33. Luna
LUNA
It’s dark and it’s cold and I’m on a concrete floor and the bulb has gone out. I can’t hear anything, I don’t know how long I’ve been here and ? —
I open my eyes and scream.
Not a small sound. A real one, the kind that comes from somewhere below the chest, and I’m sitting up before I’m fully conscious. My hands are out in front of me because my hands were tied but they’re not tied anymore, and the room is not concrete, it’s?—
Ivan comes through the door. He has a cup of tea in his hand, which is such an ordinary thing that it reaches me before anything else does.
He crosses the room in four steps, and he sits on the edge of the bed, and he doesn’t grab me, doesn’t reach for me, just puts the tea on the nightstand. He turns toward me and waits, his face still.
I breathe.
The room assembles itself around me in pieces—his room, his sheets, the pale late-morning light coming through the curtains, the cup of tea steaming gently on the nightstand, Ivan on the edge of the bed with his face arranged into the careful expression he gets when he is managing himself for someone else’s sake.
I press my hands flat on the mattress, and I breathe until the basement stops being the room I’m in.
“Here.” He hands me the tea. The word is less of a suggestion of tea and more a reminder of where I am, and I’m grateful for both.
I take it with both hands because my hands want something to hold. It’s the right temperature, not too hot, and it tastes like something with honey. I don’t ask what kind because it doesn’t matter. It matters that it’s warm and I’m here and not there.
Not there.
We sit for a while in the gray light coming through the curtains.
He doesn’t talk. I drink the tea and let the shaking finish.
He sits on the edge of the bed and does not try to fix anything, which is the thing about Ivan that keeps getting me—he knows when to fix and when to sit, and most people never learn the difference.
“I’m sorry,” he says eventually, quietly. “What happened to you?—”
“That was Jaba. Not you.”
“He targeted you because of me.”
I look at him over the rim of the cup. He’s still looking at his hands, which means he’s been sitting with this since last night and has been building a case against himself in the hours I was asleep. “I know. But only you can make me feel as safe as I do right now. Sitting here. In this room.”
He looks up. He opens his mouth. He closes it. He opens it again, and something crosses his expression that I’ve never seen on him before.
I watch him try and not quite get there, and I love him for trying, and I have been in love with him for a while now without saying so, and I cut him off before he has to keep trying. “I know what I said before. About not wanting to bring a target into the world. And I meant it, at the time.”
“What… I don’t understand.”
I wrap both hands around the cup. “Here’s what I’ve worked out. People are going to know who my baby’s father is. That’s not up for debate—they’re going to know, and that makes us targets whether you and I are together or not.”
“I can send you somewhere no one knows me.”
“Does that place exist?’
He swallows. “I can try to find a place like that. An island in the South Pacific. Something similar. Whatever you want.”
I look at him. “I could face it alone. Lonely, scared, and doing it by myself. Or I could face it with you and have all the love that comes with that.” I pause. “I’d rather do that. If you’ll have me.”
The room is very quiet.
Ivan looks at me for a long moment with those dark eyes.
He doesn’t climb onto the bed so much as arrive on it—one moment he is sitting on the edge and the next he is there, fully, reaching for my face with both hands. He takes my face the way he took it in the basement, careful and total, and he kisses me.
But it’s not a careful kiss. It starts careful and then it isn’t. I make a guttural sound against his mouth, and the tea goes somewhere I’m not keeping track of because his hands have moved from my face to my waist and I’m pulling him toward me with both fists in his shirt.
He lays me back into the pillows and follows me down, and I get my hands on the buttons of his shirt and deal with it without looking. I know where every button is. I know what’s underneath it. I’ve missed what’s underneath it more than I was prepared to admit to myself.
He pulls my hair back from my neck and finds the spot there that makes my entire nervous system reroute itself toward him. I exhale against his shoulder and feel him smile against my skin.
I’ve missed that smile. The one I feel on my skin.
I get the shirt off his shoulders. I press my palms flat against his chest and feel his heartbeat underneath, fast and real.
