New York

“Ask me,” he breathed against my throat, and I had my hand down the front of his jeans before he finished the sentence, so the asking was mostly for show.

“You’re supposed to ask me.” My back was against the wall of a little dark alcove at the top of the stairs, bass coming through the plaster like somebody moving furniture, his green shirt open to the belt because I’d opened it. “That’s the arrangement. You ask, I say yes, everybody feels like a gentleman.”

“Can I?”

“Can you what, Khalil? Use your words.”

He laughed into my neck, and that gap between his front teeth was the first thing I’d liked about him and the thing I was still liking about an hour later, give or take a drink and a dance. “Can I put my mouth on you, Jace.”

“Now that’s a question.”

Nobody had told me New York worked this fast. The city had had me since the afternoon, off a one-way ticket from Durham with two suitcases Ellis swore weighed more than he did. Ellis, my roommate as of about four hours ago, was somewhere down those stairs with Keon, both of them under the impression the water was taking a while. I had a lighting call next week, and a page under the name WHIT with a silver jacket on it that had gotten more messages than any face of mine ever had. And now here was a man I’d known for one drink, his hand flat on my stomach and his dick hard against my palm. The other one, the part of me that isn’t sensible, the part my mama prays about, had already taken the wheel.

“You sure about the wall?” he murmured.

“I’m not doing it in a bathroom. I have standards. I have a whole wall here.”

“It’s a good wall.”

“It’s a terrible wall. Somebody’s been crying on it.”

“Probably over a man.”

“Probably over a photographer.”

“We’re not all bad.” His thumb went under the hem of my shirt. “Some of us are worse.”

I got his belt the rest of the way open without looking, and found out I’d already done the buckle without remembering doing it. That was the kind of night it was. “Slow down. I want to see you do it.”

He went down on one knee the way a man does when he means to stay there, took me out of my trousers with the patience of somebody who photographs things for a living, and looked. Just looked, for a second, with the violet light from the floor below coming up the stairs and laying itself across his cheek, and I felt that look lower than any hand.

“Say something,” I told him, “before I get self-conscious.”

“You don’t get self-conscious.”

“Baby, you met me an hour ago.”

“An hour’s enough.” He ran his thumb up the underside of me and watched what it did to my face. “You walked in like the room owed you money.”

“The room does owe me money. I paid twenty-two dollars for a drink the size of a candle.”

“Then let me give you something for it,” he murmured, and he put his mouth on me, and I stopped having opinions about the wall.

He was slow about it, which I hadn’t expected from a man who’d asked to kiss me after one dance. He used his hand and his tongue together and kept checking my face, and every time I made a sound he did the thing again that made it. I had my fingers in his hair and the back of my head against somebody’s old tears, and I was thinking, as much as I was thinking anything, that I had come to this city to be looked at and here was the first man in it who looked like he could actually see.

“Wait. Wait, come up here.” It had got to where I was going to finish in his mouth with my roommate right below me, and that wasn’t how I wanted to meet somebody.

“You don’t want me to?” he asked, not moving far.

“I want to see your face when I do. Different thing.”

“That’s a lot of face.”

“Then you better get up here and bring all of it.”

He stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and I got my hand around him again and him around me, our foreheads together, breathing each other’s breath, and I asked him what he wanted, because fair is fair.

“Tell me what you like,” he said instead.

“I like being asked.”

“I noticed.”

“Then ask me again.”

“Can I,” he started, and a man’s voice came up the stairs behind him, not loud, not even unfriendly, the way somebody says a name they’ve read off a screen.

“WHIT?”

Khalil went still against me. My trousers were done up before the man reached the top step, which says something about my hands, and Khalil turned and did his belt facing the wall like a man at a urinal.

Charcoal suit. Good shoes. Phone already turned toward me, and on it my silver-jacket picture, the one I’d styled myself in a borrowed jacket in my mama’s living room, looking like a team of six had put me together.

“Vince Harrow,” the man told me, pleasant as a receptionist. “I book for Voss projects. Malachi was showing me your page downstairs.”

