Static Hour

Too Close

Her name in a stranger's mouth did something worse to her than the wind had. Kamsi's hand stayed against her lips, and beneath it she felt her own breath go shallow and fast, felt him feel it too.

He didn't move. He waited, counting something only he could hear, and when the car door below finally closed and the engine pulled away, he still didn't move for a long moment after, as though trusting silence less than he trusted his own patience.

"That was Emeka," he said finally, voice barely above breath. "Balogun's driver. Which means Balogun already knows you left your building tonight."

"How does he know my name?"

"Because I have been watching your gallery for eight months, and somewhere in eight months of watching, your name became part of what I was watching for." He said it plainly, no apology in it, and she understood, with a cold drop in her stomach, that she had been a thread in his investigation before she had ever been a woman on a balcony.

There was no time to sit with that. He pulled her by the wrist through a service door she hadn't noticed, into a stairwell that smelled of rust and old rain, and pressed the door shut behind them with his shoulder, both of them breathing hard in the dark.

The stairwell was narrow enough that there was no way to stand in it without standing close. Adaeze felt the cold of the brick at her back and the warmth of him in front of her, the bronze still wedged between them like a chaperone neither of them wanted.

"Are you using me?" she asked, because it was easier to ask in the dark, when she didn't have to watch his face decide how to answer.

"No." His voice had lost its careful edges. "I didn't know you'd move in next door. I didn't know your gallery would call you before you'd even started. None of this was planned, Adaeze. I have spent eight months planning things down to the minute, and you are the first thing in all of it I didn't see coming."

She should have asked more questions. She had a list of them, ready and reasonable, and every one of them dissolved when he lifted his hand to her jaw, slow enough that she could have stopped him, and didn't.

"Tell me to stop," he said, low, close enough now that his breath moved against her mouth.

She didn't.

His lips found hers with a carefulness that unraveled fast into something else, something hungrier, her hand fisting in the front of his shirt, his free arm coming around her waist to pull her flush against him, the bronze forgotten between them until it wasn't, until the awkward weight of it forced them apart with a startled, breathless laugh that belonged to neither of the people they'd been ten minutes ago on that gantry.

"We should keep moving," he said, though he didn't let go of her waist.

"We should," she agreed, and didn't move either.

It was the light of her phone that broke it, harsh and sudden in the dark stairwell, buzzing against her hip where she'd forgotten it entirely. She pulled it free with a hand that wasn't quite steady, expecting her mother, expecting a friend, expecting anything other than what actually lit the screen.

A message. Time-stamped one minute ago.

Mrs. Balogun:

Change of plans for Monday, dear. Come to the gallery tonight instead.

There's someone I'd like you to meet before the acquisition closes. Emeka can collect you whenever you're ready.

Adaeze stared at it until the letters stopped making sense, until Kamsi, feeling her go still against him, leaned in to read over her shoulder and went still himself, his arm tightening around her like a door closing.

"She knows where you are," he said quietly. "She's known this whole time."