Chapter 17
MILA
I’m dreaming.
No concrete, no bulb, no hand on the back of my neck, no Alexei.
A kitchen.
Yelena is at the counter. She’s singing.
She has her back to me.
She’s wearing the yellow dress. The one with the white buttons down the back. Mama used to fasten them for her before church.
Her voice is the voice I haven’t heard since Papa was alive.
She’s singing Tonkaya Ryabina.
I’m at the doorway. Barefoot. The floor of our old house. Cold tile. The grout I used to trace with my finger while Mama cooked. Sunday-morning light, Moscow, the kitchen we had when Papa was still coming home.
Yelena is humming the bar between the second verse and the third. The bar Sofia hummed back to me in the music room.
I open my mouth to say her name.
I can’t.
My throat won’t work. The air locks up. I try again. Nothing.
I try to walk into the kitchen.
I can’t.
There’s something between me and the doorway. I can’t see what it is. Glass maybe. Or air that’s gone solid. I push against it with both hands. My hands go through. My hands don’t reach her.
I push harder.
Nothing.
Yelena turns her head.
She doesn’t see me. Her eyes are on someone past me. Someone shorter than her. Someone to her left. She smiles. The smile she had when I was small. Patient. Warm.
She goes back to singing.
I bang on the invisible wall between us.
Her shoulders don’t so much as shift.
I scream her name.
No sound comes out.
I wake up.
The comforter is on the floor and my hair is damp at the hairline and my breath is coming in fragments the way it does when I’ve learned to wake silent.
The chain cold at my throat, the sheet damp under my shoulders, my hands fisted so hard in the fabric my knuckles ache.
I lie on my back. My heart is slamming against my ribs.
The cicadas are at their late pitch through the window. The household is asleep. The room is dark.
I count my breaths.
My body won’t still.
It was Yelena.
Yelena looking at someone who wasn’t me. Smiling at someone I couldn’t see.
Yelena.
I don’t say her name out loud. I haven’t said her name out loud since before the first basement.
My chest caves on the exhale.
My throat is tight. My eyes are burning. Something presses up behind my sternum and I push it back down with my next breath.
I haven’t cried since before. I’m not starting now.
I get out of bed. The chain at my throat, my nightgown, the folding knife in my pocket from habit not fear, bare feet on the wood floor. I need to still. I need to sleep. I can’t do it alone tonight and I know it and I’m going anyway.
My feet know the way. The hallway is dark.
The compound is asleep. My hands won’t unclench the whole walk there.
His mouth was on mine in the library and his heartbeat was against my palm when I put my hand flat on his chest, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, walking barefoot down a dark hallway toward a man who kissed me like that.
His door is open an inch. It’s been open an inch every night.
I stand in the doorway.
My hand on the doorframe. The wood is cool under my palm. From somewhere outside, footsteps on gravel and the low murmur of a radio at the perimeter, Marco’s men doing their rounds, the compound keeping its watch while the house sleeps. He’s breathing on the other side of the door.
I push the door open.
He’s awake.
He’s in bed, under the covers, no shirt.
The watch is on the nightstand. His phone, face-down on the wood.
I don’t look at it.
The sheet is at his waist. His chest is bare. The light from the hallway catches the line of his shoulder, his collarbone, the place where his throat meets his chest. The muscle at his shoulder. The line of his ribs. The hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse is.
He turns his head and sees me, and nothing in his face moves.
He doesn’t sit up or reach for me or speak.
He waits, then in a low voice.
"Couldn't sleep."
My throat is still tight. My hands are still fisted at my sides. I look at him. I nod once.
Quiet. Rough.
"Tebe nado spat'." You should sleep too.
He looks at me. A beat. Another.
His eyes are dark.
Then he nods. Just once. Barely.
He doesn’t say come here or sleep or my name.
I cross to the bed.
The far side. The side I lay down on the night I crossed.
I don’t lie on top of the covers this time.
I get under them.
I pull back the sheet. The blanket. I slide in.
Under the sheet. Under the blanket. In the bed with him.
The fabric is cool against my legs. My nightgown rides up to mid-thigh when I settle. I don’t pull it down.
I lie on my side.
I face him.
Not the wall.
Not his back.
Him.
My cheek is on his pillow. The pillow is still warm from where his head was before he sat up. The pillow smells like him. Soap and skin and warmth.
