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“Don’t let him through.”

The voice came from behind me, inside the building, low and fast. I had the street door open about the width of my suitcase, the garment bag hooked over my left wrist, the door code Ada had texted me still lit up on my phone, and a man in a gray polo coming across the pavement with his hand already out for the handle.

I didn’t let go of the door. I didn’t decide that, exactly. My foot decided it and the rest of me caught up.

“Move, please.” He stopped close enough that I could smell the inside of a car on him, cold air and somebody else’s cigarettes. His English was flat as a receipt. “I’m not here for you.”

“Good, ’cause I just got here. I’m moving in. That’s the opposite direction.”

He looked past me. I turned enough to see a young man at the bottom of the stairs in a white T-shirt, a phone held to his chest in both hands like it was the last warm thing in Milan. There was a red mark under one of his eyes. A little silver ring on a chain had come out of his collar, and he pushed it back inside without looking at it.

“Tommaso.” The man said it like a bill, then a run of Italian, and held his palm out flat. I didn’t need Italian for the palm.

“No,” the boy answered, in English, for me or for himself. “I cancelled. I told Renata. You call her.”

“The phone. Give it to me and I go.”

“It’s my phone. I’m keeping the messages.”

“Then come. We talk in the car.”

“He said no.” That was me, and it came out with my mama’s whole front porch in it. “Call whoever you need to call. He’s standing right there saying no to your face.”

The man put his hand flat on the glass above my head and pushed. Not hard. Just enough to show me he could. My right shoulder grabbed at me the way it does when it thinks it’s about to be asked for something, so I got my left side into the frame instead, and I hated that he watched me do it, the way a man checks a tire.

Then his eyes dropped to the garment bag, to the agency’s card in the plastic sleeve with my work name in capitals so the driver at arrivals could find me.

“WHIT,” he read. He looked back up at my face like he was holding it against a picture. “You’re the new one in the apartment.”

Something cold went down the back of my neck. “I’m the new one on this step. Back up.”

He didn’t back up. He took his phone out with his free hand, stepped away a pace, and lifted it at the brass number beside the door. I heard the little fake shutter. He tipped it at the panel of buzzers, the names on tape under each button, and took that too.

“What are you doing, man?”

He put the phone away. That was the whole answer.

“Ma che fa? Eh? Lei, sì, lei!”

A woman was coming up the pavement behind him with a shopping trolley on two wheels and a net bag of oranges swinging off the handle. She was small and old enough to have stopped being polite about anything, and she came at him like he was a pigeon on her windowsill. He said one word back. She said twelve, and I caught nothing but the tone, and the tone was plenty.

A motorbike pulled up at the curb behind her. The rider climbed off the bike and pulled off her helmet, and I knew Ada Bellandi from all those video calls by the way she didn’t look at me first. She looked at the door, the hand on it, the boy, the old woman and the man, in that order, and then she spoke to him in an Italian so level it was almost bored. He answered. She said one more thing, quieter, and tipped her helmet toward the street.

He took his hand off the glass.

“Tommaso,” Ada called past me, in English, so I’d hear it too. “Do you want to leave with Stefano?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t.”

Stefano looked at me once more. Not angry. Interested, which was worse. Then he walked back to a gray van parked half up on the pavement, got in, and sat there with the engine running long enough to make his point before he pulled away into the traffic.

My palm was wet on the handle. The old woman reached up and patted my cheek twice, hard, the way my granddaddy used to pat a dog that had done what it was told.

“Bravo,” she approved. Then she pointed at her trolley and at the stairs.

“Signora Bassi,” Ada translated, dry as toast. “She lives across the landing from you. She’d like you to carry that, since you’re standing there being tall.”

“Yes ma’am. Sì. Absolutely.” I looked at my suitcase, my garment bag, her oranges. “In what order?”

“Your case goes in the lift. Her shopping goes up the stairs. Left hand.” Ada said it without looking at my shoulder, which was its own way of looking at it. “Tommaso. Are you hurt?”

“No.” He touched the mark under his eye before she could get a proper look. “A cupboard. Not him.”

“I didn’t say him.”

“I know what you think.”

“You don’t. Where are you going?”

“Rui has my charger. Then Paolo.”

“Then I’m walking you to Paolo.” She held the door for me with her boot. “Up. Both of you.”

