Possession

7:10 PM, Tuesday.

"No, no, no. You're doing it wrong. You never crush the garlic before you toast the chiles. Only after. Otherwise it goes bitter, and your whole sauce tastes like regret."

"Regret is good in a sauce."

"Regret is the worst thing in a sauce, señorita."

Camille laughed.

It came out of her helplessly, a real laugh, the first in nine days, and it surprised her so much that she put the back of her wrist to her mouth. The kitchen of the Tribeca apartment was bright and warm, steel and white marble, with a six-burner range and copper pots hung in a row. At the island, in a white apron with a dish towel over one shoulder, stood a young man with a cheerful, flat-cheeked face and the beginnings of a mustache.

His name was Mateo. He was twenty-two. He had arrived on Monday as the evening cook, replacing the quiet woman who had left for a sister's wedding, and he was from Puebla, and he had a way of talking while he worked, quick and sing-song and half in Spanish, that reminded her so powerfully of her father's kitchen that for ten minutes she had forgotten where she was.

"My mother makes mole for forty people at Christmas," Mateo said. "Forty. She uses thirty-one ingredients. She will not tell me them. She says I must earn them."

"Have you?"

"I have twenty-six." He grinned. "Five to go. It is a tragedy."

"What are the five?"

"If I knew, señorita, they would not be a tragedy." He slid a wooden spoon across the island. "Here. Taste. Tell me if it is regret."

She tasted. Warm and smoky, with a slow bright heat that opened at the back of her tongue. She closed her eyes.

"It's not regret."

"No?"

"It's the opposite of regret." She opened her eyes and was smiling, and she felt her own face change with it, loosen, as if she'd taken off a heavy coat. "It tastes like Sunday."

"Ha!" Mateo threw his dish towel in the air. "Sunday! You hear that? She says it tastes like—"

"Mateo."

The voice came from the kitchen doorway, quiet, level, and cold as the inside of a vault.

Mateo's towel fell on the floor.

…

Julian stood just inside the door, in a charcoal suit with his tie loosened, his briefcase still in his hand. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had spent fourteen hours in a boardroom being perfect. His steel-gray eyes moved from the stove, to the island, to the wooden spoon in Camille's hand, and stopped.

"Mr. Kastellan." Mateo snatched up the towel. "Good evening, sir. I was only—"

"I'm aware of what you were doing." The tone was pleasant. That was the worst of it. "You may go for the night."

"But the sauce—"

"Leave it."

"Sir, the dinner is not—"

"Leave it," said Julian. "Now."

The boy blinked. His face, so bright a moment ago, had gone quite blank. He untied his apron with fingers that didn't seem to work, folded it, and set it carefully on the counter. Then he went out through the service door without a word.

Silence.

Camille stood with the spoon in her hand, and the taste of Sunday going cold in her mouth.

"What was that?" she said.

"The cook is dismissed."

"I heard. Why?"

"He was overfamiliar."

"He was making me dinner."

"He was standing eighteen inches from you, laughing, with his hands on your counter." Julian set down his briefcase. He did it with great care, as if it were fragile. "I won't permit it."

"You won't permit it."

"I would prefer that the staff keep a professional distance."

"Julian, he's twenty-two. He's a kid from Puebla who cooks mole!"

"I don't care where he's from."

She put the spoon down very quietly. In the quiet, she could hear the sauce simmering.

"What's wrong with you?" she said.

"Nothing is wrong with me."

"Something is wrong with you." She came around the island. "You haven't been home in nine days. You haven't spoken to me. You haven't even looked at me, except on a screen. And now you come in here and fire a boy for laughing?"

"I haven't fired him. I've transferred him." A flicker passed over Julian's face. "He'll be cooking for the Midtown executive dining room. A raise. He'll thank me."

"You transferred him."

"Yes."

"Like a chess piece."

His jaw tightened.

"Say it," Camille said softly. "That's what I am, isn't it? A piece. You move the cook, you move the driver, you move the one who gets to talk to me. You know what I did today? I called Mrs. Pena. My neighbor. An old woman who lent me forty dollars. And when I hung up, Cole asked me, very politely, if I had enjoyed my call. He knew who I'd been speaking to. He knew how long."

"It's a security protocol."

"It's a leash."

"It's—" He stopped. His hand opened and closed. "It is for your protection."

"Stop saying that."

"It's true."

"It's not the whole truth, and you know it, and I know it, and the cook knew it, and the plants know it." Her voice rose for the first time. "You can't keep telling me it's for my safety when you're jealous of a boy with a wooden spoon!"

The word hit the room like a thrown glass.

Julian stood very still.

"I am not jealous," he said.

…

They argued for twenty minutes.

It moved through the kitchen, down the long hall, into the great room under the skylight, with the lights of the city sliding across the piano. Neither of them raised a hand. Neither of them needed to. It was a fight of consonants, of clipped hard sentences fired across thirty feet of oak floor, each of them circling the other, each of them landing blows that the other had already taken in advance.

