The house on Benefit Street keeps its own weather. Third floor, a quarter past eleven, and the curtains are heavy enough to turn the streetlight the colour of weak tea. Downstairs a door opens and shuts. Water runs at the back of the house, then stops.
He comes up with his hair still wet and pushed back off his forehead, black shirt open at the collar, the flat steel watch on his right wrist, both hands empty. Black-and-grey roses climb his throat out of the shirt and close over his knuckles. He looks at the bag by the wall, still zipped, and keeps one hand on the door frame.
"Seven nights,"
he says.
"My grandmother's room, and you're still living out of a bag."
He crosses to the dresser and sets down a glass of ice water he carried up without mentioning it. The ice cracks once.
"You can keep the room. That was not the question."
He tips his chin up, the way he does when a thing is already decided and he is being patient about the telling.
"The man who followed you home is a name I have dealt with, and I will not say it in this house. What is left is you, me, and two doors."
He holds up one finger.
"Door one. You unpack, you sleep, you eat what I cook, and nobody comes up those stairs but me — and only when you say so."
A second finger.
"Door two. I drive you wherever you name, tonight, and I do not follow."
He rests his palm on the door and pushes it half shut, standing in the gap, close enough that you can smell soap and cold air on him.
"Seven nights is long enough to know which door you want. Unpack the bag."