The scars under my hands, the muscle, the tattoos of him—all of it weeks away from me, and my body has been aware of every one of those weeks and does not approve them.
Now I get to do something about that, and I intend to.
“Luna.” My name in his mouth, low.
“Don’t stop. Talk later.”
He doesn’t stop.
He works his way down my throat, and the sensitivity I’ve had since the pregnancy makes everything louder—his mouth, the faint scratch of his jaw stubble, the deliberate pressure of his lips against my collarbone.
He takes his time at my breast, and I arch into it and make a sound that has no dignity in it whatsoever.
His hand comes up to hold me steady and he does not speed up.
He is entirely unmoved by my impatience, which has always been one of the more maddening things about him in bed.
I love it, though.
He moves lower. The drag of his mouth across my ribs, my stomach, the inside of my hip, and I have the pillow over my face by the time he gets where he’s going, biting down on it.
He’s thorough in the way he is thorough about everything—methodical, attentive, completely focused, no part of his attention elsewhere—and I’m saying his name like a broken record until it stops being a word.
He gets his hand into the act, and I lose the thread of everything. The ceiling. My own name. Any argument I have ever made in my life about independence and self-sufficiency.
His fingers glide straight into me, and his mouth mounts my clit. I break on his hand and against his mouth, my whole body pulling tight and then going loose all at once. I lie there for a second in the wreckage of it, breathing. Barely.
He comes back up my body, and I pull him the rest of the way there, both hands in his hair, not interested in waiting another second.
He braces above me and looks at my face for a moment before he does anything else.
There’s nothing in his expression right now that has anything to do with control or distance or the careful management he keeps over himself in every other context.
He looks like a man who is exactly where he wants to be.
“Hi,” I say, because it is the only word I have.
“Hi,” he says, and his voice is completely wrecked. He brushes my hair back from my face with one hand, and then he moves into me. I exhale like I’ve been holding a breath for weeks.
We move together slowly, the way we did that first tender morning in his bed, except that now there is more weight to it—more history, more of what we almost lost pressing up against the present moment and making the slow nearly unbearable.
I wrap my legs around him, and he shifts and finds a depth that makes me gasp into his shoulder and stay there, my mouth against his salty skin, my hands in his hair.
He says something against my neck. Russian, low, the tone of a man talking to himself about something he has no other language for. I don’t need a translation. I know the tone. I know him.
It builds. The slow becomes less slow, turns urgent.
The two of us are moving together like we’re trying to close the distance that the days have put between us.
I drag my nails down his back, and he groans against my throat and his hand finds my hip and holds, pulling me to meet his thrusts even faster.
I pray his name, and he answers with his own ritual.
We go over it together at the same moment. Gasping. Breathless. Elated.
On the verge of madness.
For now, I just hold on.
After, he pulls me against him, and I let my head fall to his chest, and I lie there listening to his heartbeat come down from wherever it went. Steady. He is steady, and his arm is around me. His hand moves slowly up my back.
I lie in the warmth of it and let the basement go—the bulb, the cold, the chair, the lists I made in the dark to keep myself functional. The last thing I added to that list, before I heard the door at the top of the stairs, was his name. I was right to add it. He was always coming for me.
His hand moves slowly up my back.
“Ivan.”
“Mm.”
“Don’t ever let me spend days not answering your texts again.” I pause. “Also, I’m sorry for not answering your texts.”
A pause. Then, low and warm, with the edge of something that is almost a laugh. “I’ll do my best. On both counts.”
I close my eyes. I’m exactly where I decided I wanted to be, and I have decided to stay. The decision feels like the easiest one I’ve made in months. Not because of the baby. Not because of Jaba or fear or the math of what his world costs.
Because I want to. Because I have wanted to since I sent him away, and the relief of being done with that is enormous. I’m going to close my eyes and lie here in Ivan Fedorov’s bed and enjoy it for as long as he’ll let me.
And I suspect he’ll let me for a while.