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He waits until the hall is quiet. Then he comes around the desk, and I’m leaning back against the edge of it with my hands flat on the wood, and he stops in front of me, closer than anybody’s been all day.

“You handled that well,” he says.

“I didn’t handle anything. I yanked a drawer off its runners.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m not.”

He takes my hand off the desk and turns it over. It’s shaking.

“Fine,” I say. “A little.”

He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my palm, right in the center, where the silver comes up. It’s cool. It goes all the way up my arm.

Then he kisses me.

It’s slow and sure. His hand slides to the back of my neck and holds me there, cool fingers at the base of my braid, and I grab his lapel and pull him in, and the desk creaks behind me. Dez’s pens rattle in their mug. I don’t care.

“Well,” Merek says from the doorway. “That’s a nice thing to come back to.”

I don’t stop. Neither does Lenart, not for a second, and then he lifts his head just enough to look at the door without letting go of my neck.

“You’re blocking the light,” he says.

“You don’t like the light.”

“I don’t like being interrupted.”

“I’m not interrupting.” Merek leans on the doorframe, his arms crossed, his tail curling slow behind him, and his ember lines have come up from that banked red all the way to orange. “I’m admiring.”

I look over Lenart’s shoulder at him. His eyes are on my mouth. He’s grinning.

Lenart’s hand is cold on my neck. Merek’s heat is coming off him from all the way across the room.

“Come here, then,” I tell Merek.

His eyebrows go up. Lenart’s thumb moves once along my jaw, which is as close as Lenart comes to laughing out loud.

Merek crosses the office in two strides. Lenart doesn’t let go of me. He just shifts half a step, enough to make room, his cool hand still at the back of my neck, and Merek’s hot one comes up along my jaw from the other side, and he tips my face up and kisses me.

He tastes like the coffee he made at eleven. He’s warm everywhere Lenart is cold. One of them has my neck and the other has my face, and for a second I can’t tell where the cold stops and the heat starts.

Merek brushes his thumb over my bottom lip and kisses me once more.

“See you later, Trouble.”

He goes. Lenart kisses me once more, short and certain, and steps back and straightens his cuffs like nothing happened.

“I’ll be in my office,” he says. “The ledgers start with 1875. Don’t try to read them all tonight.”

I’m alone in Dez’s office.

I go to the window and pull the blind the rest of the way up.

There’s the back lot. The white delivery van, still parked where it’s been all week.

It’s the picture. The same corner, the same angle, the same slant of the van’s roof. I’m standing where somebody stood on Sunday with a phone.