Chapter 15
COLE
Iwoke up on the couch with a dead arm and a stiff neck and Mikhail Volkov's head on my chest and it was the best morning of my life.
The light coming through the living room windows was grey and soft, early enough that the sun hadn't fully committed.
My left arm was pinned under Mik's shoulder and had gone completely numb from the elbow down, which was a problem I was absolutely not going to solve by moving, because moving would mean disturbing the man who was sleeping on me with an expression of complete peace that I had never seen on his face before.
Awake, Mik's face was a controlled environment.
Every expression vetted, every micro-movement authorized.
Asleep, the controls were off. His forehead was smooth.
His mouth was slightly open. The scar through his eyebrow was just a line, not a story, not a wound, just a detail on the face of a man who was dreaming about something that didn't hurt.
I lay there and memorized him. Not because I was afraid of forgetting.
Because I wanted to be greedy about it. I wanted to take this moment and hold it in both hands and know that it was real, that the man who had stood on my doorstep at 2 AM and said "you make me tired of the wall" was still here in the morning.
That he hadn't evaporated into the disciplined ghost who treated me like furniture at the facility.
He was here. He stayed.
My phone said 7:14. No practice today. Recovery day. The hockey gods had granted us a mercy, and I was going to use every minute of it to exist in this new version of us that had been built last night on this couch out of Russian phrases and tears and the simple, radical act of not letting go.
Mik stirred. His breathing changed. I felt the moment he surfaced, the slight tension that entered his shoulders as consciousness returned and his brain ran through its morning checklist. Location: not my apartment. Position: horizontal. Situation: I am lying on top of Cole Briggs.
He didn't bolt. He didn't stiffen and pull away and start rebuilding the wall. He just lay there for a moment, and then his hand, which had been resting on my stomach, moved slightly. A small, deliberate motion. His thumb tracing a slow line across my ribs.
"Good morning," I said.
"Your arm is dead."
"Completely. I think it might actually be gone."
"You should have woken me."
"And miss the only time Mikhail Volkov isn't controlling his face? Not a chance."
He lifted his head and looked at me, and the expression on his face was something I'd never seen in the daylight. Unguarded. Warm. Still carrying the residue of sleep and last night's confession, and underneath it all, a tentative softness that looked like hope.
"I look terrible in the morning," he said.
"You look like you."
"That is not the compliment you think it is."
"It's the biggest compliment I know how to give."
He put his head back on my chest. We lay there for another ten minutes, and the silence was the new kind.
Not hostile. Not cautious. Not even the charged version that hummed with unspoken tension.
This was a silence that had nothing left to hide.
A silence that had been emptied of secrets and filled with presence.
Eventually my arm started tingling with the specific agony of blood returning to places it had abandoned, and I had to move. Mik rolled off me and sat up, and I shook my arm until the feeling came back, which involved a lot of undignified flapping.
"You look like a bird," Mik said.
"A majestic bird."
"A bird that has been hit by a car."
"Your pillow talk needs work."
He almost smiled. Then he did smile. A real one.
Not the almost-version I'd been collecting since September, not the ghost or the suggestion or the twitch at the corner of his mouth.
A full, real, uncontrolled smile that transformed his entire face and made him look like a completely different person.
A person who had been in there the whole time, behind the granite, waiting.
I stared at him. He noticed me staring and the smile started to retreat, the old reflex pulling it back behind the curtain.
"Don't," I said. "Don't hide that."
The smile stayed. Smaller now, but it stayed.
I made breakfast. Eggs and toast and coffee, nothing fancy, because my culinary abilities peaked at "things that require a pan and a toaster.
" Mik sat at the counter and watched me cook, which was a reversal of our usual dynamic, and I caught him looking at my apartment with different eyes.
Like he was seeing it for the first time as a place he was allowed to be in rather than a place he was visiting in secret.
"You need a new toaster," he said.
"That toaster is a veteran. Show some respect."
