CHAPTER 14 #2
The doorway light moves on the wall behind him because Gabriel has shifted his weight one inch.
I keep my eyes on Alexei. I follow Alexei's breath against mine — four-beat — four-beat — and the count breaks on the third because his ringed thumb has come off my hip and gone to my clit and the cold of the steel ring against the wet of me is the after-image my body remembers without being told.
I am going to come again.
I want to hold it back a little longer. The first one was mine. The second one I want shared.
"Yellow."
The word comes out of me clear. My own voice.
Steady. I have been practicing this word in the suite for two days.
I have said it aloud to the fiddle-leaf fig.
I have said it aloud to the medallion. I have said it once at the writing desk in the empty room.
I know what it sounds like coming out of my mouth.
Alexei stops.
No slowing. He stops. He pulls out and stays at the entrance of me, his cock wet against the inside of my thigh, his ringed thumb leaving my clit and going flat to my hip bone, his eyes on mine. His breath is the only fast thing in the room.
"Hippocratic?"
"Yellow. Just yellow."
"Yellow," he repeats, like he is writing it on a clipboard. "Stop. Talk to me, krasivaya."
Gabriel moves.
The doorway light shifts and lays itself across the cot's foot instead of across the cot's middle as Gabriel comes one step into the bay.
Two. Three. His footfalls on the trauma-room floor are the slowest steps I have ever heard a man take.
He stops two feet from the head of the cot.
His hands stay at his sides. He puts his left hand flat on the rolling blood-pressure stand at the head of the cot — the spread fingers, the small declarative pressure he uses on a tabletop before he speaks.
"Elena. What do you need?"
His voice is quiet. He is asking now where he stated before. The architecture has rotated.
I look at him. I look at Alexei.
I have practiced this answer too.
"Closer. Both of you. I want you both in the room with me.
Not just at the door. Gabriel — come to my brow.
Put your hand on my brow. Don't kiss me.
Don't enter me. I just want you there. I want to feel you breathing where I can hear it.
Alexei — don't stop touching me. Slow down.
Stay in me. I am still here. I want to stay here. I will tell you when to go again."
The room holds.
Then it adjusts.
Gabriel comes around the head of the cot.
His gaze passes Alexei without landing. Alexei's gaze passes him the same way.
They route through me. Gabriel kneels on one knee at the head of the cot and lays the back of his left hand flat against my brow.
His skin smells of vetiver under the soap.
His fingers are spread — index at my hairline, middle at the center of my forehead, ring finger between my eyebrows, small finger along my temple.
He has covered the bone of my forehead with the architecture of his hand. He breathes.
I breathe.
"Slower, Alexei."
Alexei pushes back into me. Half-depth. The cot frame creaks.
The belt at my wrists pulls. Gabriel's hand on my brow stays exactly where he set it.
I follow Gabriel's breath — six in, eight out — and I follow Alexei's because Alexei is the four-beat — one, two, three, four — and the count braids itself into the architecture above and below me.
I am held at the brow. At the wrists. At the hips. Inside.
"Color, krasivaya."
"Green."
Alexei goes again. Slower. Half-strokes that bottom out and pull and bottom out again, as I asked.
The cot frame rings under my hips. The cold steel at the small of my back is now warmed almost to body temperature where my bound wrists have been pressed into it.
The doorway light is on the wall across from me. I track it once and let it go.
Gabriel holds his silence for a long time. His hand on my brow stays where he set it. I am being held by two clocks.
"See what you are," Gabriel says. Quiet.
One sentence. The lab-table register is gone from his voice; this is the register he uses when he is making a note in his head.
The line is for me alone, marked private from the room.
The line lands at the center of my forehead under his fingers and stays there.
I come the second time with Gabriel's hand on my brow and Alexei in me to the hilt and the ringed thumb back on my clit and the cot frame creaking under my hips and the belt at my wrists pulled to the limit of its slack.
My teeth stay open this time. I let the sound out.
It is the breath I have been holding since I learned to hold breath at fourteen on the Belt Parkway, the breath I let out now because the two men in this room have earned every register I have.
Alexei comes a stroke later. He pulls out — he has always pulled out with me until we have the conversation we still owe each other — and he comes on the inside of my thigh and the small of my belly, low groan in Russian that lives outside any dictionary, the ring on his thumb pressed once against my hip bone for the after-image.
His head goes down to my sternum. He keeps his weight held off me.
He breathes against the medallion. His stubble against the silver. He kisses the medallion once, the edge instead of the angel, and his mouth says the name in his head that he has only said once on a page of mine: Yuri. I hear it without him saying it.
Gabriel lifts his hand from my brow.
I miss it the instant it goes.
He comes back a beat later with the back of his hand against my cheek instead — the knuckle to my cheekbone, the cool of his ring-less hand. He has heard me miss him. He has answered without my having to ask.
"You did beautifully, Elena."
The vocabulary he chooses is mine alone: praise withheld, gift withheld, good girl withheld. He says my name. The line is small. The line is mine.
Alexei sits up. He undoes the belt at my wrists.
The leather is warm now. He frees my hands one at a time and turns each wrist up to his mouth, kisses the bone — left wrist, right wrist, the four-beat of his mouth against the pulse points as he does it in the bay when a patient has come back from a long code.
He sets the belt across the foot of the cot.
"Don't move, krasivaya."
He goes to the corner of the bay where the saline warmer lives.
He takes a four-by-four gauze, runs it under the warm saline, warms a second between his palms because the cloth-between-the-palms is what he learned at Shock-Trauma.
He cleans me — between my thighs, the inside of my belly, the small of my back where the cot frame has marked me in a thin pink line along the bone.
Gabriel has stepped back to the bay doorway. He is letting Alexei finish. I follow Gabriel's silence. One. Two. Three.
"Water," I say. A statement, plain. A small declarative because that is what I have left.
Gabriel goes. He comes back from the kitchenette with a clean tumbler of cold water.
He kneels at the head of the cot, lifts my head with the palm of his left hand, puts the rim of the glass to my mouth, tips it.
I drink in the slow swallows he sets the pace of.
Three. He puts the glass on the rolling stand and his hand back at my brow.
Alexei has folded my scrub bottoms from the gurney. He sets them on the foot of the cot.
"Suite?"
"No."
"Call room?"
"Yes."
"Okay, krasivaya. I am going to carry you. Are you with me?"
"I stay with you."
He puts his right arm under my knees and his left arm around my back and lifts me.
The cot frame creaks once as my weight comes off it; the steel keeps its silence; the frame settles.
I put my left arm around his neck. Gabriel turns and goes to the bay door and holds it open from the inside with his palm flat against the wood.
The corridor light comes back at us. I follow the lights — six between the bay and the lift, five, four, three, two, one. The doorway light at Bay 6 narrows behind us as Gabriel closes the door.
Floor 11. The freight elevator is open. We ride up. Alexei keeps me in his arms. Gabriel stands beside us with his hands loose at his sides, keeping his silence.