Laura
Larry leaves at eight-fifteen. He was kind about it.
He’s always kind. That’s the thing about Larry Stevens — he is genuinely, thoroughly, without-agenda kind, and standing at my door watching him go, the grief of it sits in me — the grief of knowing that kindness isn’t enough.
That I spent eight months trying to want what he was offering and the wanting never came, and he deserved better than a woman who was making do, and I told him that tonight over pasta and decent wine and he took it with the same quiet grace he takes everything.
He said: I think I always knew.
I closed the door.
I stood in my entryway for a long time.
Then the doorbell rang and I thought, he forgot something, and I opened the door without checking.
It’s not Larry.
Maxim fills my doorway the way he filled that hotel corridor over a year ago — like the space was already his before he arrived, like the city behind him is just set dressing, like he was always going to end up here eventually and the only question was when.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
“No,” I say.
“Laura—”
“No.“ I put my hand on the door. ”I know what you’re going to say and the answer is no. I am done with this roller coaster. I am off. You don’t get to keep doing this — showing up, disappearing, showing up — I am not a rest stop, Maxim, I am a person, and I am not getting on that ride again.“
He’s quiet for a moment.
“You shouldn’t be on any rides right now,” he says. “Not in your condition.”
The air goes out of my lungs. I stare at him.
The stillness in his face. The way he holds my gaze.
And I know — I know exactly how he knows; I know about the surveillance, I know about Daniil, I know about the folder that lives between files on a laptop—and the burning fury of being known without permission rises up and mixes with everything else I’m feeling until I can’t untangle any of it.
“I knew it.” My voice comes out flat. “I knew there was a real reason you came back. It wasn’t about me, was it?
It was about the—“ I stop. Swallow it. ”Fine.
Fine, you know. Congratulations, your surveillance network is very thorough.
We can work out custody arrangements like adults.
Lawyers. Schedules. You don’t have to be here for this part.
“ I move to close the door. ”Leave. We’ll figure the rest out later. “
His hand stops the door.
“No.”
“Maxim—”
“I’m not here for the baby.”
“Then why—”
“I’m here because I drove four hours in the wrong direction six weeks ago and I’ve been trying to find a reason to turn around ever since and I ran out of reasons.
” He steps inside. I step back, which is its own defeat, and he closes the door behind him.
“I’m here because I have been sleeping on sheets from the safe house for six weeks like a man who has completely lost his mind.
I’m here because I watched a couple in their home last week and I had to leave before I broke something because it should have been us.
” He glowers. “I’m here because Viktor sent me a message and the first word that came out of my mouth was my son, and I didn’t correct it, and I wasn’t talking about the baby. “
The air in my apartment is very still.
“I don’t believe you,” I say. “You came because of the pregnancy. The rest is—”
“The baby made it faster.” He cuts through it.
Clean. Certain. “Just like the wedding made it faster. You were getting married, and I couldn't let it happen, Laura — that wasn’t about protecting anyone, that was a man who could not physically let that happen. The baby is the same. It’s faster.
It isn’t the reason.” He holds my gaze. “You are the reason. You have always been the reason. I just—I didn’t recognize it.
I’ve never—” he stops. His jaw works, the same struggle I’ve watched a hundred times, the thing he holds back.
He doesn’t hold it back this time. “I didn’t recognize it because I haven’t had a lot of it.
Love. I didn’t have a lot of it, and I didn’t know what it looked like up close, and I have spent my entire adult life being very good at the wrong things and being very proud of that, and then you followed me down a hotel corridor and everything I was proud of became a problem. ”
My eyes are burning.
I don’t move.
“I am a monster.” His voice is even. Not cruel, not self-pitying — factual.
The same clinical delivery he gave me the worst morning of his life.
“That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the inventory.
I have done irreversible things. I will do more.
I live in a world that has a body count, and I am a significant contributor to it, and that is never going to change.
” He steps closer. “You better learn to love it. Because you are stuck with it.” Another step.
“With or without this baby, you are stuck with me, and I need you to understand that before you make any more decisions about custody arrangements or roller coasters or any of the other ways you’re trying to manage the fact that you want me as badly as I want you. ”
“You don’t get to just—”
“Tell me you don’t want me.”
My jaw tightens.
“Tell me, Laura.” He stops in front of me.
Close. The closeness that my body has memorized and my brain has been trying to forget for six weeks.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want me, and I will call Daniil and leave, and we will work out whatever arrangements need to be worked out through lawyers, and I will never set foot in your apartment again. ”
The lie is right there.
Three words.
“I can’t say that,” I finally say. “And you know it. And I hate that you know it.“ My voice rises. ”I hate that you can show up at my door and say your condition like you’ve been watching me this whole time, like you know, like nothing I do is mine because you’re always already—“ I stop. The anger crests and comes down. Underneath it: everything else. All of it. ”Tell me you love me.