Hearing my working name out of a stranger’s mouth, in a city I’d lived in for less than a day, with my dick still half hard in my trousers, did something to my spine. I stood up straighter. Beside me Khalil had gone quiet in a way that had a shape to it, and I noticed the shape and filed it and did not ask, because a man in a suit was saying my name.

“Depends who’s asking.” I gave him the smile from the page, the one that costs nothing.

“Somebody filling a lookbook slot.” He scrolled, and under the picture there was a page of names and measurements that I didn’t remember sending anybody. “Paid fitting tomorrow. Five hundred for the day if you’re selected. International usage negotiated separately.”

Five hundred would replace most of what I’d spent to get here. He showed me a man on a hotel terrace in a coat that fell open like a sail, and I was wearing it before he said the word travel.

“We need to see you walk. There’s a room off the back. Five minutes, then your friends can feed you.”

I looked at Khalil. He was buttoning his shirt with his eyes on Harrow, and his face had done something I didn’t have a word for yet.

“Who is that?” he asked, low.

“Work.”

“Jace.”

“Five minutes,” I told him, and I kissed the corner of his mouth, and I went, because a man had said my name like it already belonged on a list, and being chosen like that felt personal, and the other one was still driving.

* * *

The side room had a garment rack, two folding chairs and a small lamp aimed at a white wall. A woman carrying a makeup case came out as we went in, and a young man in a camel jacket stood by the rack with his phone in his hand and a look on his face like he’d been standing there a while.

“This is Tariq.” Harrow didn’t look at him. “We’re just finishing.”

“No,” Tariq told him, “we’re waiting for you to tell me when I get paid.”

“Not in front of somebody I just invited in.”

“Then you should’ve paid me before you invited somebody in.”

Harrow put two fingers on my elbow and walked me toward the lamp. “Coat off a second?”

I opened the coat. It was Ellis’s, long black fur that wasn’t fur, with a belt, and it had cost him money he refused to discuss. Under it I had on the sheer shirt and the cropped jacket, and under the lamp I looked, in the reflection in the dark window, like somebody who had already been hired. Harrow took a picture on his phone, asked for my name and number, and then, without changing his voice at all, told Tariq to stop recording him.

“It’s a voice note. You told me the date on Friday. Last week you said I’d regret asking the client directly.” Tariq held the phone up by his shoulder like a man showing an ID. “I want the promises and the threats in the same place.”

“You’re making yourself hard to book.”

“You already booked me. That’s how we got here.”

I looked at the strip of bare floor I was supposed to walk. The bass came through the wall. I pictured Khalil down the hall, still buttoning his shirt, and wondered if he was thinking about where I’d gone.

“Can we get through this?” I asked. “We’re all trying to work.”

Tariq turned his head, and his expression went somewhere before he opened his mouth. I had been in New York for half a day and I had already found a way to sound like the man standing between him and his money.

“Exactly.” Tariq’s voice went flat as a receipt. “Some of us already did.”

Harrow held out his hand. “Delete it.”

“No.”

“You’ve got private company material on there.”

“Your voice saying you’d send that thing to my family if I kept asking for my money.” Tariq didn’t raise his own. “That’s what you don’t want them hearing.”

Harrow looked at the door. I saw the change in him before I understood what Tariq meant, the way you see a cue go wrong before the fixture actually moves. This hadn’t started with a payment date. I had walked into the middle of it and asked the wrong man to hurry.

He reached. Tariq pulled back and the rack went into the wall, hangers chattering. I stepped into the doorway without deciding to, and Harrow came at Tariq fast enough that my arm went out on its own.

“Let him leave.” It came out of me level, which surprised us both.

“Move.”

His hand closed on the loose belt of Ellis’s coat as I turned and the pull caught me across the stomach like a seatbelt. I grabbed the frame to stay up and heard a seam go. Tariq got the door open behind me and Harrow put his foot against it.

“Nobody is leaving with a recording of me.”

There was somebody in the corridor. A shoulder, a dark staff shirt. “Help us,” I shouted, and my voice came out of somebody else. “He won’t let us out.”

