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The part of me that has never once in twenty-eight years asked for anything without being certain of the answer first wants to argue this point on principle, and the rest of me is already past it, stranded on the wrong side of principle, shaking faintly with my cheek tipped toward the sheet and every nerve I have pointed at the inch of him that’s barely inside me.

“I want you to stop teasing me and push in,” I say, and my voice comes out lower than I intended and steadier than I deserve.

He pushes in, one long unhurried stroke that doesn’t stop, that keeps going past the point I think is all of him and finds more, and my arms give out completely, so I’m chest to the mattress with my hips held up by his hand and the sheer animal need to keep the angle. The stretch is total. The depth is a fact my whole body has to negotiate with, a breath held and then released in a sound I don’t recognize as mine.

He goes still, buried to the hilt, and gives me the second.

“You feel that,” he says, his voice low. “How deep does this go?”

“I feel everything, that’s my whole problem, I’ve always felt—”

He drives in harder, and the rest leaves me as sound. A second wind starts to coil, and I can feel him feel it, the grip of me going tighter around him on every stroke, and he doesn’t let up, takes me through the build with his fist in my hair and his hand at my hip, pulling me back onto him.

Then he stops, pulls out, turns me over again, and comes down over me face to face, pushing back in before I’ve finished gasping at the loss of him. “I want to watch this one,” he says, forehead dropping to mine, his heart going faster than mine now, the one tell he can’t talk his way out of. “You hid the last one in a pillow.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re close. I can feel your cunt arguing with you about it.” He grinds in deep and holds, and the coil pulls past the point of any name. “Let it win.”

I do. It breaks over me with him buried to the hilt, and he goes with me, his control cracking in the one place he can’t hide it, his rhythm coming apart, his mouth at my throat saying my name like he wasn’t saving it after all. He stays inside me long after, reluctant to move, his weight a warm dead anchor, his breath slowing against my neck.

“Better than the bathroom,” I tell the ceiling, because I say the true thing even now.

He huffs a laugh into my skin and doesn’t move to leave.

11

Adrianos

She sleeps like she argues, all the way committed, one arm flung off the edge of the mattress and her hair waging a private war with the pillow, and I lie still and give myself sixty seconds to count the reasons this is a problem.

The list runs long, and I won’t pretty it up. She works for me, so every hour she’s under this roof she’s mine to keep breathing, and I’ve added a complication to a job that had no slack in it for one. She’s under my protection, the same protection with a body count already attached to its name. Kalliopi worked for me too, and Kalliopi’s in the ground in Queens under flowers this woman chose, and the line you can draw from that grave to this bed runs through my own two hands. Elena and I lost the same person, hers a friend who could read her from front to back, mine one of the few I ever let near the real work, and neither of us has put her name in the air since the car. The dead don’t need me in bed with their grieving best friend to feel they were loved.

And she’s the most oblivious creature about her own survival I’ve ever been handed responsibility for. A man cocked a pistol against her skull her first day on the payroll, and she walked out of it sorry she hadn’t gotten more time with the filing cabinet.

Last night moves nothing on that list. What I take from the sixty seconds is one rule for myself, that I’ll go easy on her this morning. Not soft, I haven’t owned soft in decades, but she kept losing her sentences halfway through last night. Every time I’ve been near her, she’s talked without a single gap in it, fast, certain, three steps ahead of me, and last night her body kept outrunning her mouth and leaving her with nothing to say. A mind like hers won’t forgive that easily. She’ll come into my kitchen daring me to make it small, and I won’t give her the satisfaction.

I get up without waking her. She doesn’t stir, dead to the world, and the house I move through to reach the kitchen is the same kind of quiet it was the mornings my son slept past noon, and I let him. I cut the thought there and put the coffee on instead.

The kitchen’s mine alone at this hour, Penelope’s not in yet, and the city outside’s going from gray to a thin gold along the river. I make coffee the old way, slow over the flame in the little pot my grandmother used, the smell of it climbing the room, because there are three or four things in my life I still do with my own hands and refuse to hand off, and this is one. I’m into the second cup when she comes to the doorway in last night’s sweater pulled back into place, chin already up, loaded for a fight she’s bracing to come.

“Coffee’s on the stove,” I tell her, and I stay put, hip to the counter, a full length of marble between us on purpose. “It’s strong. You look like a woman who takes it strong and insults it anyway.”

“I take it strong, and I don’t insult; I assess.” She crosses to the stove and pours. I watch her notice the gap I’m holding, the distance I put between us before she was awake. It loosens her shoulders half an inch, the relief of it, but then that same half inch tightens again with irritation. She’s impossible to please, which shouldn’t intrigue me as much as it does.

“You’re keeping that counter between us on purpose,” she says, into the cup.

“I’m drinking my coffee.”

“You’re drinking coffee on the far side of the room like I’m contagious. Last night you carried me to bed, and this morning the counter’s a demilitarized zone.” She drinks, watching me over the rim, honey eyes gone sharp before the caffeine’s even hit. “I’m not asking you to feel things, you’d be bad at it. I’m logging the reversal for the record, because I keep good records, it’s the whole reason I’m in this kitchen instead of dead in an office in the Garment District.”

That last one she throws like it’s nothing, but it isn’t nothing, and the fact that she can put the gun and the paperwork into one joke before nine in the morning is its own wound.

“The policy hasn’t moved,” I tell her. “The work’s the work. Last night changes what happens between us when the work’s done for the day, but it changes nothing about what you are to the people I’m hunting, or what I need from you to reach them.”

“That was almost graceful.” She tips her head. “You rehearse it over the coffee, or does the diplomacy arrive pre-pressed, like the suits?”

“I have range, koukla. You’ve seen a thin slice.” The warmth comes up under the words, the charm I keep idling at all hours, a tool, and I know it’s a tool, and she rolls her eyes at it, but then her mouth twitches at the corner.