16. Maxim
MAXIM
I’ve spent my life learning the exact distance at which a person stops being a danger to me.
Far enough that they cannot reach me, near enough that I can read them.
I had held Valentina at that distance for six weeks with the discipline of a man keeping his hand above a flame to prove it doesn’t frighten him.
Then she said the thing about the painting, about being handed away, and her eyes came up wet and furious and entirely unbroken, and the distance I had measured so carefully stopped meaning anything at all, the way a rule means nothing to the man who has already decided to break it and is only waiting to hear himself say so out loud.
“Say something,” she said. “You always have something. The terrible calm thing you do. Say it.”
“I don’t have it.” It was the truth. The machinery that hands me the right sentence had gone quiet, and what was left was only a man in a room with the one person who had ever made him want to be one. “For the first time in longer than I can tell you, I do not have the line.”
She studied me, that quick clever gaze moving over my face the way it moves over a canvas, hunting the brushwork that gives a forgery away.
I let her look. For once I did not arrange my face into anything for her to find.
I let her see the thing underneath it, the thing I had spent eight years burning out of myself, and it was soft, and it was foolish, and it was completely real.
“You’re not performing,” she said, slow, like she had caught me at something rarer than a lie. “You don’t actually know how to do this. Any of it.”
“No.”
“Good.” Her breath snagged. “Neither do I. Not the true version of it. I have been handled my whole life. I have never once been...”
“Chosen,” I said.
I crossed the distance I had guarded for six weeks.
I did it slowly, leaving her every step of it to stop me, because that mattered more than anything I have ever needed another person to understand.
“Listen to me, because I will only manage this once while I still can. You are not a prisoner in this house. Not tonight. The door at your back is open. It has been open since the hour I forgot to lock it, and I am not going to lock it now. Walk through it and no one stops you. I will put you somewhere your brother and Falcone will never reach, and I will never come near you again, and that is a promise and not a threat.” I made myself say the rest of it.
“But if you stay, you stay because you want this. Not because I took you. Because you chose it. I have spent my whole life taking things. I find I cannot take you. I can only be chosen, or not.”
Something moved across her face that I’ll keep for the rest of my life.
No one had ever offered her a door before.
They had offered her walls and told her the walls were love, and here was a man who deals in locks for a living holding one open and asking her to want him on the far side of it. She did not walk through it.
“I’m staying,” she said. “Not because I’m trapped. Because you’re the first person who ever thought to ask.”
So I kissed her. Or she kissed me. The honest answer is that the distance collapsed from both sides at once, and I stopped keeping the account of who moved first, because keeping the account is the thing I do instead of living, and for the first time in eight years I was simply living.
Her hands fisted in my shirt. My hand found the back of her neck where it had wanted to be for weeks and had not been allowed, and she made a sound against my mouth that loosened a knot in me I had tied so long ago I had forgotten it was a knot and not just the shape I came in.
I didn’t take her there, in that room. I wouldn’t let her first time, or the first that ever counted for me, happen under the gray eye of a camera I’d bolted to the wall to watch her. I drew back, and she followed the loss of me, and I caught her face in both hands.
“Not here,” I said. “Not where I watched you. Come with me.”
“Is that an order?”
“It is the opposite of one.”
She took my hand. A Ricci took the hand of the man who had taken her, and let me lead her out of the cell block and up into the part of the house that belongs only to me, and every step she didn’t let go was a small astonishment I have no language clean enough to hold.
My rooms had never had a person in them, not one who mattered.
She stood in the middle of the cold order I live inside, all that disciplined emptiness, and she looked around once and then looked at me, and I watched her decide not to say anything about it, decide to be gentle with how bare a life can get, and the mercy in that nearly took me off my feet.
“So this is where you live,” she said. “It’s very you. Did a monk do the decorating, or did you just interrogate the furniture until it left?”
“You’re making jokes,” I said. “Now.”
“I make jokes when I’m terrified. Six weeks, and you never noticed.” Then the joke fell away from her, all at once. “I am terrified, Maxim. Not of you. Of how much I don’t want the door.”
“Stop offering it to me, then,” she said when I opened my mouth to give it to her one more time, because I needed her to keep having it.
She crossed the room and took my restless hands and stilled them between her own the way Baba Nadia stills a blade.
“I am not looking at the door. I am looking at you. Catch up.”
So I did. I undressed her the way you handle a thing that has come through a fire and might not survive being handled twice, slowly, with the whole of my attention, which is the only thing of worth I have ever had to give anyone.
The zipper of that borrowed dress gave under my fingers one tooth at a time, and I set my mouth to each new inch of her as it opened, the curve of her shoulder, the wing of her spine, the small of her back where my hand had learned to sit in a gallery and had never once stopped wanting to come home to.
She let the silk fall and turned inside the circle of my arms, and the sight of her undid the last orderly thing left standing in me.
“You’re staring,” she said, and there it was again, the armor, the joke groping for cover.
“I am memorizing,” I said. “Let me.”
And she let me. She stood and allowed herself to be looked at, and I watched the old fear in her go quiet under the simple weight of being wanted with no price hung on it.
Then she reached for the buttons of my shirt and freed them with those restless, certain hands, and I held still and let her, though every nerve I own was a wire drawn to its breaking point.
Her palms flattened on my chest and slid down, learning me, and everywhere they traveled the cold I live inside went warm and then caught fire.
I’m not a man who gets touched without a purpose behind it.
She touched me for no purpose but the wanting, and the want of it went through me like a live current.
When her mouth found my throat I heard myself make a sound I didn’t know I owned, low and half wrecked, and I felt her smile against my skin, pleased with herself, learning by the second exactly how to take a man like me apart.