✦

The lift took my suitcase and about half my dignity, and I sent it up alone and took Signora Bassi’s trolley in my left hand. She went up ahead of me with a hand on the rail, talking the whole way, not to me so much as near me. On the second flight she stopped, pointed down at the street door, and shook her finger at it.

“Questa porta. Sempre aperta. Sempre i ragazzi.”

“The door?” I guessed. “Always open?”

“Sempre.” At the top she pointed at her own door, a straw mat and a little brass hand for a knocker, and at a photo stuck in its glass, a big soft-faced man in a work jacket with his arm around her. “Matteo. Mio figlio. He carry.” She frowned at her English. “But he work.”

“Well, today I carry.”

She took the trolley from me like I’d been renting it and pointed across the landing at the other door, the one with the agency’s sticker by the bell. “Tu. Là.”

“Me. There. Yes ma’am.”

She let herself in and shut the door. I heard one lock turn, then another. I pulled my suitcase out of the lift and rolled it across the landing.

My door opened before I knocked. A man in running shorts and nothing else stood there holding a phone charger, brown and wiry, with a mouth already arguing with somebody. He looked at my garment bag, then at the suitcase beside me.

“You brought your own rail?”

“It’s one shirt.”

“For two weeks?”

“The rest is in the case. Don’t let the size fool you. Most of it’s shoes.” I put out my left hand. “Jace.”

“Rui.” He shook it, looking past me down the stairwell. “What happened downstairs? Signora Bassi only shouts like that at the man with the scooter.”

“A man wanted Tommaso to get in a car.”

His face went still. “Stefano?”

“You know him?”

“I’ve been in his car. I didn’t invite him here.” He stepped back to let me in. “Tommaso gave this address for a pickup once. I told him use the café. He never listens to me. Nobody listens to me in this apartment, and now there are two of you.”

Tommaso came up the last flight with Ada behind him. He took the charger out of Rui’s hand, kissed his cheek, said something in Italian that made Rui roll his eyes, and then looked at me properly.

“WHIT, yes?”

“Jace, when I’m off the clock.”

“Rui showed me your pictures. The blue thing.”

“Blue Wings. From Paris.” I could still feel that costume move whenever somebody brought it up. “You liked it?”

“I liked it.” He looked toward the stairwell, then back at me. “He read your name.”

“Off my bag.”

“Now he knows the bag.” He said it plain, like weather. Then he put the charger in his pocket with the phone and held both there with his hand flat over the cloth.

Ada took the apartment in with one look, the way she’d taken the street.

“If that man comes back, you don’t argue through the door,” she told me. “You don’t open it. You call me, and then you call the police, and I don’t care which order.”

“He took a picture of the number. And the buzzers.”

“He’s driven to this address before. A photograph doesn’t give him anything he didn’t have.”

“It gives him me.”

She looked at me a beat longer than she had. “Your work name is on a garment bag, Jace. It’s also on my website. It’s on every casting list I sent this week. That’s not a secret, that’s a career.” Then, less brisk, “I’ll speak to Tommaso’s booker. You eat something. I’ll send you the details for tomorrow before you’ve unpacked your shoes.”

“Is tomorrow a casting?”

“I’ll send you the details.” She was already turning for the door. “Rui. Show him where the hot water lies to people.”

“It lies to everybody,” Rui called from the kitchen. “It’s not personal.”

✦

The wardrobe in my room had two hanging sections. One side held three of Rui’s shirts with a great deal of breathing room. The other side held an ironing board.

“Oh, we are absolutely about to have a conversation.”

Rui leaned in the doorway. “I was keeping it warm for you.”

“You were keeping it for you.”

“I was keeping it for whoever came. Now you came.” He pulled the board out and stood it in the hall, where it blocked the bathroom, and we looked at it like a third roommate neither of us had chosen. “It can go behind the kitchen door.”

“Then the kitchen door won’t open.”

“The kitchen door doesn’t need to open. You can see the kitchen from here.” He made a face at my garment bag. “Show me the famous shirt.”

I unzipped it. Green, cut close at the waist, with a collar that sat exactly where I wanted it. Khalil had said a word about it in his front room that I wasn’t repeating to a roommate.

Rui looked at it for a while. “It’s good. You’re going to be hot.”

“That’s what I was going for.”

“The temperature, I meant. It’s June in Milan, you’ll sweat through the arms.” He pushed off the doorframe. “I have a go-see. The door locks itself. If the buzzer goes and you don’t know the voice, don’t answer. If you do know the voice, also don’t answer, because it’s Signora Bassi and she wants you to carry something.”

