Chapter 9: The Longest Night

The generator caught at half past two with a cough and a long mechanical hum.

One bulb came back over the nurse's desk, and then another.

The old baker rolled over and went back to sleep.

"Four hours," Leone said, wiping grease off his hands with a rag. "Then they walk in with clipboards and find reasons."

"Then we have four hours."

"To do what? Scrub the floors?"

"To not be asleep," I said.

He looked up.

I was standing in the doorway of his little back office.

It held a cracked desk and a cot he'd never admitted to using.

I had taken my hair down.

I had been thinking for an hour about what Donata had said, about the boy's asthma and the dust and the bread.

She had taken every comfort I had left and promised to take the rest by morning.

I wanted something she couldn't take.

"Gemma," Leone said slowly.

"You said tell you tomorrow."

"I did."

"It's tomorrow."

I crossed the room and pushed the door shut behind me.

He put the rag down.

I took the first step and he took the second.

Then we were against the wall by the filing cabinet, his hands in my hair and mine under his shirt.

His skin was hot.

He tasted like terrible coffee, and I bit his lower lip until he swore.

"You don't know what you're doing," he said against my mouth.

"I know exactly what I'm doing."

I pushed his shirt off his shoulders and let it fall.

He was broad and scarred and a little soft at the middle, built to save patients.

I put my palms flat on his chest and felt his heart slamming under them.

Nobody's heart had ever slammed for me.

I had been touched, for five years, by a man who watched my face while he did it.

Leone didn't watch.

He had his eyes shut and his forehead against mine.

"Take off the dress," he said, rough.

I reached behind me and pulled the zipper down.

The blue fabric slid off my shoulders and pooled around my ankles.

He opened his eyes then, and I watched them go dark.

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