Chapter 6 #2
For the first time since she could remember, since childhood, since before her father’s first disappearance, since before she had learned that the people who are supposed to stay never do, she wasn’t counting.
Not seconds, not exits, not the distance between her skin and his.
She was in the dark cabin at forty thousand feet with his hands on her face and his mouth on hers and time wasn’t a sequence of numbered moments but a single, continuous, borderless now.
She pressed into him. Her palms flat on his chest, over his shirt, over his heart.
She could feel it. Slamming. The heartbeat of a man who had spent months building a three-hundred-million-euro perimeter around the thing he wanted and had just torn through it with his bare hands.
His heart was enormous under her palms, she could feel it in her wrists, in her arms, in the vibration that travelled through his ribcage and into her body as though they were sharing the same pulse.
He murmured something against her mouth.
Russian. She didn’t understand the words.
She understood everything else: the texture of them, the weight, the way they came from somewhere below language, below thought, from the place where a man keeps the things he won’t say in any tongue his audience can translate.
The words were low and rough and anguished and they tasted like the sound he had made on the tarmac stairs: involuntary.
Confession. A man’s mouth admitting what his mind still refused to.
She’d never ask him to translate. She didn’t need to.
Some things were more honest in a language you couldn’t decode, because decoding them would have required reducing them to meaning, and what he was saying had nothing to do with meaning.
It had to do with the shape of her name in his mouth, and the way his breath came apart against her lips, and the trembling of his hands as they slid from her face to the back of her neck and held her there.
Held her, with a gentleness that made the shaking worse, as though the effort of not pulling her closer was more than he could sustain.
She pulled herself closer instead. Rose on her toes.
Let her hands slide from his chest to his shoulders to the back of his neck, where his hair was short and warm and she could feel the tension in the cords of muscle beneath his skin.
He made another sound, not Russian this time, not any language, and his forehead dropped to hers.
They stood there. Forehead to forehead. Breathing each other’s air.
His hands on the back of her neck, hers on his.
The dark cabin around them like a room with no walls.
The engines humming a single, sustained note.
The world outside the windows was black and featureless and irrelevant, and for one perfect, suspended moment, there was nothing in the universe except the two of them and the sound of breathing and the heat where their foreheads touched.
His phone rang.
The sound was obscene.
A sharp electronic trill that shattered the silence like glass, and the cabin that had been a sealed world, dark, warm, theirs, became a cabin again.
An aircraft. A workplace. A space that belonged to a man who had a phone and a brother and a promise and a life outside the three inches of air between their mouths.
He pulled back. Not far, his forehead was still against hers, his hands still on her neck.
But the pulling-back was there, in the tension that re-entered his body like a current switching on.
She felt him return to himself. Felt the walls re-materialise around him, brick by brick, in the seconds between the first ring and the second.
He answered. One word. Wrecked.
“What.”
Not a question. A demand. The voice of a man who had been interrupted in the middle of the first honest moment of his life and wasn’t interested in pretending otherwise.
She couldn’t hear the other end. But she could see his face.
They were close enough, still, for the faint glow of the phone screen to illuminate his expression.
And she watched it change. The openness that the kiss had produced, the brief, miraculous dissolution of every wall he’d built, closed over.
And then he was stepping back, and the heat disappeared.
He spoke into the phone. Russian, rapid, clipped.
Not the low, rough Russian he had murmured against her mouth.
This was operational. This was a man receiving information and processing it and making decisions and the woman he had been kissing thirty seconds ago was watching the transition happen in real time, like watching weather change, like watching a door close.
The call lasted ninety seconds.
He lowered the phone. Looked at her. And the expression on his face, the expression she’d see in the dark behind her eyelids for weeks, the expression that would make her want to scream and weep and shake him until the walls fell again, was a mask.
Not blank. Worse than blank. Composed. Deliberate.
The face of a man who had chosen, in the ninety seconds of a phone call, to undo everything the kiss had built.
“Alexei has found a candidate,” he said.
His voice was level. Almost steady. If she hadn’t been standing close enough to see the vein in his throat pulsing at twice the rate his tone suggested, she might have believed he meant it.
“A good man. Clean. Law enforcement background. No connections to our world.”
She stared at him.
He had kissed her. He had held her face in his shaking hands and murmured Russian into her mouth and pressed his forehead against hers and breathed her air and kissed her like she was oxygen, like she was the only breathable thing at forty thousand feet, and now he was standing in the dark cabin with his phone in his hand telling her that his brother had found her a husband.
“You’re serious.”
“The introduction will be on your next layover. Alexei will arrange it.”
“You’re serious.”
He looked at her. And in the half-second before the mask finished forming, in the hairline crack between what he was saying and what his eyes were screaming, she saw it. The devastation. The cost. The look of a man committing an act of violence against himself and calling it honour.
Then the mask closed. The crack sealed. He sat down. Picked up his folio. Opened it to a page he wasn’t going to read.
“You should get some rest,” he said. “We land in three hours.”
She stood in the aisle. The air where his forehead had been against hers was cold.
The Russian he had murmured against her mouth was fading, not the memory of it, which would never fade, but the vibration, the physical resonance, the way her lips had felt the words even though she hadn’t understood them.
She didn’t speak. She went to the galley. Drew the curtain.
She stood in the dark with her hands on the counter and her eyes closed and the taste of him still on her mouth and she thought: He kissed me like I was the only thing in the world and he’s still going to give me away.
She thought: I’m not going to let him.
She thought: Whatever Alexei has found, whoever this man is, whatever clean, law-enforcement, connection-free candidate they put in front of me, I’ll sit across from him and I’ll smile and I’ll be polite and I’ll think about the sound Andrei Almazov makes when his walls come down, and I’ll know that no amount of clean hands will ever make me forget it.
She pressed her forehead against the cold steel of the galley cabinet.
Three hours to landing.
The taste of him didn’t fade.