"You said I could keep my life!"

"I said you could keep your name."

"I said I'd be here, I'd be yours, I didn't say I'd be a prisoner!"

"You are not a prisoner."

"Then open the door!"

"The door is open."

"Then why does Cole follow me to the bathroom?"

"He doesn't—"

"He waits outside!"

"There is a man named Anthony Gray," Julian said, "who has the full resources of the Executive Office of the President, and who knows your face. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what I am holding off?" He had her by the wrists now. She did not know when that had happened. His grip was iron, and trembling. "I put four men on your floor. I put cameras in the lobby. I read your phone records, yes, because the last time I let you out of my sight, you took the 6 train to Hunts Point and caught a bullet."

"A graze."

"Don't."

"It was a graze, Julian."

"I know what it was!" His voice cracked across the room like a whip, and then dropped, abruptly, to a rasp. "I know exactly what it was. I held your arm in a van under the tracks, and your blood was on my hands, and I have not been able to wash it off for fourteen days."

The room went silent.

Camille looked up into his face. He was breathing hard. His hair had fallen across his forehead. The cool banker's mask had been stripped away, and what lay under it was raw and white-lipped and unguarded, and he did not seem to know it.

"Everything I have ever had," he said, low, "was a position. The firm. The badge. The name. I held them because I was good at holding them. I have never wanted one single thing in my life that I couldn't take apart and put back. I understood that. I understood me."

"Julian—"

"And then there's you."

His fingers loosened. His thumbs, without any evident decision, moved across the insides of her wrists, over the pulse.

"You laugh in a kitchen with a stranger, and something in me goes... out of control. I don't know the word. I stand in a doorway and I want to put my hand through a wall. And I know it's wrong. I know it's not something I'm entitled to. You didn't choose this. I made you."

His voice broke.

"I'm afraid, Camille," Julian Kastellan said. "I'm afraid that if I open my hand, you'll go. And I don't know what is in me, if you go."

…

The skylight stood open to the night. In the glass, the reflections of two figures hung, small and pale, in the middle of the vast room.

Camille did not move.

She had been waiting for an apology. She had prepared several answers. She had prepared a speech about autonomy and respect, about power, about the difference between a man who loved a woman and a man who wanted to keep a thing. All of it was true. All of it was in her mouth.

None of it came.

Because she was looking at his hands, scarred, square, shaking, around her wrists. And she remembered a man on his knees in a dim van, with his forehead against her leg.

"You want to know what I think?" she said quietly.

"Yes."

"I think you're the loneliest man I've ever met."

He flinched, as if she had struck him.

"I think you built yourself a very beautiful tower, and you've been up in it so long that you've forgotten it has a door." She tilted her head, studying him. "And I think you took me out of my life because you couldn't think of any other way to bring a person into yours."

"That's not—"

"Isn't it?"

He said nothing.

"Then open it," Camille whispered. "Your hand."

Julian stared at her.

"You said you're afraid I'll go. I might. I might hate you for years. I might never forgive the hospital." Her voice trembled, and steadied. "But you cannot hold a person by the throat and ask her to want to stay. Either let me breathe, Julian, or don't talk to me about being afraid."

For a long moment, he did not move. The city lights slid across his face. A siren sounded, very far away. He looked down at his own hands as if they belonged to another man, and then, slowly, one finger at a time, he released her.

Her wrists were red. She rubbed them.

"I'm sorry," Julian said.

It was the first time he had ever said it. It came out stiff, formal, rusty with disuse. He said it again, lower, as if testing its weight. "I am sorry."

She looked at him.

And Camille Duarte, who had sworn on the way up the elevator that she would never again let this man touch her, took one step across the oak floor and put both hands on his lapels, and pulled him down, hard, and kissed him.

…

It was not gentle.

It was nine days of fury and fear and exhaustion, a kiss with teeth in it, clumsy and furious and shaking. She felt him go rigid with shock. She felt his gloved hand, he was wearing his gloves, she realized, he'd never taken them off, come up and close around the back of her neck, and then the shock broke like ice and he kissed her back with a hunger so absolute that it frightened her.

He drove her back against the cold glass. The piano trembled. His mouth was on hers, desperate, searching; his breath came ragged; and somewhere, distantly, she heard herself make a small sound in her throat, a sound she had not made for any man in six years.

This is wrong, she thought. He bought you. He owns the floor. You're kissing your jailer.

She did not stop.

"Camille," he said against her mouth, hoarse, a man drowning. "Tell me to leave."

"No."

"I'm not—I don't know how to be—"

"I know." Her fingers tightened in his hair. "I know what you are."

The skylight blazed with stars. On the oak floor, a briefcase lay forgotten where it had been set down, and behind it, through the kitchen door, the sauce on the stove went on quietly simmering, smoky and warm, tasting of Sunday.

Neither of them noticed when it began to burn.