I should argue with that. There is a version of me that argues with that, that has an extensive and well-reasoned case against being anyone's anything, that has spent thirty-seven months building a life specifically organized around belonging to no one and nothing except Evie and the promise I made her. That version of me is somewhere in this apartment, and I will find her later. Right now I am here, and he is here, and his mouth is doing something to my collarbone that makes the argument impossible to locate.
He walks me backward until the backs of my knees find the couch and then I am sitting and he is in front of me and he looks down at me with those pale eyes and the controlled want in them that is not quite controlled anymore, and I look back, and for a moment we just do that — look at each other, in the way that people look at each other when they are deciding something that cannot be undecided.
"You can still say no," he says.
"I know," I say.
"I want to hear you say it isn't that."
I look at him. "It isn't that," I say.
Something moves in his expression — not relief, Victor does not do relief, but something that functions like it, a small release of something held. He reaches down and takes my face in his hands and looks at me for a moment with an attention so complete it feels like being read, like being understood at a cellular level, and then he says, very quietly, "Moya," and kisses me again.
What happens next is the thing that has been happening since the storage room, since the alley, since the hallway and the candlelight and the note outside my door — all of it arriving at once, the accumulated weeks of wanting and resisting and managing and failing to manage, and I stop managing it entirely, which turns out to feel like breathing after holding it for a very long time.
He kisses me again, his hands move to my waist, and he lifts me effortlessly, wrapping my legs around him. He walks me back into the wall of his apartment, pinning me between the mass of his body, and looks at me.
“Ruki,” he instructs.Hands. His voice is low, the one he used the night of the blackout. “Za golovu.”Above your head.
Obediently, I put my hands above my head against the wall. He looks at them, then at my face with a crooked smile. Reaching up, he closes both wrists in one hand, holding them there against the wall with a that is non-negotiable.
“Ne opuskay,” he says.Don’t lower them.Then, against my mouth, “Khoroshaya.”Good
His free hand moves to my jaw first, tilting my chin up, his mouth at my throat. Then lower. His hand finds the hem of my shirt and slides beneath it. The warmth of his palm against my skin makes me pull in a harsh breath.
“Tikho,” he says against my collarbone.Quiet.
He sets me down long enough to pull my shirt over my head, and before pulling off his own. Then his hands are on my back, at the clasp there, and then his mouth is on my skin. I try to grip the wall above me, it’s the only thing I have to hold onto, and I’m determined not to let go of it.
“Victor–”
He keeps both my wrists pinned above my head in one hand, as he looks at me for a moment with those dark eyes, before his free hand moves to the waist of my jeans. He holds my gaze the entire time, keeping me right where I am between him and the wall as he works to unbutton my jeans and the zipper with one hand. He pushes at the edges of my pants, I feel the cool air against my skin as the fabric shifts, and then his hand and I pull in a breath.
“You are so beautiful,” he says as he slips his hand between the fabric and my center. That first touch caused a shiver to run through the entirety of my body. As he stroked his fingers against me softly at first, he whispered in my ear, “I have wanted you for so long.”
“Victor—” I beg.
He works his fingers into me, one, and then two. Kissing me as he does so to keep me quiet.
“Eshchyo,” he says.More.Not a question
“Yes,” I say. Then he adds a third, and I instantly come undone with his name on my lips once more.
"Zdes'. Ya zdes'."Here. I'm here.Said the way he says everything really — simply, without decoration, like the truth doesn't need help.
I am not going to think about what this means. I am going to be here, in this, for exactly as long as it lasts, and I am going to not think about thirty-seven months of running or the man in the blue coat three blocks behind me or the note in my jacket pocket or the promise I made to a twelve-year-old, and I am going to?—
The sound comes from across the hall.
A crash. Loud, sudden, the specific sound of something falling or being knocked over, the kind of sound that in any other momentI might categorize and file and deal with in a moment. In this moment, it goes through me like a current, like something electrical, because across the hall is my apartment and Evie should be at school for another forty minutes, but?—
I am off the couch before I have finished the thought.
"Alex—"
"Evie," I say, and I am already across the room, already at the door, already in the hallway with my jacket half on and my heart doing the thing it does when the fear is real and immediate and not the ambient kind I've been managing for years. The door to 4C is closed and locked, both locks, the way I left it, and I get my key in the first lock on the second try, which is worse than I'd like, and the second lock, and I push through, and I say her name before the door is fully open.
The living room is empty. The kitchen is empty. Evie's bedroom door is open and there is a lamp on the floor beside her bed, cord pulled from the wall, shade askew, and beside it — curled in the corner of her bed with her knees pulled up and her dark eyes very wide — is Evie, who is home three hours early, who is looking at me with the expression of someone who has just been very frightened and is deciding how much to show.