He’s already on his side facing me.
No shirt. The sheet is at his waist. Low on his waist. Lower than it needs to be. The line where the sheet meets his skin. The muscle at his hip. The place where his ribs meet his stomach.
His chest rises and falls when he breathes.
His right hand is on the sheet between us. Palm down. Fingers loose. Close enough that if either of us shifted, we would touch.
His hand stays. He doesn’t move at all.
His face is close to mine in the dark.
No man this close. Not safely.
His eyes are dark, almost black in this light, and he doesn’t look away and neither do I. We don’t touch or speak. The heat of his body reaches me through the space between us, his warmth and the size of him and the smell of his skin, and my nipples are hard against the cotton of my nightgown.
His every breath reaches me. Chest rising. Falling. Steady. Not like mine.
The room smells like soap and clean sheets and jasmine through the open window.
The cicadas have gone quiet.
The line of his jaw, the place where his throat meets his chest. His hair falls across his forehead. His mouth is soft at the edges, real.
The mouth that was on mine in the library. That kissed me slow and deep and gave me everything without taking anything back.
My eyes go to his.
He’s looking at me. His eyes move across my face.
I let him.
The sheet shifts when he breathes and I catch the shape of him below it, hard, unmistakable, and he doesn’t move to hide it. His jaw tightens once. His hand on the sheet between us goes very still.
After a long while my heart slows.
My breath evens.
My hands unclench.
My body stills.
I close my eyes.
His hand stays on the sheet between us. Close enough to close. Close enough that the warmth of it reaches my fingers without touching.
I don’t close it.
Not tonight.
I sleep.
The light at the window is gray when I open my eyes.
Dawn. Early. The household isn’t awake yet.
He hasn’t moved.
His hand is where it was. Palm down on the sheet. Close to mine.
He’s asleep.
His mouth is softer than it is when he’s awake. The line between his eyebrows is gone. His breath is even and slow. The pulse at his throat is steady.
The sheet has slipped lower on his waist while he slept, low enough now to show the muscle at his hip, the shadow below it.
He’s asleep with his face close to mine.
I don’t move.
I stay.
The pillow has creased the side of my cheek. I don’t lift my head or shift. I lie on my side with my cheek on his pillow.
I count in my head.
Raz. Dva. Tri.
The same count he gave me on the rug beside my bed when I couldn’t still on my own.
Chetyre. Pyat’. Shest’.
His ribs move when he breathes.
Sem’. Vosem’. Devyat’.
His hand curled loose on the sheet.
Desyat’.
Ten.
I keep counting.
The line of his throat, the hollow at the base of it, the warmth of him there, slow and steady and alive.
His mouth.
I kissed that mouth in the library. He let me pull away first.
His mouth is close to mine right now.
I could close that distance.
I don’t.
Sorok.
Forty.
I don’t kiss him or touch him.
I sit up. Slow. Careful. My body doesn’t want to move and I make it anyway. I slide my legs out from under the covers.
The air is cold against my skin after the warmth of the bed.
I stand.
I walk barefoot into the hallway.
I don’t look back.
Sofia’s light is on.
I’m still steps away when the door opens.
Sofia is in her nightgown. Her hair is down. She looks awake. Not sleepy-awake. Alert-awake.
She sees me.
Her eyes drop to my nightgown. To my bare feet. To the direction I came from.
She doesn’t say anything.
She raises her left hand. Palm out. The gesture that means stop or wait or I see you.
She closes her door.
Slowly. Soft. Until the latch clicks.
The line of light under the gap goes out.
She saw me.
I walk to my room.
I close my door.
Sit on the unmade bed. The comforter is still on the floor.
My hand goes to the side of my face. There’s a crease there. From his pillow.
His pillow.
My nightgown smells like his sheets. Like him.
I don’t move.
I can still feel the heat of him, the space between us that never closed. The line of his ribs when he breathed. The hollow at the base of his throat. The way his eyes looked at me in the dark.
I wanted to touch him.
To put my hand on his chest and feel his heartbeat. To close the distance and press my mouth to his.
I lay close enough to feel his warmth. I let him sleep.
I get under the covers in my own bed.
The sheets are cold. They smell like nothing.
I close my eyes and his warmth is still on my skin.