His face manifested neither surprise, nor happiness, nor astonishment.
Zilch.
He looked at her.
He looked at her for . . . hard to say how long. Seconds aren’t really seconds at times like this; they’re rare and count triple. For an eternity, let’s say.
And she . . . she was speechless. First she was drained, and then it was okay. Her part of the work was done.
She didn’t move a muscle. It was his turn now. His turn to take over their story. To say something stupid and jeopardize everything, or to say . . . she didn’t know, something that would finally let her sit down and breathe.
He had sensed all of that. He was struggling for words; it showed in his face. Words, fatigue, and his memories. That he was groping. That he was on the point of . . . and then biting it back. That he was scared, and that he was as deeply enmeshed in this as she was.
He looked down again, and went back to what had been absorbing his attention. To buy some time, and because he was smarter when his hands were occupied.
A long, rectangular blue stone was on the counter in front of him. He was sharpening his knives.
She watched him.
They played Mikado with their nerves, and the calm, regular scraping sound soothed them both. These, they might both have been telling themselves, were so many minutes bought before everything might crumble.
He inspected the blade, testing its sharpness by letting it slide in a curve over his left thumbnail, then turned it around and went back to work.
A sort of dark paste had formed on the stone. He traced loops in it, and figure eights, and whorls, bearing down with all his weight on the three fingers guiding the steel.
Fascinated, she studied the short fingernails whitening with effort, the hardened and cut pads of flesh at their tips, and, hidden beneath the ebony sleeve, the famous abbreviated ring finger.
That finger, crippled, soft, and pale . . . she wanted to touch it.
Without sparing her a glance, he pulled a bowl of water toward him and moistened the stone with gentle strokes of his hand.
The scraping of the blade, the stormy little flutterings of their hearts, which had been pent up for too long, the humming of the walk-in freezer in the distance, cradled them for another moment, and then there were footsteps in the next room, the CLACK! of a circuit breaker, the noise of a door closing and a pair of shutters being drawn, and then one—no, two—locks clicking.
They found themselves plunged into darkness, and it was only then that she saw him smile. She could hear his dimples in his voice.
“Too bad. Like I just told you, I forgot my keys.”
He was already savoring this. She still hadn’t spoken. She groped behind her and found a stool, pulled it over and sat down across from him.
After all the noise, silence again.
“I’m happy,” he murmured.
She had reopened the little cut on her lower lip. Was it his turn to talk? Oh dear, no, not now. She was too tired. She’d come to him because he hadn’t stolen from her; please, let him keep up that momentum.
She played with her wounded lip, to gain a few more seconds.
She bit it where it hurt the most, and sucked away her own blood.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
“You too.”
“Yeah . . . me too. More than you. But I had more to lose, right?”
She smiled in the dark.
He rocked back and forth, as if he wanted to make a hollow in the stone.
After another minute, or two, or three, or maybe a thousand, he added, his voice still low:
“I thought that you . . . that I . . . no . . . nothing.”
Sccccritch! A fly electrocuted itself in the bluish halo of a trap set near the corridor.
“Are you hungry?” he asked after a time, looking at her as if he’d never seen her before in his life.
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
She smiled, and it hurt, and she licked her lips, because it hurt.
She salivated on her lip a little, to cauterize it, and he carefully wiped his big knife.
“Take your clothes off.”