18. Ronan
RONAN
There are moments a man remembers on his death bed.
This is one of them, and I know it while it's happening, which is rare.
She's in the water, weightless and unafraid, the city pouring away beneath her through the glass floor and the whole black glitter of the ocean flung out past the edge of the world.
The blue light shimmers on the wet planes of her shoulders.
Her dark hair is slicked back off her face, and her eyes are bright and daring.
She jumped. She looked at all this and decided it belonged to her, too.
Are you getting in, Mr. Akov?
Or are you scared?
"Scared," I answer. I set both glasses down on the bar without looking at them, because I've stopped being able to look at anything but her. "Terrified, as a matter of fact."
I strip off my jacket. Then the shirt.
When my bare torso is revealed, Cali stiffens. I know exactly what she's seeing. A man does not do the work I do and come away smooth. There's the pale seam under my left collarbone, old and knotted where a surgeon in a hurry did his best in a room with no name.
The two on my side, close together, matched.
The one across my forearm that I don't tell people the truth about, because the truth is boring and involves a rusted, jagged length of pipe.
She doesn't gasp. Nor does she look away and pretend not to see. She looks. And then she lifts one eyebrow at me and asks the question without saying a word.
What gave you those scars?
"Occupational hazards," I tell her, stepping down into the water, "of Brooklyn real estate."
"Is that so?"
"I'm afraid it is. It's a brutal market."
She narrows her eyes at me. But she lets it go. She's learned that some things I'll share on my own time or not at all, and she's decided—for tonight—to let me keep them to myself. That's a date-six story. If we make it that far.
The water is luxuriously warm when I sink in, wearing only my pants.
I step toward her until it laps at my chest, and then she's close, closer than we've been, near enough that the small waves she's making crest against my sternum.
Her toes don't reach the bottom, so she clings to my shoulders.
We tread there together in the last tank in the building, suspended over Coney Island and the whole dark sea.
I have never in my life wanted to keep a thing safe the way I want to keep this.
"You're staring," she says.
"Caught red-handed."
"That's rude, Mr. Akov."
"I can't help it. You're beautiful."
To my surprise, that makes her laugh.
It's quick and reflexive, an automatic little deflection with a shrug built into it. "The blue light's very forgiving," she says. "You should see me under a fluorescent. Whole different exhibit."
She flicks water at me, and it's a good joke, it's a very good joke, she is actually funny in a way that makes the rest of the world seem like it's gray and stale.
But I don't laugh.
Because I wasn't joking.
Not. One. Bit.
Cali's chuckle curdles and dies. I see the wariness enter her posture. "I'm not fishing," she promises. "I wasn't, like, angling for you to keep saying it. At ease, soldier, you know what I mean? I'm fully aware of what I look like."
"Tell me, then," I urge her. "What do you look like?"
She rolls her eyes, but it's a stall and we both know it.
"Like a woman who had two kids and a stressful decade.
" She wheezes out another half-laugh. "Which is fine.
I'm not, like, tragic about it. It's just…
Todd wasn't a compliments guy." A little shrug, water rippling off her shoulders.
"So I don't really have a frame for it. That word.
It's not one I've had a lot of use for."
Todd wasn't a compliments guy.
She says it the way you'd say Todd wasn't a runner or Todd didn't care for cilantro.
A preference. A neutral fact of the man's constitution.
And she pivots off it immediately, already reaching for the next joke, the next deflection, because the ground she's standing on is uncomfortable and she wants us both off it fast.
But I've stopped hearing her.
Because something has gone very still and very cold in the center of me.
Ten years.
The man had her for ten fucking years. He woke up next to her—this—every single morning.
He watched her carry his children and bring them out of her own body, watched her build a company out of nothing but her own mind, watched her laugh, watched her cry, watched her breathe, watched her be.
Ten years of a front-row seat to the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.
And he never once told her she's beautiful?
No—his crime was even worse than that. He didn't just deprive her of it; he ripped it away from her.
Bastard. Utter fucking bastard.
I have hurt men for less than this. I want to correct things.