“She already got me.”

“Then you’re family now. Lucky you.” The front door banged and locked itself behind him, and the apartment got quiet enough that I could hear a radio across the courtyard. I sat on the bed. It creaked like a porch swing.

✦

Khalil had made me promise in his kitchen in New York, with my bags by his door. “When you land. Not when you’re settled. When you land, Jace.” So the phone went against the suitcase on the bed, since holding it up at arm’s length is one of the things my right shoulder still has an opinion about, and I lay down on my left side and called him.

He answered on the second ring, from the studio. Behind him was the long roll of gray paper he shoots against, a stool, a hook on the wall with nothing on it yet, and that window light he either swears at or brags about. He had on the black shirt. The good one, the one that makes his shoulders look like a decision.

“You’re there,” he breathed.

“I’m here. In a borrowed bed. In a room with a door that closes.”

“Turn the phone. Show me.”

I showed him the window, the courtyard, somebody’s sheets hung across it, the wardrobe with its new and very empty side. He made me go slow, the way he makes clients go slow when they want to rush to the good part.

“Now you.”

I turned it back. He put his thumb up to the gap in his front teeth and held it there, the way he does when he’s trying not to grin before he’s earned it.

“Hi.”

“Hi, baby. You wearing the black one for a woman who throws flour?”

“She doesn’t throw it. She sifts it. She’s a professional.” His client owns bakeries all over Brooklyn and wanted to be photographed in her own apron with her hands in her own dough, and she’d moved the shoot twice, and he’d complained to me about each change like I could fix it from a plane. “She’s not due for a while yet. I’ve got you first.”

“You’ve got me how?”

He leaned in. The gap showed. “Show me the arm first.”

“Khalil.”

“Show me, and then I’ll stop asking.” His voice didn’t change much. It didn’t have to. “A man held you under in his pool two months ago. I get to look at your shoulder before I look at the rest of you.”

So I sat up on my left elbow and lifted my right arm for him, slow, out to the side and up, past where it used to stop on his sofa, up past my ear, until it hit the place that says no and I said ah under my breath and put it down.

“That’s higher than my sofa,” he said quietly.

“That’s higher than your sofa.”

“And overhead?”

“Overhead’s still rude. Carrying on the right is rude. Sleeping on it is rude.” I lay back down. “The physio cleared me to walk up and down a room and let people dress me. She didn’t clear me to reach for the top shelf. So you know. If you were planning to make me reach for a shelf.”

“I wasn’t planning on a shelf.” He got up, and I heard a lock turn on his end, the studio door, and he came back and sat on the posing stool in front of the gray paper like he was the client now. “Can I see you?”

I felt that one land low. “Ask me right.”

“Can I watch you take that shirt off?” His voice dropped into the place it goes. “Left arm first. Slow. I want to see where it catches so I know where not to put my mouth when you’re home.”

“Lord.”

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a yes.”

I took the T-shirt off the way the physio taught me, left arm out, head through, the right sleeve sliding down off that arm without lifting it, and he didn’t say a word the whole way. On a shoot, that quiet is when the light finally does what he wants. I lay back on the borrowed pillow with my chest bare and watched him look.

“There he is,” he murmured.

“You’ve seen it.”

“Not on an Italian pillow.” He undid the top two buttons of the black shirt, then the rest, and pulled it open without taking it off, and the window light went across his stomach. “Your turn. Jeans.”

“Ask me right.”

“Jace.” He laughed, low. “Can I see you hard for me in that little room?”

“You can see me working on it.”

I got the jeans open and pushed them down with my left hand, and the bed creaked like it had something to report, and Khalil’s whole face changed.

“Do that again.”

“I’m not doing that again. It’s a rental. It’ll tell on me.”

“Who’s it gonna tell?”

“The lady across the hall. She already patted my face. I’m not trying to get a reputation in my first hour.” But I shifted my hips on purpose and the bed went off like a porch swing in a storm and he made the sound he makes, the low one, like he’s the one being touched.

“Touch yourself,” he told me. “Slow. You’ve been in a hurry since the airport, I can hear it on you.”

I took my dick in my hand and the first stroke went right up my spine. I’d been thinking about this exact thing across a whole ocean, with a stranger in the next seat I was scared could read it off my face. Now there was nobody but a radio across the courtyard, and my head went back against the pillow.

