15. Nina
NINA
I’d spent five years learning to sleep in a bed that was too big. That night I remembered exactly why I had hated it.
The compound rose out of the dark like a thing that did not want to be found, which was, I would come to understand, the entire idea.
A wall first, high and unlovely. Then a gate that rolled open before we reached it, because someone inside had been watching us approach the way someone inside was always watching everything.
Then the men. The quiet ones Mila had asked about at my kitchen counter a lifetime and a week ago, standing in the exact places a person stands when his job is to make the dark safe and himself invisible inside it.
“Is this a castle?” Mila asked from my lap, not afraid, because she had decided hours ago that the worst day of my life was an adventure, and I had not had the heart or the strength to correct her.
“It’s Lev’s house.”
“It’s too big to be a house.”
“He has a lot of feelings,” I said, which was the only explanation that ever satisfied her, and she accepted it for him as readily as she accepted it for Gary.
Inside, the surrealism kept arriving in waves.
There was a kitchen the size of my entire apartment, with copper pots no one had ever cooked an honest meal in.
There was a hallway hung with art instead of family, which told me more about the years he had spent dead than anything he could have said.
And there was a room they had made ready for a four-year-old on a few hours’ notice, with a bed I could have slept four across, a real four-poster, the kind from the crab movie, and when Mila saw it she forgot to be tired for exactly long enough to climb the thing like a mountaineer and declare it hers.
“Do princesses live here?” she said, burrowing.
“One does now.”
“Is Lev the king?”
I tucked the blanket the way she likes, tight as a bandage, and did not have an answer that was both true and small enough for a child, so I gave her the one she wanted. “Something like a king,” I said.
“Kings keep you safe.”
“This one’s going to try very hard.”
She was asleep before I reached the door, the immediate, total sleep of a child who has decided the tallest people in the room have it handled.
I stood in the doorway of that absurd, beautiful, fortified room and watched her chest go up and down in a stranger’s castle, and I understood that I had crossed a line tonight I would not be walking back across, and that I had let a man with a gun and a wall and an army carry the only thing I had ever truly owned through a gate that locked behind us.
Lev was waiting in the hall. Of course he was.
He had given us the room and the space and the silence, and he was leaning against the wall across from Mila’s door with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes doing the thing they do, the grey going dark at the edges, reading me for damage the way he reads everything.
“She’s down,” I said.
“Good.”
“She thinks this is a vacation.”
“Let her,” he said. “For tonight, let her.”
And that was when it broke. Not loudly. The loud part had happened at the park, the screaming-inside part, the counting-her-fingers part.
This was the other kind, the kind that comes after, when the danger has passed and the body finally lets itself feel the size of what it just survived.
My hands started shaking. I had held them still for four hours, through the car and the gate and the bedtime, and the second I had no one left to be brave for, they betrayed me all at once.
“Hey,” he said, low. “Hey. I’ve got her. Nothing gets through that gate.”
“Don’t.” My voice came out wrong, scraped. “Don’t be kind to me right now. I can’t hold it together if you’re kind to me.”
“Then don’t hold it together.”
Five years. Five years of grief I had folded into the bottom of a drawer with a watch I couldn’t look at and couldn’t throw away.
Five years of being furious at a dead man because furious was the only way to survive missing him.
Five years of telling a child a beautiful lie about the sky, and meaning it, and hating that I meant it.
It all came up the back of my throat at once, and I did the thing I had sworn on every cold night I would never do if the dead ever had the gall to come back.
I crossed the hall and hit him in the chest with both fists, once, not hard, because there was no force left in me, only the need to put my hands on the proof.
“You died,” I said. “You let me bury you.”
“Nina.”
“You let me stand at a service with a box that didn’t even have you in it, and you let me come home and learn I was pregnant alone, and you were alive, you were alive the whole time, breathing, somewhere, choosing not to come back.
” The fists uncurled against him and just stayed, flat, feeling his heart go, because the bastard’s heart was going, steady and warm and entirely against the rules.
“I hate you,” I told the heartbeat. “I have hated you for five years. It was the only thing that got me out of bed.”
“I know.”
“Don’t agree with me.”
“I’m not agreeing,” he said. “I’m telling you I knew.
Every day. I knew exactly what I was doing to you, and I did it anyway, because the only way to keep you breathing was to make you think I wasn’t.
I would do it again to keep you alive. And it is the single worst thing I have ever done, and I have done a great many. ”
There was no apology in it that could have reached the size of the wound, and he did not insult me by trying to make one.
He just told me the truth, plainly, the way he had started doing, and the truth has a different temperature than comfort.
It went through me and lit the other thing, the thing I had spent five years pretending I had buried alongside him.
I kissed him.
Or he kissed me. I have replayed it a hundred times since and I cannot tell you who moved first, only that the distance between us stopped existing, that one second I was hitting his chest and the next my fists had his shirt twisted in them and I was pulling him down instead of pushing him away, and his mouth came down on mine like the answer to a question I had been screaming into a pillow for half a decade.
He kissed me the way he does everything, with total attention and no wasted motion, one hand sliding into my hair to hold my head exactly where he wanted it and the other splayed wide and possessive against the small of my back, gathering me in like something he had misplaced and finally found.
I had forgotten this. I had made myself forget it.
The years had sanded the memory down to a fact, he was a good kisser, the way you remember a country you can no longer afford to visit.
The reality undid the fact completely. My knees actually went, the cliché of it, and he felt it and made a low sound against my mouth and took my weight without breaking the kiss, walking me backward toward a door I hadn’t known was there.
“Tell me to stop,” he said against my lips, ragged, the most undone I had ever heard him. “Right now. Tell me and I’ll sleep in the hall.”
“If you stop,” I said, “I will kill you myself, and this time I’ll do it properly.”
It startled a laugh out of him, rough and disbelieving, and then the laugh turned into something else as his mouth found my throat, and I stopped being able to make jokes.
He got the door open without looking and we went through it still joined at the mouth, and the kiss changed under us, turned from a question into something certain, deep and unhurried and thorough.
His hands moved everywhere at once, down my spine, over my hips, dragging me flush against the long hard line of him so I could feel exactly what this was doing to him through too many layers of cloth.
I pressed into it without an ounce of shame.
Years of holding still, and my body had apparently been keeping a list. I wanted the layers gone.
I got my hands up under his shirt and felt him go rigid, then groan into my mouth when my palms found the bare heat of him, and that sound did more to me than any word he had said in the hall.
His room was dark and I was glad of it. I had done my thinking, years of it, and I was finished.
I wanted the wordless thing now, the thing my body had kept sealed in a drawer marked do not open while the rest of me grieved.
He worked my shirt off my shoulders one slow inch at a time, and I shoved his down his arms until it fell, and for a moment we just stood there half bared and breathing hard, his hands relearning the shape of me, mine flattened over the heartbeat that was not supposed to exist. Then he eased the last of the fabric away and stepped back the smallest distance, just to look, and the looking undid me more than touch could have, his gaze moving over me dark and reverent, the grey of his eyes gone nearly black in the low light.
“You’re looking,” I said, suddenly shy, which was absurd, given everything.
“I’m memorizing,” he said. “There’s a difference.” His thumb traced the silver line below my navel, the one she had given me on her way into the world. “This is from her.”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s my favorite thing in this room.” And he put his mouth to it, to the scar, to the proof of the years he had missed, and something in my chest cracked clean open, and after that there was no more careful.