But a bullet would be too clean and a concrete coffin in the East River would be too fast. Even if I had a lifetime to do it slowly, whatever I did to Todd Bradshaw would never come within a country mile of how much pain he's actually earned.
But it's not the time for my revenge fantasies.
Cali is watching me. And whatever is showing on my face has stopped her mid-joke. I will not let her think for one second that any of this cold is pointed at her.
So I move.
I pull her close with a hand on each perfectly formed hip. Her breath goes shallow. Her hands come up and find my chest, over the old seam under my collarbone, resting gently against my overheated skin.
I lift one hand out of the water and I put it against her jaw, my thumb along her cheekbone, tilting her face up to the blue.
"Here is what I know," I tell her. "I have sat across a table from you three times now. I've seen you from up close and afar, in fluorescent light and blue. And I am telling you, as a fact, under oath, in front of one octopus and a great deal of kelp—"
She laughs as I go on.
"— that you are the most beautiful thing I have ever been in a room with."
"Ronan…"
"You don't have to believe me tonight," I reassure her. "But soon enough, you will."
That's when I kiss her.
Slow. Gentle. My mouth offered up to hers, where she can choose whether or not to take it. Chlorine and wine, the soft straw of her hair under my hand, her velvet skin against my fingertips.
I've wanted this for so fucking long. Ever since that night in the lounge, when this smart-mouthed stranger told me my entire gender could get bent.
The intensity with which I've wanted it has concerned me.
I've wanted many things in my life, all of them with a white-hot need, but this, her?
That kind of wanting needs a different name.
And despite all that build-up, having her is even better.
Her arms come around my neck. Her legs find my waist under the water and I catch her, one arm banding low across her back. She's weightless and she's warm and she's pressed against me. The kiss goes deeper, hungrier, her fingers in my wet hair, a broken little noise climbing up her throat.
I could have her here. Her breath, the arch of her, the way she's stopped thinking—all of it says yes. Making love in the last tank suspended over the ocean, and it would be extraordinary.
It would also be a mistake I would never forgive myself for.
So I stop.
I gentle the kiss down, slow it, press one last soft one to the corner of her mouth, and then ease back until there's an inch of water between us. She chases it halfway before she catches herself, and God, the look on her face… dazed, flushed, kiss-swollen, furious with confusion…
"Why are you stopping?" she whimpers.
My heart is going like the octopus downstairs trying to get out of its tank. "Because," I growl, "when I take you to bed, kotyonok, you're going to believe every word I say first. Every single one."
I get her out of the water before she prunes.
There's a stack of towels waiting for us.
I wrap her in one and dress her in my shirt.
It swallows her, the sleeves dangling past her hands, the hem to her thighs.
Objectively absurd, but when she looks up at me from inside it, hair damp and half-asleep on her feet, I feel that wanting grow another two sizes.
"I have to be back by eleven," she murmurs into my collarbone.
"You will be. The car's already downstairs."
"Mm." She frowns and closes her eyes. "This is a very confusing date, Mr. Akov."
"Is it working?"
She doesn't answer. She's asleep, or near enough, one hand fisted loose in the front of my—of her—shirt, breathing slow against me.
Eventually, I carry her down. She wakes enough to walk to the car under her own power, in my shirt and her heels and nothing else. I get her settled and give the driver the nod. Then I stand on the curb and watch the taillights go until they turn and I can't see them anymore.
When she's gone, it's just me and the glass and the Ferris wheel and a great deal of quiet. I take out the third phone and dial.
"Uh-oh," says Navi. "Who died?" It's late and I don't call him this late for good news.
"Slushay menya," I snarl. "Vnimatel'no."
Listen to me. Carefully.
He listens as I rattle off the things he needs to hear.
"Zapishi adres," I tell him.
Write down the address.
And then I say it. Numbers, a street, the borough. A brownstone with two pairs of children's rainboots by the door.
Her address.
"Ponyal," Navi says.
Understood.
I hang up. In the tank behind me, a pale, enormous, sharp-toothed shark swims into the kelp forest and is swallowed up.