The man outside hit the door hard enough to give us the space. “Vince. Back up.”

His badge said DARIUS. He was broad across the shoulders and older than any of us, and he said it like he had already told Harrow once tonight to behave. He put himself in the doorway between Harrow and Tariq.

“You’re done in this room. Give me the key.”

For one second I thought that was it. He had the voice. He had the shirt and the radio. This was his building.

Harrow reached inside his jacket. Darius caught his wrist. I saw a short dark shape between them, and then the sound happened, so close I felt it inside my teeth.

Darius went into the frame with his shoulder. Tariq ducked into me. There was blood on the white wall where the little lamp was still shining, bright and stupid and pointed at nothing.

Somebody screamed from the corridor. I couldn’t tell if it was me.

“Go!” Darius shouted, still on his feet, still in the door.

I pulled Tariq through the gap beside him. Harrow was wrestling with another staff shirt now, all motion, and I didn’t see where the gun went. Tariq stumbled into a road case and I got the back of his jacket, because letting go felt like leaving him in that room, and we ran for the green sign while people from the floor came the other way.

“Don’t come back here!” I yelled at them. “Go around!”

The fire door needed a harder push than I had. For one long second it didn’t move, and Harrow was somewhere behind us, and my hands weren’t mine. Tariq hit the bar beside me. The door swung out and the alarm started, and the stairwell was concrete and cold and smelled like cigarettes, and we went down it the way you go down stairs in a dream, too fast and not fast enough.

The alley at the bottom was lit by one bulb in a cage. Cold slapped my wet face. We were a few steps from the street, where there were cabs and people and a takeout window glowing, when a man stepped out of the dark at the alley mouth and into the middle of it.

Thick. Quiet. A black leather flat cap and a work jacket, the kind of man you’d walk past on a loading dock without wondering who he was with. He wasn’t running. He didn’t have to. He held his hand out, palm up, the way Harrow had.

“Phone,” he said, bored, like a man collecting a ticket.

“Don’t,” Tariq breathed behind me.

I put him behind me anyway, because I was taller and the coat was dramatic and because I had just watched a man get shot for standing in a door. The belt of Ellis’s coat was hanging off me by a strip of lining. I tore it the rest of the way off and threw it at the man’s face, which is the kind of thing you do when you’ve been in a city six hours and have no idea what you’re doing.

“Left,” Tariq hissed. “Jace. Left.”

It did what it needed to. He flinched. We went left instead of past him, through a propped door into the back of the takeout place, into steam and a woman shouting in a language I didn’t have.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Sorry, sorry, we’re leaving.”

“Don’t apologize, move,” Tariq said through his teeth, and we went down a line of woks and out through the dining room past a table of people eating noodles who did not look up, because this was New York and somebody was always running through somewhere.

I came out onto the sidewalk and my heel went on the step and I went down on one knee, hard, and put my left hand out and felt the pavement take the skin off my palm. I stayed down. Tariq had stopped, and I couldn’t stand him standing over me in the open.

“Keep going.” My voice was somewhere above me. “Please. Keep going.”

“He’s not there.” Tariq was looking back down the block at the alley mouth. “He’s not there, Jace. He’s gone.”

“He knows my name?”

“I said it. Just now. Get up.”

He helped me up. We got as far as the lit window of a pharmacy before I could turn around and look. People were pouring out of the club. A woman with no coat. A man shouting a name into his phone. I tried to call Ellis and kept pressing the wrong thing with the hand that wasn’t bleeding.

Then he was there, shoving through the crowd with Keon behind him, and he caught my face in both his hands and looked at my palm and made a sound I had never heard him make in all those months of talking to him through a phone.

“It’s my hand.” I held it up between us like evidence. “Ellis. It’s my hand. I’m not…”

He pulled me in before I could finish. I wanted to tell him about his coat. I kept looking over his shoulder for Darius.

* * *

Khalil came out with a staff member, his camera in his bag now, and when somebody near us said Harrow’s name he stopped walking.

“Vince did this?”

I looked at him. “You know him?”

