Charlotte sat at a table in a front window of the Polish bakery polishing spoons. It was 9:30 and the doors had been locked by Mr. Symanski on his way out, but his wife, Alina, could still be heard straightening the kitchen. It's true that it would not have been considered customary for a man to leave his wife to walk home alone, let alone in the dark, but as the Symanskis lived in the building next door to the shop, they seemed both to have decided at some point that it would be acceptable to make an exception. Charlotte had a rag balled tightly in her hand and rubbed at a smudge impatiently. She'd been over the spoons two or three times already but didn't feel comfortable leaving before Alina did. From where she was sitting, glowing in the window, she could see a thin line of smoke curling up from under the awning of the shop across the street. In the shadows, he'd be leaning against the storefront—the same faded checkered shirt, the red suspenders hanging down at his sides, a gold-tipped can slung through one belt loop. He would appear calm—leisurely, even—but his eyes would be too tight and he'd flick the embers away with too much force.

Alina stuck her head out of the kitchen door and wished Charlotte a good night with the typical amount of steel in her voice.

"Don't forget to lock the back door behind you," she warned as she did every night.

"I won't, Mrs. Symanski. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a nice night," Charlotte answered, keeping her voice intentionally light as one thumb ground more vigorously into the innocent spoon in her hand. Alina's boots clipped across the warn wooden floor of the kitchen, the Charlotte heard her pause to straighten something in the pantry as she passed through and stepped out the back door.

As soon as she heard the rear door close, Charlotte stood—toppling her chair backwards—and scooped all the spoons into their velvet-lined case. Stringing the cleaning rag hastily through the waistband of her apron, she righted the tipped chair and made her way to the kitchen, turning down lamps as she went. She pushed the box of spoons onto the top shelf of the pantry, that nearest the door, and walked out into the dark alleyway behind the shop with the cleaning rag still tucked in her waistband and her apron still tied behind her. Charlotte paused and bent to lock the door with the key tied around her neck, then her boots were loud on the cobblestone as she made her way out of the alley and into the road, the still road, past him leaning against the storefront, passed him without looking his way, and kept on down the sidewalk toward her tenement.

She crossed the doorway of an open bar, light and music spilling out under her feet, and ignored the voices and the clink of glasses. She turned into a more inhabited part of town and passed the vaudeville theater where men would be crowded into their seats to see the Swedish Meadowlark. She crossed to her building and opened the door, walking through a lobby strung with laundry lines heavy with hanging clothes and cluttered with stray newspaper pages crumpled underfoot. She mounted the creaky wooden stairs, avoiding the worst boards, and climbed to the sixth floor where she let herself into her apartment and lit the lamp before pulling the curtains closed.

Charlotte seated herself at the table in the middle of what was a very small room and waited with her back to the door. If she held her breath and sat very still, she could hear the stairs groan and a pair of boots scuff across the landing to stop at her door. It was quiet, then the door brushed open and closed again and she felt him and smelled him in the room with her—stale tobacco, sweat, but at least not booze. On days he'd been at the docks, he'd smell so strongly of fish and saltwater that Charlotte would hang his clothes out the window to keep the entire room from smelling like a fish market. In the old days, there was the coppery scent of newsprint mixed in, too, and his hands—black with ink—would stain her white shirt so that she'd be up late scrubbing it before work the next morning. But he didn't sell papers anymore.

He leaned down and reached around her to set a pint of whiskey on the table in front of her, a brown paper bag clinging to the sides and mouth of the bottle.

"I thought you weren't going to drink so much anymore," she breathed.

He kissed her cheek and inhaled deeply.

"Didn' take," he said lowly in her ear. "Fact, I'm still blind drunk from last night."

