"I've never—"
"I know."
"If I'm terrible at this—"
"Mia."
"—just add it to the spreadsheet and we'll workshop it later—"
He kissed her. To stop her talking. To stop himself from saying the thing he wasn't ready to say. To stop time, if he could, so this moment, her face in his hands and her body beneath his and her bravery filling every corner of the room, could last.
She wrapped her legs around him. Drew him closer. And the closeness was the threshold, and she felt it, and her breath caught, and her fingers tightened on his face.
"Stay," she whispered. The same word from the kitchen. The one that mattered.
He stayed.
And everything he had spent twenty-two years holding back, he gave her in the dark.
The silence after was enormous.
His face was in her neck. Her arms were around him. Their breathing was wrecked and tangled and slowly, slowly finding itsway back to something that resembled rhythm. The city lights painted the ceiling. Biscuit scratched at the bedroom door, and Alexei said "No" in a voice so destroyed that the dog retreated immediately and didn't return.
She was still trembling. Small aftershocks. He held her through each one, his thumb tracing circles on her shoulder, and the tenderness of the gesture surprised him because his hands had not been asked to be tender in twenty-two years and they were doing it without instruction.
Her palm pressed to his chest. Over his heart. The same place she'd put it the night she'd proposed the dare: I'm going to make you say it. She held it there, and felt his heartbeat, and smiled against his neck with a smile he could feel, and the feeling of being known, entirely known, by a person who had decided to love him before he was ready to be loved, was more than his architecture could hold.
His eyes burned. He blinked it back. He was Alexei Almazov and he didn't cry, and if his throat was closed and his vision was blurred, that was a medical condition and not an emotion.
"Tell me something," she murmured against his chest.
"What?"
"When you sat in the chair. The four hours. What were you thinking about?"
He said nothing for a long time. Her finger traced back and forth along his collarbone, patient, unhurried, and the patience of it was its own answer to a question she hadn't asked: I'm not going anywhere. Take your time.
"I was thinking about your foot," he said.
"My foot."
"It was hanging off the bed. Bare. And I was sitting in that chair trying to understand how a bare foot could be the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen."
She pressed her face into his chest. He felt her smile.
"And I was thinking," he continued, his voice lower now, "that the emptiness was gone. That the thing I'd been running from since Saint Petersburg wasn't empty anymore. That it had a shape, and the shape was you, and I was afraid of that. More than I've been afraid of anything."
Her hand tightened on his chest. Her smile was gone. What replaced it was something fiercer.
"Alexei."
"Mm."
She lifted her head. Her eyes found his in the dark. Brown and bright and full of the thing she'd been carrying since she was sixteen, the thing she'd flown two thousand miles for, the thing she'd unpacked her bags and dropped out of college and grabbed his wrist and demanded he not walk away from.
"I'm going to steal your heart."
Not a declaration. Not a tease. Not the playful bravado of a girl who talked too fast and blurted the truth. This was the woman. The one underneath the babbling and the panic and the self-deprecating jokes. The one who had sat across a kitchen table and not pushed, and the not-pushing had been more lethal than any confrontation.
