Danila looks at me. I look at him. Neither of us has ever described it that way, but she said it in one sentence and it's the most accurate thing either of us has heard about our friendship.
"It has its moments," Danila says.
"So does everything worth keeping."
She says it simply and Danila lifts his glass and Grace lifts hers. They drink, and I stand between them with my glass in my hand and my knife in my pocket. There’s the realization that the two people I trust most in the world are standing in my kitchen; one of them is eating pizza in my shirt and the other is drinking Georgian wine and neither of them needs me to say anything because they've figured each other out in thirty minutes and become friends.
Well after midnight, Danila leaves. He shakes Grace's hand at the door, and she holds the shake for an extra second and says, "Come back. Next time bring better wine."
"Georgian wine is the best wine."
"Bring Italian. I'm learning to drink what I am."
He laughs and pulls her in for a hug, then looks at me and nods and the nod says everything.She's good. She's right. Don't fuck this up.Then he leaves.
Grace walks to the window. My window. The one I've stood at every night for weeks, watching her apartment across the street. She looks through it. She can see her own windows from here, dark, the curtains she never closes because she never knew anyone was watching.
"Twenty-three," she says.
"What?"
"Nail curls on the windowsill. I counted. Twenty-three nights of standing here watching me."
I don't deny it, I don't explain it, I just stand behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. She leans back against my chest, and we look through the window together at the street, the bodega sign, her apartment and the cracked window of the restaurant below us.
"Tomorrow," she says. Her voice is low. "My apartment. My bed. My rules."
"Your rules."
She turns in my arms, and her face tilts up. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
I grin and pick her up, bridal style, and carry her to my room.
Chapter Twenty: Grace
Ispendthemorningpreparing, and not in the way other women might. No candles, no lingerie, no curated playlist meant to set a mood. I clean my apartment and wash the sheets. I throw away the trash that’s been sitting for a week because I need this place spotless.
Claudio doesn’t care, but I want it to be…
Nice.
I want it to be nice.
I take a shower, wash my hair, and stand in front of the mirror for a long time looking at my body. Not checking, not assessing. Looking. I've never done this before. For twenty-four years, I treated my body as a vehicle. A thing that carries plates, walksthree blocks, takes pills, taps its finger against surfaces. I've never once stood in front of a mirror and thought:this is mine.
I’ve never once been proud of it.
But itismine. All of it. Small, narrow shoulders, thin wrists. The hip bones where Carmelo's grip leaves bruises that I press my thumb into just to feel the ache. The collarbone my finger taps in the dark. The freckle below my ear where his mouth always goes first. Olive-warm skin and dark hair hanging past my shoulders and gray-blue eyes that belong to my father, set in a face that belongs to my mother, on a body that survived five years of the worst things human beings can do to a child and is still standing.
The bruises from Carmelo's last grip are fading on my hips, yellow at the edges, green in the center. Every mark on this body is mine, the visible ones and the invisible ones. The tapping, the flinch at Italian that's finally starting to fade, replaced by something closer to a pull than a push. My tongue keeps finding words my mouth forgot and putting them back in the air.
I get dressed. Jeans, a black shirt that fits close, no bra because I don't want one and I'm allowed to not want one, then I walk to the bodega.
Rosa looks at me over the counter, opens her mouth to comment on my hair, which is down and damp and doing whatever it wants, and then closes it again. She tilts her head instead.
"New man?" she says.
"What?"