"It burned the bread."
"It toasted the bread aggressively. There's a difference."
He ate the eggs without complaint, which from Mik was basically a standing ovation. We drank coffee and talked, and the talking was different now. Lighter. Easier. Not because the heavy things had disappeared but because they'd been said, and saying them had made room for everything else.
He told me about a documentary he'd watched about Soviet hockey.
I told him about the time Jonah got his head stuck in a jersey during a quick change and had to be rescued by two equipment managers.
He told me about Katya's latest email, which included a detailed analysis of why Fitzgerald was better than Hemingway, and I told him that I'd never read either of them, and he looked at me with such genuine horror that I laughed hard enough to spill my coffee.
"I'm going to make you read Gatsby," he said.
"Is this a threat?"
"It is a promise. You will read it and you will understand why it matters."
"Will there be a quiz?"
"There will be discussion. Which is worse."
This was Mik happy. Mik happy was bossy and opinionated about literature and mildly appalled by my lack of cultural education, and I wanted every second of it for the rest of my life.
After breakfast, he went to the bathroom and I heard the water running and I started washing the dishes.
Two plates. Two forks. Two mugs. I was putting them in the cabinet when I noticed that Mik's mug, the plain white one he'd brought over weeks ago without comment, was sitting on the counter next to the sink.
He'd used it this morning. I picked it up and opened the cabinet and put it on the shelf next to mine.
His mug. My mug. Side by side on the same shelf.
I stood there looking at them for longer than was reasonable. Two mugs in a cabinet. It was nothing. It was everything.
Mik came out of the bathroom and found me staring into the cabinet like it contained the secrets of the universe.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Just organizing."
He looked at the cabinet. At the two mugs. At me. Something moved across his face that I couldn't read, and then he walked over and adjusted his mug so that the handles were facing the same direction as mine, and the precision of the gesture was so perfectly Mik that I felt my chest crack open.
"They should match," he said, as if this explained everything.
It did.
He kissed me. In my kitchen, in the morning light, with coffee on his breath and his hands on my waist and no urgency at all. Just a kiss because he wanted to. Because he could. Because the wall was down and the door was open and we were standing in the daylight for the first time.
The kiss deepened. My back was against the counter and his body was against mine and his hands moved from my waist to my hips and I could feel the shift in him, the moment the tenderness caught fire.
"Bedroom?" I said.
"Bedroom."
We made it to the bedroom in approximately twelve seconds, which was impressive given that we did not stop kissing during the transition and nearly took out a lamp in the hallway.
The mood was different from every time before.
No desperation, no careful handling. Mik was laughing before we even got our shirts off because he got tangled in his sleeve and I tried to help and made it worse, and he said something in Russian that was clearly an insult directed at my shirt-removal technique.
"What did you just call me?" I said.
"I called you unhelpful."
"That is not what you said. The word was longer than that."
"Russian is an efficient language. One word can mean many things."
"What things?"
"Unhelpful. Also, beautiful. Context dependent."
"Did you just call me beautiful while insulting me?"
"Yes."
I kissed him and pushed him backward onto the bed and he pulled me down on top of him and we were skin to skin and laughing and hard and the combination of all of those things at once was the best feeling in the world.
This was what it was supposed to feel like.
Not desperate. Not stolen. Just two people who wanted each other in the daylight.
He rolled us over and climbed on top of me and the view nearly stopped my heart.
Mik above me, hair falling across his forehead, the scar through his eyebrow, his grey eyes dark with want.
He put his hands on my chest and pressed me flat against the mattress and the authority of the gesture sent heat coursing straight through me.
"I want to try something," he said.
"Anything. Everything. All of the above."
He kissed down my body with the methodical focus of a man conducting research, and Mik's research was always thorough.
My neck, my chest, the spot below my ribs that made me squirm.
He spent time on the scar at my collarbone, which he'd become fascinated with, tongue tracing the ridge of it while his hand moved lower.