“I’ve worked around him.” He was looking at my hand. “Where were you when it happened?”

“In the room.”

“Can I see?”

I gave him the hand. His fingers were careful around the torn skin and his thumb stayed on my wrist like he was counting. I wanted his hands on me and I wanted him to explain the way he’d said Vince, and both of those were true while the first siren came around the corner, and I didn’t say either one.

They brought Darius out on a stretcher, awake, furious with somebody trying to cut his shirt, and I started crying at the sound of him arguing, which I would have liked to do somewhere that wasn’t a sidewalk. A paramedic sat me on the low wall and cleaned the palm and the knee, which had gone through the lining of my trousers, and an officer waited with a pen.

I told him I’d gone down the corridor looking for a friend.

Tariq, beside me with a paper cup of water he hadn’t drunk, turned his head away.

“Which friend?” the officer asked.

I looked at Khalil. My working name was on Harrow’s phone. Malachi downstairs had looked at my page an hour ago and told me not to rearrange my life over a conversation at a party, and here was what it was going to sound like when it got around: the new boy from Carolina followed a stranger into a back room on his first night because the stranger said his name right. Being the person something happened to while he was having a good time sounded less stupid. It also left out how I’d got between Tariq and the door.

“No.” I made myself look at the pen. “I’m sorry. That’s not right. He offered me a fitting. I went because I wanted it.”

The officer put his pen down and waited. He got my name, the name I work under, everything Harrow had said, and the man in the cap at the alley mouth with his hand out. When he asked about the gun he got what I’d seen and where I’d looked away. Which hand had held it, I couldn’t tell him, and making that up because the first answer shamed me wasn’t going to happen.

“The man in the alley,” the officer asked. “He asked for your phone. Not your wallet.”

“Phone.”

“You have something on it?”

“He took a picture of me. On his phone.” It came out shakier than I meant it to. “I’ve got nothing. I’ve been here since lunch.”

“Since lunch.”

“I moved here today. Those are my suitcases in that building over there, still packed.”

He wrote that down slower than the rest. “And the man in the cap. You’d know him again?”

“I’d know the cap. I’d know his hand.” I looked at my own. “He wasn’t in a hurry. Everybody else was in a hurry.”

Across the street two officers brought Harrow to a car with his jacket open and his mouth moving. He saw me and tried to turn, and one of them stepped between us, and I stood up so fast the paramedic told me to sit back down.

“He’s going with them,” Ellis said. He took my good hand and kept it. “Look at me. He’s going with them.”

* * *

It was after three when we finally got a car. Keon went with Tariq, who didn’t want the train alone, and before they left I apologized for what I’d said in the room.

“You wanted your turn,” Tariq told me, not unkindly.

I couldn’t argue with that.

“So did I.” He looked at the dressing on my palm. “Send me your number. We should find out about Darius.”

“Is he going to…”

“He was cussing the paramedic. Men who are dying don’t cuss the paramedic.” Keon had Tariq’s elbow and was steering him toward the curb like a parent. “Go home, Carolina. Sleep in your clothes. We’ll fix the coat.”

“Ellis is going to kill me about the coat.”

“Ellis is going to cry about the coat and then cry about you and then kill you. There’s an order.”

Khalil stood by the car door. I asked him again how he knew Harrow.

“A client used him on a shoot.” He said it to the roof of the car. “Not somebody I hired.”

“What client?”

He looked at Ellis holding the door, then at me. “Can we talk when you’re warm?”

I let him kiss my forehead. I wanted one piece of that night to survive, and I could feel exactly how easily wanting that was helping him change the subject.

* * *

In the car Ellis kept my good hand on his knee and looked out his own window for a while, and then he said, without turning around, “Tell me the day.”

“Which part?”

“From the top. Before the part I know. I want to hear you say it was a good day before it wasn’t.”

“It started with me on a sidewalk freezing my ass off while you were upstairs doing whatever the fuck you were doing.”

“I was putting on shoes.”

