41. Nina
NINA
Two Months Later
I wake up before Nikolai.
That still surprises me sometimes, the way small things that have become ordinary still carry the faint texture of when they were new.
A year ago, I could not have told you what Nikolai Vasin looked like asleep.
Now I know that he sleeps on his back with one arm across his chest like a man who, even unconscious, is not entirely at ease, and that he wakes up the moment the room changes, light or sound or movement, as though some part of him never fully switches off.
Right now, he’s still asleep, and the room is quiet, and the city outside is doing its slow, early morning thing, and I lie here and look at the ceiling.
I think about the woman who landed at JFK last year.
She had a carry-on bag packed for four days, a return flight booked for Monday, and a piece due to her editor by Tuesday. She had a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that smelled like coffee and notebooks and the particular silence of a life built to contain exactly one person.
She had ten years of work behind her, a network of contacts across three governments, and an instinct for organized crime that had put people away on two continents.
She was good at her life.
She was genuinely, specifically good at it, and she knew it, and she was not unhappy in it, and if you had asked her on the plane what she wanted the next ten years to look like, she would have told you without hesitating.
More work. Better work. The next Warsaw, the next Brussels, the next room in the next city where the right source finally said the right thing, and the story opened up.
I look at the ceiling.
I’m thirty-seven weeks pregnant in a house I didn’t choose with a man I didn’t choose, and I have not filed a piece in months because I have been too comfortable to open the laptop before noon.
I took a leave of absence from the only career I’ve ever cared about, and I don’t recognize a single thing about this life from the outside.
Nikolai shifts beside me. Not awake yet, just shifting, and his arm moves and finds me in the dark the way it finds me now, automatically, and I stay still and let it, and I think that this is also something I could not have told you about a year ago.
That he reaches in his sleep. That the man who absorbed every fight I threw at him without moving an inch reaches in his sleep.
I’m thinking about this when my stomach announces itself.
Not subtly. The nausea has been manageable for weeks, and this morning it decides to be unmanageable, and I’m out of bed before I’ve finished deciding to move, and I make it to the bathroom in time, and I’m kneeling on the cold tile thinking unkind thoughts about the first trimester having apparently decided to make a comeback in the third when the bathroom door opens.
Nikolai crouches beside me.
He doesn’t say anything. He pulls my hair back with one hand, puts the other on my back, and waits, and I would find this touching if I were not in the least dignified position available to a human being on a Tuesday morning.
When it’s over, I sit back against the cabinet, and he hands me a glass of water and sits on the floor beside me, back against the tub, which is an extremely undignified position for a man who runs a criminal empire, and I tell him so.
He looks at me. “You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“You were about to.”
“I really wasn’t.”
He looks at me for a moment, and then he looks at the bathroom floor, and the corner of his mouth moves.
I watch him and something about the two of us sitting on cold tile at six in the morning, him in yesterday’s shirt and me in a state I will not describe, catches up with me, and I start laughing.
Not a polite laugh. The real one, the full one, the kind that comes from somewhere below the ribs and doesn’t ask permission first.
He looks at me like I have lost my mind. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say, still laughing. “This is just…” I gesture at the bathroom. “This is not what I pictured.”
“What did you picture?”
“I don’t know. Something with more dignity.”
He looks around the bathroom, at the two of us on the floor, and something gives in his face, and he laughs, a real one, low and brief and completely unguarded, and I’ve heard that laugh maybe three times in nine months, and each time it lands like something rare.
We sit on the bathroom floor and laugh about nothing for a moment, and the city outside is waking up, and the house is quiet, and I think that this is also something I could not have told you about a year ago. That we would end up here.
He helps me up.
I brush my teeth, and he leans in the doorway and watches. I look at him in the mirror, and he looks back, and neither of us says anything
We go back to bed because it’s still early and neither of us has anywhere to be.
I lie down, and he lies down, and the room is warm, and the ceiling is the same ceiling it has always been, and outside the window the city is coming up gray and slow.