Chapter 14 #3
The dining room table was set for two. White linen—not the kitchen tablecloth, a proper one, pressed, without wrinkles. Candles. Two. Special glasses, not the everyday ones. A bottle of wine, opened, breathing. The room smelled of rosemary and garlic and something I recognized immediately.
Il Cedro. It smelled like the restaurant.
Daniil stood by the table. He had changed. Dark suit—not the charcoal one he wore for business, a different one, darker, with a white shirt open at the collar. His hair was combed. He looked like a man who had made an effort and was not entirely comfortable admitting it.
“Did you cook?” I asked.
He looked at me. The briefest pause.
“Yes.” He gave me a look.
“Yes?”
Another pause. He tried to keep a straight face.
“No. No I didn’t cook.”
“You ordered from Il Cedro.”
“Yes.”
I laughed. The sound filled the dining room—the small, warm room that I had eaten soup in and spilled coffee in and sat on the floor in while Daniil read reports. It was a different room with candles.
“I actualyl thought I might tell you I made it. Then I remembered you have seen me operate a stove.”
“The grilled cheese was not that bad.”
He pulled out my chair. I sat. He pushed it in. He sat across from me. The candlelight fell across his face and made his eyes look darker — less ice, more depth. He poured the wine. He set the glass in front of me.
“Thank you for courting me,” I said.
“Thank you for asking for it.”
We ate. The risotto was delicious—saffron, parmesan, the particular creamy texture that came from someone who understood that risotto was a meditation, not a recipe.
“Tell me something,” I said.
“What kind of something?”
“Something you haven’t told me. Something ordinary. Something that has nothing to do with the Voronins or the Bratva or your father.”
He considered. His fork rested on the edge of his plate.
“I wanted to be an architect,” he said.
I set down my wine.
“You wanted to be an architect.”
“When I was twelve. I read a book about Soviet brutalist buildings. The photographs. The concrete. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I drew floor plans in my school notebooks. My father found one and told me architects were men who couldn’t become leaders, so they settled for drawing buildings for other men to own. ”
“Daniil.”
“I stopped drawing.”
“Did you ever think about going back to it?”
“No. By the time I was old enough to choose, the path was set. The Sokolov organization needed an heir. Lev had decided what I would be.” He picked up his fork.
“I don’t regret it. I’m good at what I do.
But sometimes I look at a building—the way the weight distributes, the way the structure holds—and I think about what it would have been like to design something instead of inherit it. ”
I looked at him. The candlelight. The white shirt. The man who had wanted to build things and had been given an empire to maintain instead.
“You married an architect,” I said.
“I’m aware.”
“I could show you things. Drafting. Design. If you wanted.”
“Maybe.” The corner of his mouth moved. “After the war.”
“After the war.”
His phone buzzed. He glanced at it. Turned it face-down on the table.
It buzzed again five minutes later. He glanced again.
The third time, I reached across the table and placed my hand over the phone.
“One hour,” I said. “You gave Arkady instructions for the evening. He knows how to reach you if something urgent happens. Give me one hour where my husband is not the Pakhan.”
He looked at my hand on the phone. He looked at my face.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Be present.”
He turned the phone off. Not face-down—off. The screen went dark. He placed it in his jacket pocket and buttoned the pocket.
“One hour,” he said.
“Thank you.”
The conversation continued. He asked about the Henry Street project.
I told him about the client who wanted modern aesthetic and the contractor who would give him exactly what he deserved.
He asked about the bathhouse—the one on the Red Hook waterfront, the one I had described on our first date.
I told him about the tile work. The worn steps.
The windows that needed restoration but not replacement, because the glass was original and original glass had a character that new glass could not replicate.
He listened. He asked questions. He remembered details from our first conversation and built on them, and the building of details — layer on layer, conversation on conversation — created something that had not existed before.
A history. A shared architecture of small facts and remembered preferences and the particular intimacy of a man who listened to his wife talk about windows because he found her fascinating when she talked about windows.
Then he asked a different question.
“What would you have done?” he said. “If we had met without our fathers arranging our lives. If there had been no alliance, no marriage, no agreement. Just you and me in a room somewhere.”