“Look at me,” Khalil ordered, softer than the words. “Not the ceiling. The ceiling didn’t fly you here.”

“You didn’t fly me here either.”

“No.” His hand had gone down out of the frame, and I could see his shoulder start to move under the open black shirt. “I put you in the taxi, though. I put my hand on the back of your neck when I put you in it.”

My hand stopped.

It just did, the way a foot finds a stair that isn’t there. My other hand had come up off the sheet toward my own collarbone, toward my throat, and something in me flinched away from it before I even knew it was mine.

Khalil saw. He sees everything on a screen; that’s his whole job. His shoulder went still, and he brought his hand back into the frame. His voice came down soft.

“Hey. That’s you. That’s your hand. Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

“Put it on your chest instead. Flat. Right in the middle, where I put mine when you can’t sleep.” He waited till I did it. My heart was going under my palm like it had someplace to be. “There. That’s mine. You’re just holding it for me.”

“That’s corny,” I told him, and my voice wobbled on it.

“It’s working, though.”

It was working. He talked me back up into it the way he talks a nervous client into their own face, telling me what he could see, the light on my stomach, my thighs, my mouth.

“When you get home I’m not touching that arm,” he promised, husky. “I’m putting you on my counter and I’m using my mouth, and you’re gonna keep both hands flat on the counter where I can see them.”

“The counter? Baby, the counter’s got your mail on it.”

“Then you’re gonna be lying on my mail.”

I laughed, and the laugh went straight down into my hips.

“Talk to me,” he breathed. “Tell me something about Milan.”

“The water lies. The ironing board lives in my closet. My roommate’s pretty and rude.”

“How pretty?”

“Not as pretty as you.” I was close, and from his face he could see it. “Not as rude, either.”

“Say my name like you’re in my bed and not some Italian lady’s.”

“It’s an agency’s bed.”

“Jace.”

“Khalil,” I gave him, and I gave it to him the way he’d asked for it, the way I only say it in his bed with the radiator knocking, and I watched him hear it. His eyes stayed open on the screen the whole way. He came first, with his teeth showing and his head tipped back against the gray paper and his free hand fisted in the open edge of his shirt, and seeing that took me right over behind him. I came hard into my own hand on a creaking bed in a city where I didn’t know which way was north, with my left palm flat on my chest where he’d told me to keep it.

For a while we just breathed at each other across all that water.

“There,” he decided, very pleased with himself. “Now the room knows who you belong to.”

“The room knew. The room’s a snitch.”

His buzzer went off behind him, loud and rude. He jerked like somebody had walked in on us, then grabbed his shirt closed and looked over his shoulder at the studio door.

“That’s her.”

“You said you had time.”

“She’s early. Bakers are always early, they get up in the dark.” He was buttoning wrong and saw it and started over. “How did you get in? Anything happen?”

I looked at the window. Across the courtyard the radio had changed to a man talking fast about football.

“A lady made me carry her oranges up the stairs.”

“That’s it?”

“She patted my face. I’ve been claimed.”

“Course you have.” The buzzer went again, longer. “Call me when you know what tomorrow is. Love you.”

“Love you.”

Then the screen was just my own face, flushed and tired and a little stupid with it.

✦

I cleaned up at a hot tap that ran cold, put on a fresh T-shirt, left arm first, and hung the green shirt where the ironing board had been. It looked like somebody who’d been picked.

Then I sat on the end of the bed and typed.

“Something happened downstairs when I got here. A man wanted Tommaso to give him his phone. He read my name off my garment bag and took a picture of the building and the buzzers. Ada came and he left. I’m okay.”

I read it twice. He’d step out of the bakery lady’s light to read it, and he’d ask if I was safe, then whether the man knew the apartment, then whether the police knew, then why he was hearing it now and not while my hand was on my chest. Fair questions, every one. None of them what I wanted him walking into his shoot with.

I deleted it word by word. Then I took a picture of myself by the window with the courtyard and somebody’s sheets behind me and sent him that instead.

He sent back a heart, and then: “Stop being fine looking at me, I’m working.”

I went back to the window. The sheets hanging opposite lifted in the breeze. From here I couldn’t see the street door at all.

My phone buzzed in my hand. Ada.

“Tomorrow is a paid fitting at Casa Bellori. Not a casting. They’ve already booked you for it. Arrive fed, arrive on time, and don’t apologize for the shoulder. Tell them what it does.”

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