“ Quiet. Direct. ”If you’re going to stand in my apartment and tell me I’m stuck with you, say the actual word. Say it.“
He looks at me for a long moment.
“I love you.” No hesitation. No qualification.
No footnotes. “Beyond reason. Beyond fear. Beyond every cowardly thing I’ve done to protect myself from knowing it.
” His eyes hold mine. “I love you. And I’m done fighting it.
I’m a fighter — that’s the job, that’s the whole job — but not this. Not you. No more.”
The apartment is very quiet.
“Okay,” I say.
Then: “And if you ever leave me again.” My voice comes out different.
Quiet and certain and something he hasn’t heard from me before.
“If you ever pack a bag for me while I’m sleeping.
If you ever call Daniil while I’m in your arms and arrange my departure like I’m a problem to be managed—” I hold his gaze.
“I will shoot you myself. You say I’m not cut out for this world but I will commit every act of violence available to me to make sure you cannot do it again.
” I tick them off. Calm. Level. “Not walking out — no legs. Not opening the door — no hands. Not looking at anyone else — no eyes.” I watch his face. “I’ll make you stay.”
His expression shifts. Not fear. The other thing. The worse thing. The thing I’ve been watching build in him since a hotel corridor and a folder he wouldn’t name and a man who drove four hundred miles because he couldn’t physically let me marry someone else.
His jaw works once. Then: “You never asked.” His voice is different — stripped down, past every layer of control he has, down to the thing underneath all of it.
“About other women. About anyone after you. You never asked but I’m answering.
” His eyes hold mine. “I was never with anyone else after you. Not once. Not even close. Because you are irreplaceable and I have known it since the moment you stepped into my elevator and I have been furious about it every single day since.” His jaw works again, harder.
“I have missed you every second. Every minute. Every hour—”
“I get it,” I say.
“No.” His voice. Rough in a new way, rough in the way that costs him, rough in the way I’ve only heard twice in my life and both times it wrecked me. “You don’t. Every day. Every week. Six weeks of that. Torture, Laura.“
I hold his gaze for a long moment. Then he breaks into a thoughtful look that is belied by a half-grin. “Hmm. I could use that as a tool.” His mouth pulls. Dark and certain. “More effective than bullets.” His mouth tilts further. “Less blood too.”
“I take it back, there might actually be something wrong with you.”
“Definitely, but it’s too late to back out now.
” He steps forward. His hands find my face.
His thumbs on my cheekbones, holding me exactly the way he held me in a hotel suite the first time, and my body goes from furious to undone in the space of that touch.
“We’re past all of it. You’re with me.” His eyes hold mine. “Forever.”
The word settles into my chest and stays there.
“Yes,” I say.
“And ever.” His forehead drops to mine. “This life and the next.”
“And the next,” I agree. My hands close on his shirt. “You’re going to be terrible at this.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m going to have to fight you every single day.”
“Probably.”
“And you’re going to try to manage everything and control everything and send me places in the middle of the night when things get hard—”
“Less than before.”
“That’s not a promise.”
“No.” His mouth brushes the edge of mine. “But it’s a start.”
We don’t make it to the bedroom.
We make it to the wall, which is closer, and that’s where it stays for a while — his hands and my hands and the impossible relief of him against me after six weeks of the sheets and the drinking and the missed seconds and minutes and hours that accumulated into something unbearable.
He kisses me like he has a point to make and intends to make it thoroughly. I let him. I make the same point back.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he says, against my throat, “for six weeks.”
“Just six?”
His exhale is rough. “Don’t push it.”
He lifts me and my legs go around him and the wall is behind me and he is completely, mercifully, devastatingly present, and I stop making words for a while.
Later — the bedroom, the dark, the mountain of things we still have to figure out arranged quietly around us — he puts his hand flat to my stomach. Low. Careful. The gentleness I have watched surprise him every time it comes out of him.
“Hi,” he says. Quiet. Not to me.
“He can’t hear you yet,” I say, over the lump in my throat. A lump I can't seem to swallow down.
“She.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I know.” He’s looking at his hand on my stomach.
There’s something open in his face I’ve never seen — undefended, nothing held back, nothing between him and the thing he’s feeling.
“I know what I’m capable of,” he says quietly.
“I’ve known since I was eleven years old.
But I also know—” He stops. His jaw works.
“I know what it cost not to have it. Love. Someone who stays.” His eyes come up to mine.
“I’m not my father. And I’m not my mother.
And whatever I am—monster, killer, difficult man, all of it—” His hand presses gently. “I am going to be here.”
The words don’t shake. He means them with everything.
“I know,” I say.
I put my hand over his.
Outside, the city does what cities do — indifferent, ongoing, completely unconcerned with what has just been decided in a third-floor apartment on Tremont Street. The window is dark. I’m not checking it. I have everything I was waiting for.
Right here.
Under my hand.