I set down my wine. I looked at him across the candles.
“I would have flirted outrageously,” I said.
“You don’t flirt outrageously?”
“Outrageous flirting is loud. It’s obvious.
It’s leaning across tables and touching sleeves and laughing too hard at jokes.
I don’t do that. I make eye contact. I ask questions.
I remember what you told me and bring it up later so you know I was listening.
I find reasons to be near you and then I act as though the nearness is accidental. ”
“That sounds effective.”
“It’s devastating. I’ve been told.”
“By whom?”
“By the trombonist, actually. He said I was the most dangerous woman he’d ever met. He was twenty-three and not super suave, so his standards were low. But the principle stands.”
Daniil’s mouth curved.
“So go on. Show me,” he said.
“What?”
“You said you would have flirted. Show me how.”
I looked at him. The candles. The wine. The dark suit and the white shirt and the man who had turned off his phone and asked me what I would have done if the world had not been arranged for us.
I picked up my wine glass. I took a sip.
I set it down. I looked at him—not at his face, not yet.
At his hands. The broad shape of them on the table.
The way his fingers rested near the base of his wine glass.
I let my gaze travel from his hands to his wrist to the cuff of his shirt to the exposed skin above the buttoned collar.
Then I looked at his face.
I held his gaze. I did not smile. I did not look away. I let the silence between us fill with the particular awareness of a woman who wanted to be looked at and was willing to wait.
“You have something here,” I said. I reached across the table. My fingers touched the corner of his mouth. My fingertip traced the edge of his lower lip for one second, two, and then I withdrew my hand and placed it in my lap.
“Thank you,” I said. As though he had handed me a napkin.
His eyes had not left mine. The ice-blue had darkened. His hand on the table had gone still—not tense, not gripping, but still with the particular stillness of a man whose attention had narrowed to a single point.
“That’s how you flirt?” he said. “Clean my mouth.”
“First I clean with my fingers. Then I clean with my lips.”
His eyes widened with lust. “Is that so?”
“Maybe.” I giggled. “But it is a bit forward. Maybe I try something else.”
“A different approach?”
“Mmmh. I’d wait. Let you notice. I’d let you wonder whether I meant it or whether I’m the kind of woman who touches everyone’s mouth at dinner.
I’d let you think about it. I’d let you think about it until the next time we’re in the same room, and then I wouldn’t look at you at all.
Not once. And you’d spend the entire evening wondering what changed. ”
“That’s cruel.”
“That’s effective.”
“It’s both.”
I smiled. The first smile of the flirtation—slow, private, the kind of smile that existed only for the person it was directed at. I let it happen. I let him see it.
“The difference now,” I said, “is that I don’t have to wait.
I don’t have to wonder whether you noticed.
I know you noticed. I know you’re thinking about my finger on your lip.
I know that when I stand up from this table and walk past your chair, you’re going to watch me go.
And I know that when I come back, you’ll be here.
Because you love me. And that, Daniil Sokolov, is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever felt. ”
He stood up. He came around the table. He took my face in both hands and kissed me, and the kiss tasted like saffron and wine and deep, warm, love.
Moments later, music began. It came from his phone, connected to the small speaker on the living room shelf.
Something old. Russian. A man’s voice, low and unhurried, singing about a river or a woman or both—my Russian was good enough for architecture and arguments but not for poetry, and the song seemed to be both.
Daniil stood in the center of the living room. He extended his hand.
“Dance with me.”
I took his hand. He drew me in. His other hand settled on my waist. He pulled me close. My hip met his. My hand went to his shoulder.
He moved.
He was good.
Not adequate. Not functional. Good. He led with his whole body—a slight shift of weight, a pressure through his palm on my waist, and I followed because following was the only option when the man leading you knew exactly where he was going and moved with the calm, unhurried confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that the steps were in his muscles rather than his head.
“When,” I said.
“When what?”
“When did you learn to dance. And why was this information withheld.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I asked you to tell me something ordinary. You told me about brutalist architecture.”
“Architecture is more interesting than dancing.”
“Architecture is not more interesting than discovering my husband can dance. Nothing is more interesting than that. This is a betrayal of the highest order.”