Charlotte knew he was just teasing her. She could always tell from the way his footsteps fell whether he was drunk or not and tonight he was not drunk. The night before, though, he had been. He stepped around the table and began to empty his pockets onto its surface—first the cane came unslung from his belt loop, then his slingshot and brass knuckles clattered to the table, along with all the change in his pocket. He lifted the cabbie hat from his head and ran a hand through his hair, which was dirty and getting longer, hanging to his chin. His suspenders already slung down from his shoulders, he tugged his shirt up from his pants and began to unbutton it from the top, stepping out of his boots and kicking them against the leg of the table.

"Did anyone follow you?" Charlotte asked, unmoving from her chair.

"Nobody ever does, Doll," he answered, turning to face her while he undressed, his eyes light. His shirt was too big on him, bigger even than it had been the month before, and Charlotte worried.

"We can't keep going like this. It's getting to you. I can see it."

"Nothin gets ta me. Don worry bout me," he answered, now bare from the waist up and unbuttoning his pants.

"You've lost more weight," she argued.

"You sayin I don look good?" he teased.

"I don't see how you can be like this about it." Her voice was tight and she'd crossed her arms on the tabletop. He was down to his long johns now, tight from navel to knees, and he stood loosely with his arms away from his sides.

"Why we gotta do dis right now, uh? C'mon, Char."

She looked at him hard and didn't answer. He crossed back over to her and pulled her to her feet. Then he took her face in his hands—not so much tender as intentional—and stooped down so that his eyes were level with her—not some great distance as he was not a tall man, but a couple of good inches. The pads of his fingers were rough and calloused on her cheeks and he held her head uncomfortably still between them.

"I can do whadevah I want, Sweet'eart," he said firmly. "I'm Spot Conlon. I own this fucking city. If I wanna see ya, I'll see ya. Nothin nobody can do to stop it happenin."

He reached one hand up into her hair, the other keeping her chin in place, and tugged a few hairpins out, letting them fall to the floor where they clicked lightly as her hair tumbled down around her face.

"Better," he said.

He pulled the forgotten rag from her waistband and let it fall to the floor with the hairpins, then reached his arms around her waist and untied her apron, letting it crumple at her feet as well.

"Relax," he insisted. "Just be 'ere wid me and don' worry 'bout dat udder stuff."

Charlotte felt the crease in her forehead loosen and closed her eyes as Spot leaned in and kissed her neck, unhooking her shirt collar where it clasped at her hair line. He lifted one hand, then the other, and undid the two covered buttons at her wrists. She stood still while he lifted the shirt off over her head. No matter how many times they'd done this, she never got used to standing in front of him in anything less than her chin-high blouse and floor-length skirt. He was not the first man she'd slept with, but the other times had been in the dark with no traipsing around in their underwear like Spot did. He had been with a lot of women. Charlotte tried not to think about how many, but she thought that must have been why he was so comfortable with nudity. It made her feel sort of lackluster thinking that it didn't make him nervous to see her down to her corset and slip, like she was just the same as the hundreds of other women he'd seen that way.

She sat down on the bed—the thin white sheets—and let him unlace her boots then tugged her feet out of them. He followed the seam of her stockings up the back of her leg until he found the top tight around her thigh, then rolled them down over her calves and left them balled up near her shoes. Still kneeling in front of her, he tugged at the laces of her corset, her whole body lunging with the force of it, until it was loose enough to fit over her head. Charlotte took a deep breath—her favorite breath of the day was the first one without her corset on—and smiled a little in spite of herself. She watched Spot walk over to the kerosene lamp on the table and bring it to the little stool by her bed where he set it before walking around to the other side of the mattress and checking out the window before he climbed into bed next to her.

"Why did you do that?" Charlotte asked, swinging her legs up into bed. "Do you think someone followed you?"

"You tink I'd be 'ere like dis if I did?" he retorted, gesturing to his bare chest. "I wouldn't let dat 'appen, Doll. Relax."

He pulled her down next to him, facing him, and slid the straps of her slip over her shoulders and down her sides.

"Just be 'ere wid me," he said again in a low voice.

He pulled her into his chest, his hands splayed against the bare skin of her back, and breathed against her hair.