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I woke once, near dawn, and found him lying awake beside me, propped on one arm, watching me sleep with a face I’d never seen. Naked, unguarded, wide open. The face of a man who had been given something and could not believe it.

“Go to sleep,” I mumbled.

“In a moment.”

“You don’t sleep.”

“I am practicing.”

“Liar.”

“Yes,” he said, with great tenderness, and lay down.

I fell back into the dark. And my last thought, the last one before the water closed over my head, was very simple and very clear.

I’m not going to be able to leave.

Chapter 17

MAKSIM

Never Been With Anyone

Idid not sleep. I told him I was practicing, and I was, in the sense that a man practices a language he will never speak. I lay on my back on the big carved bed with his head on my shoulder and his breath warm against my collarbone, and I listened to him dream.

He dreams loudly, which I had not expected. He mutters, and he argues with someone named Duke about a penalty. At one point around four he said, clearly, “ Ice prince, “ and smiled, and turned his face into my arm, and I stopped breathing altogether for some minutes.

I have been asked, over the centuries, by the few who have known me, what I did with the nights. I said I read. I said I walked. I said I sat by the window and watched the city. All of these were true. None of them was the answer.

The answer was: I waited. For dawn, for the end of the night, for the door to close and the next person to walk out of it. It was all I had ever known how to do. I had made a virtue of it. I had called it patience.

Lying there in the gray before morning, with the whole heavy warm weight of him on my chest, I understood for the first time that patience is what you call it when you are afraid to ask.

He woke at a quarter past eight.

I felt the exact moment. His breathing changed. His heart, which had been slow, kicked up. His body went stiff along the length of mine, and I heard him take a long, careful, silent breath, and hold it.

I kept my eyes closed. I let him believe I slept.

He lay very still for perhaps a minute. Then, with the deliberate slowness of a burglar, he began to slide out from under my arm an inch at a time. He put one foot on the floor and then the other, and he reached for his jeans, which lay in a heap beside the bed. I heard him find one leg and then the other, and hop, once, on one foot, in a perfectly silent and perfectly ridiculous attempt to dress without a sound.

I opened my eyes.

“Where are you going?”

He froze. One leg in, one leg out, shirt half over his head. In the gray light from the window he looked like a stag surprised by a car.

“Nowhere.”

“That is a very specific nowhere.”

“I’m, uh.” He dragged the shirt down. His hair stood on end. There was a mark on his neck, a small purple flower just below the ear, and I felt a wholly undignified pang of pride. “I need to change. My stuff’s at Jason’s. I’ve got practice.”

“Practice is at eleven.”

“I have things.”

“What things?”