her painting. I should be thinking about that, and instead I’m thinking about a man’s hands on my thighs.

But underneath the annoyance there’s this other thing, and it’s been sitting there since about four this morning, and I don’t fully know what to do with it.

I didn’t hold my stomach in. Not once. I didn’t apologize for my body or angle myself into the shape I used to make myself into with Craig, who once told me I was a lot, in a voice that made it clear he didn’t mean a lot of anything good. I took my bra off in front of a man in a bright room and he said fuck like it had been dragged out of him.

I talked. I told him to breathe. I told him to open his eyes, and he did, and he kept them on me.

For thirty-five minutes on this floor I was completely, entirely, embarrassingly myself, and it turned out that was the version he wanted.

I push off the door and go to the desk. His card is still sitting there against my stack of label cards, plain white with a cell number and nothing else. I pick it up and slide it into the back of my phone case.

And it’s only then, standing in the middle of my own gallery, two hours from the doors opening, with cinnamon in the air and the crease still in the tablecloth, that I remember he never gave me my underwear back.

Natan

When Eduard calls, he is straight to business, which is how I know it isn’t a conversation.

“Teplov,” he says. “He’s been selling the night gate at the second yard. Two loads last month that weren’t ours, riding over our bridge on our paperwork.”

“Where is he?”

“Sheremet’s shop on the eastern road. Mechislav is ten minutes out.”

“How much of him do you want left?”

“He needs both hands to work on Monday.” There’s a pause, and then the part he actually called to say. “His wife knew nothing about any of it. Keep it inside the building.”

I put the empty trays on the counter at Purr & Pour and Delilah starts to say something about the state of my face. I’m out the door before she finds the end of the sentence.

Sheremet’s shop smells like primer and hot metal, and there’s a Mercedes up on the lift with half its panels taped in brown paper. Teplov is sitting in a plastic chair near the compressor with a cup of coffee, which tells me nobody has approached him about this yet.

Mechislav is against the workbench with his arms folded, letting the quiet do the early work. He likes a man to arrive at his own conclusions. I take the coffee out of Teplov’s hand and set it on the bench.