“You were putting on lip gloss. I could hear it.” The driver’s eyes came up in the mirror and went back down. “I sent you the building, the front door and a picture of my face in case you forgot who you invited to live with you, and you said the picture was blurry.”

“It was blurry.”

“I was shivering, Ellis. And then you tell me it’s a walk-up. You said fourth-floor apartment. You did not say I needed to train for it.”

“You made it.”

“I made it because you carried the one with the shoes.”

“Fourteen pairs.”

“I never said fourteen. Why are you putting numbers on my business?”

“Because I helped you pack on FaceTime, fool.” His thumb moved on my knuckles. “Keep going.”

So I kept going. The scarf he brought down that was the ugliest scarf in the five boroughs, and the way he’d screamed “Biiiiitch!” loud enough to turn a woman’s head across the street. The closet he called generous because the door opened as far as the handle. The coat, in the mirror, and me saying it was giving rich auntie who owns three properties and doesn’t speak to her sister, and him saying that was exactly why he bought it, and don’t lose the belt.

“You lost the belt,” he murmured.

“I threw it at a man.”

“Keep going.”

Keon under the light with his collar crystals thrown across my borrowed fur: “Oh, you arrived ready.” The drink the size of a candle. Malachi by the service door with his silver rings and that one raised finger that shut Keon up mid-sentence, scrolling my page and stopping on the silver jacket.

“He asked for digitals,” I told the window. “Front, side, full length. He said a designer’s casting a presentation later in the month and he’d ask about my size and couldn’t promise a thing. He said don’t rearrange work over a conversation at a party.”

“And you said?”

“I said that was what I was supposed to ask. And he said that was right.” I laughed, and it hurt somewhere under my ribs. “I liked him, Ellis. I had a good day. Then I went upstairs for water and a man in a green shirt remembered my boots.”

“And then a man in a suit said your name.”

“And then a man in a suit said my name.”

He didn’t say anything else until we were on our block. He didn’t have to. I’d wanted a second to enjoy being here, and I got about four hours.

* * *

At the apartment Ellis took the coat off me like he was undressing somebody in a hospital. The belt was gone, somewhere in an alley in a stranger’s face. There was blood on the cuff, Darius’s, and Ellis folded that part inward without saying anything and laid the coat on a chair while I stood in the middle of the kitchen trying to remember what I had come in for.

“I can get it fixed,” I told the coat, not him.

“Sit down.”

“I know a girl in Durham who does…”

“Jace.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never has to. “Sit. Down.”

I sat. He put a glass of water in front of me and went into the bathroom, and I heard the tap start and stop and start again, and when he came back out his eyes were red and his face was ordinary.

My phone lit up on the table. A picture of me in the little room, coat open, chin up, waiting to be chosen. Under it a message from a number I didn’t know.

You can tell a story that gets you work or one that follows you everywhere. Think before you post.

I had watched the police put Harrow in a car before we left that block. Whoever sent this had my number and the picture he’d taken minutes before the shot. And somebody had been waiting at the bottom of the fire stairs for a phone.

“Ellis.” I turned the screen so he could see it. “The man in the alley. He wanted my phone. Not my wallet, not the coat. My phone. And I don’t have anything on it.”

He read it twice. “Who has your number?”

“Harrow. I gave it to him in the room.”

“Harrow is in a car with his hands behind him.”

“Then somebody Harrow gave it to.” I put the phone face down and picked it back up. “The man in the alley didn’t have a phone out. He had his hand out.”

“Don’t post anything.”

“I wasn’t going to post the shooting, Ellis.”

“Don’t post the pretty one either. Not tonight.” He reached across me for the officer’s card, and his hand was steady, and mine wasn’t. “We call this man. Then you eat something. Then I decide whether I’m speaking to you.”

“You’re speaking to me now.”

“This is triage.”

Behind the message, when I closed it, was the picture meant for posting before any of this: my head tipped back laughing, Khalil’s hand at my waist, the whole city lit up purple behind us like it was glad I’d come. Deleting it wasn’t happening. Posting it wasn’t either. My thumb stayed over it while Ellis dialed, and the other one, for once, didn’t have a thing to say.