Page 31 of Savage Daddy
And then I stopped.
I pulled back. I made myself do it, made my hand uncurl off her waist and made my body straighten and made the eighteen inches open back up between us, and it cost me more than anything has ever cost me, more than the worst night in Palermo, more than the worst thing I’ve ever taken in a ring—because everything in me was built to close that distance and I was tearing it open instead, against the whole grain of myself, with my heart slamming and my hands not steady and her mouth still right there asking.
Because she didn’t know what I was. Because if I kissed her now I’d kiss her into the chair next, and the voice next, and the set-down next, and I’d have her without her ever choosing the man underneath the man, I’d be exactly the thing she’d spent her whole life going cold against—the one who handled her, who pulled the lever, who knew the name for it while she melted not knowing anything—and I would not do that to her. I would not take it. Not until she knew.
She stepped back like she’d touched the oven.
And the thing on her face—I’ll carry it a long time, the thing on her face when I pulled back. Not relief. Not the cold. Confusion. Pure, wounded confusion. I’d had her, and I’d stopped. The grinning idiot who’d come crashing through her door like Saint George had just pulled back from a kiss she was already giving,and she had no framework for it, no shelf to put it on, and I watched her look for one and not find one, and I watched her decide—I saw it happen, the door coming down—that it meant something other than what it meant.
“Right,” she said. Flat. The shutter all the way down, but cracked, I could hear the crack in it. “We’re done. It’s late.”
“Katerina—”
“Go home, Tonio. Take your dog.”
I wanted to tell her. God, I wanted to tell her right there in the warm wrecked middle of it—I stopped because I’m trying to do the one decent thing, I stopped because you don’t know yet what you’d be choosing, I stopped because I’d rather break my own hand than handle you—but it wasn’t a thing you say in a doorway with your pulse still going and a man in a dark car across the street, so I said none of it. I got my coat. I whistled the dog. And I went out into the cold with the kiss banked but not gone, burning, the man at the curb still watching, and behind me the warm gold light went off, one switch at a time.
Chapter 8
Katerina
Itwasadisaster.I’d burned the first tray of koulourakia.
Me.
I don’t burn things. I’ve timed an oven by the smell since I can remember, and that morning I stood three feet from it thinking about a man’s mouth and let a whole tray go to coal, and I scraped them into the bin before he came in so he wouldn’t see. I hated that I’d done that, and I hated more that the reason I’d done it washim.
He’d stopped.
I’d given him the kiss the first time, a week ago, climbed him like a fence and then told him to leave. Fine. But last night he’d had me—my fist in his shirt, my breath in his mouth, my whole body up on its toes saying yes before my brain had time to kick in—andhewas the one who had pulled back. He uncurled his hand off my waist, like he was setting down a hot pan, and he opened the space back up between us.
I’d watched him pull back and it had not looked like relief. It had looked like pain. Like he wanted me so badly it hurt. I didn’t understand it.
So I made a decision. I’d decided hedidn’twant me, because that was the version that kept my walls up.
And then—of course—when he came in this morning at four exactly and he’d looked at me—one look, before the grin, before any of the noise—it was not with the look of a man who didn’t want me.
He wanted me. I wanted him.
So what on earth was going on?
I thought of Despina.Why are you so terrible to a man who likes you.I thought of her hand on mine, warm, pinning. I thought, with a flat fury that had nowhere to go, that she’d been right, the old woman, she’d been right in the church basement and she’d be unbearable about it if she ever found out, and I would die before I gave her the satisfaction.
Because I liked him. That was the fact at the bottom of all of it, and I’d stopped being able to lie about it. I liked the grinning broken-nosed idiot who’d put my father’s name back on my glass in my father’s green and never once asked me to thank him for it.
And nowIwas doing it. The thinghedid.
I’d caught myself three times since four o’clock cataloging him—the forearms when he pushed his sleeves up, the muscle moving under the ink, the way he set a fifty-pound sack down without a grunt and then turned and found me with that look. I was inventorying him the way he’d been inventorying me for months, and I knew exactly how it felt to be on the receiving end of it, and I couldn’t stop. My eyes kept going to him. My eyes had opinions now. I aimed them at the dough and they came back.
“You want these proofed warm or cool?” he asked. He had a tray of tsoureki braids and he was holding them away from his body like they might go off.
“Warm. Rack by the oven, not on it.” Sharp. Sharper than the question needed. I heard it come out sharp and didn’t soften it, because cold was the only tool I had left that worked, and even that was failing.
“Warm rack. Got it, boss.”
He went and did it. Didn’t push. He never pushed anymore. It kind of made me mad. He was good at taking my crap. Another reason I really liked him.
“You missed the eggwash on the third one,” I said.