I got us to the bed without letting go of her, or she got me there, and which of us led had stopped mattering somewhere back in that first kiss.
The rest of what we wore fell away in the dark, and then there was nothing in the way at all, no silk and no surname and no eight years of careful cold, only the long warm shock of all of her skin against all of mine.
She arched into me as though she had spent her whole life waiting to be this close to another living person and had only in that moment learned it was allowed.
She found the scars in the dark, the whole catalogue of my work written into my skin, and she didn’t flinch from them and she didn’t ask.
She traced them instead, slow, first with her fingertips and then with her lips, the bullet seam at my shoulder, the older silver lines a man collects in my trade, and she did the thing my sister used to do, the thing I had sworn I would never let myself feel again.
She made the worst of me ordinary by refusing to be afraid of it.
I had to stop and set my forehead against hers and simply breathe, because a man can be undone by tenderness in a way that no amount of violence has ever once managed on me.
Then I stopped breathing for either of us and put my hands on her in earnest. I have a patience that has broken harder people than her across a steel table, and I brought the whole of it to this.
I mapped her by touch, finding the places that made her breath catch and the places that made her go still and the one spot just inside her hipbone that made her say my name like a question she did not want answered too quickly.
I followed my hands with my mouth, down the line of her throat, across the rise of her breasts, and when my tongue found the peak of one she arched up off the bed with a sound that pulled something loose deep in me.
I did it again, slower, only to hear it a second time.
She knotted a hand in my hair and held me to her, and I understood that she had spent her whole life being told what she was permitted to want, and I set myself to the patient work of showing her she could want all of it.
She laughed once, startled into delight by something her own body had done, and I felt my mouth curve against her skin, an expression it had very nearly forgotten how to make.
I moved lower, tracing the plane of her stomach, the inside of one thigh and then the other, taking her higher by degrees while she unraveled above me, until her hips were lifting after my hand and her clever mouth had abandoned words altogether.
When I finally touched her where she most wanted to be touched she was already past speech, slick and trembling, and I worked her up with the same care I bring to everything that matters, reading each breath, easing off every time she neared the edge, until she was strung tight as a bowstring and saying please in a voice I had not heard from her before, my proud girl undone to a single honest word.
“Maxim.” It came out of her in pieces. “I don’t want careful. Not for the first one. I have had a whole lifetime of careful. Give me the other thing.”
“Then keep your eyes on me,” I said. “The whole time. I want them on mine.”
“Greedy,” she breathed, but she gave them to me. I have looked away from everything in my life. I did not look away from her, and she did not look away from me.
I moved between her thighs and she opened to me, winding her legs around me, drawing me in, and I went into her slowly, watching her face the whole way for the catch of pain and finding instead a kind of wonder there, her breath leaving her in one long unsteady sound as I filled her.
Her name was in my mouth and her hands were knotted in my hair, and she made a sound I expect to hear on the day I die, the sound of a woman arriving somewhere she had stopped letting herself believe in.
I held still inside the shock of it, both of us breathing hard, and gave her body the time to take in the fact of mine.
Then she moved under me, demanding more, and I gave her exactly what she had asked me for.
We found the rhythm the way you find a language you did not know was already in your mouth, and it built, and went on building, her nails dragging down my back and her breath breaking against my ear and my name caught in it over and over, as though she were counting something only she could see.
I have never once in my life let go of the wheel.
I let go of it then. Somewhere in the heat of her I felt the control I had built my whole existence around simply leave my body, and I braced out of old habit for the terror of it, and the terror did not come.
What came instead was relief, the wild and total relief of a man who has carried a wall on his back for a decade and is finally, in the dark, in her, allowed to set it down.
When she came apart it was around me, with my name on her lips and her eyes still locked to mine through every second of it, and the sight of her like that, undone and unafraid and entirely mine, took the last of me over the edge with her.
I went after her, buried in her, her heart slamming against my chest, and somewhere in that unguarded, unmeasured, wholly unplanned moment, with not one thought spared for caution by either of us, we made a thing that neither of us yet knew we had made.
Afterward I held her like contraband I meant to keep.
It’s the only honest way to put it. I’ve moved a great many valuable and forbidden things through this city, and I’ve never once held any of them the way I held her, with my arm a bar across her and my mouth in her hair and the absurd animal certainty that the world would have to come through me to take her back.
She fit against me as though she had been measured for the space.
I stayed awake on purpose. I didn’t want to lose a single hour of it to sleep.
We didn’t talk much. We’ve both made our livings out of words, the careful giving and withholding of them, and that night we set the words down on the floor and left them there.
The quiet between us was not empty. It was the most honest conversation I’ve ever had.
It said all the things we were both still too well trained to say with our mouths, and we let it say them, and we understood each other without a single error, which has never happened to me once with the lights on.
The window went from black to gray to the first thin line of gold, and I felt her come up out of sleep, felt the exact moment she remembered where she was and who she was and what the two of us had spent the night dismantling.
Her fingers were still threaded through mine. She did not draw them back.
“This can’t happen again,” she whispered.
I am an excellent liar. So is she. It is among the many things we share, and I heard, running underneath the words, the truth they had been built to cover, the same truth sitting in my own chest and refusing every order I gave it.
“No,” I agreed.
I meant yes. She knew I meant yes. We lay there in the gold coming up across the floor, two professional deceivers telling each other the single lie we both needed spoken out loud, so that we could go on doing the dangerous and irreversible thing we had already, both of us, decided to do.
Neither of us believed a word of it. Neither of us let go of the other’s hand.