Chapter 37
NICO
The lamp on the desk is on at low.
I am at the chair by the desk. I have been waiting.
Mila has come to my bed every night since we came home. She is at the doorway in the white shirt. Just the shirt. The chain at her throat under the collar. The wooden cross is on my nightstand beside the lamp where she has set it.
She does not stop in the doorway. She crosses to me and sits on my lap, her hands at my chest, her face close to mine.
I go hard the moment her weight settles.
She doesn’t kiss me first. She looks at my face. She has been doing this for days. Every morning when I come back from the back room. Every night when she comes to me. Like she is reading something written there that only she can see.
Her face changes. The tightness around her eyes goes.
She kisses me. Careful. Slow. Her hands stay flat on my chest like she is taking a reading.
She tastes like chicory. I kiss her back. I carry her to the bed.
I lay her on the bed and she lifts her arms over her head, then stops, drops them, reaches for my collar instead. Pulls me down to her. Her fingers at the buttons of my shirt, working them open one at a time, unhurried, her eyes on my face the whole time.
“I want to see you,” she says.
I let her.
She pushes the shirt off my shoulders. Her hands at my chest, my ribs, the scar at my side she has traced before. Her palm flat on the tape Giada put on and her eyes coming up to mine.
“Does it still hurt?”
“No.”
She presses lightly. Testing. Her mouth curves.
“Liar.”
I take the shirt off her. The chain stays. She is bare under it and I go still for a moment just looking at her in the low light, and she watches me look, and she does not look away.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“Yes.”
She is small. Her ribs have gone soft. Her hipbones have filled. She is warm and she is here and she is mine.
I start at her wrist. Three small marks on the inside of her right wrist. A city I was not in. A room I cannot undo. I kiss the marks. Her skin tastes faintly of soap. Tongue after each. She breathes in once.
I move to the inside of her left wrist. Two marks. Another city. Another room I was not in. I kiss both.
“Nico.”
I look up.
Her eyes are wet. She shakes her head once. Looks away.
I move up her arm. The crease of her elbow. The line of her shoulder. The collarbone. The chain at her throat. The dark place under her jaw where the violin lived. The pulse there.
Her hand comes to the back of my head. Holds me.
The small mark above her left eyebrow. The line is old. The first scar Alexei gave her.
I put my mouth there and I hold it there and I do not move. Under my lips her pulse is steady. She survived every room I was not in. Every one of them. And she is here, and I am going to spend the rest of my life making sure she never has to survive alone again.
“Hey, baby.” The words come out low and soft against her skin before I have decided to say them.
She goes still under me for one beat. Her fingers tighten in my hair.
I kiss it and move down.
The line below her ribs. A longer scar from a city I do not know.
I kiss it. The hipbone on the left, a small raised mark.
I kiss that too. The inside of her right thigh.
The place I marked the night before the river.
The mark has faded to a faint impression.
It has done its work. I kiss the place. Slow. Tongue after.
“Bozhe.” God. Her hand tightens in my hair. “Don’t stop.”
The inside of her left thigh. A smaller scar. A city I was not in. I kiss it.
I move back up her body. Across her sternum. Salt-warm. Her skin smells of jasmine through the open window. I take the chain at her throat in my teeth for a breath and let it go. I kiss the chain and the place where it meets the locket-line that has been empty for years.
The new cut on her left thumb, small and still healing. The cut the folding knife took out of her thumb when she pulled the blade back from the Russian’s sleeve at Casa Lucia. The only mark her hands put on the world.
I kiss the cut last.
She makes a small sound. Then.
“That one tickles.”
I lift my mouth. She is looking at me with something warm and almost surprised in her face and I realize I have not seen her look like that before, like she did not know she was allowed to laugh in this bed.
I kiss her mouth.
“Vsya moya.” All mine.
“Da.” Her hands come to my face. “Vsya tvoya.” She pulls me down. “Now stop talking and—”
I taste her. The salt of her hipbone. The inside of her thigh.
Her pussy, wet and ready. She makes sounds against my hair, not small, not bitten off, real sounds, her voice fully in the room, and her hands find the back of my head and hold me and when she comes the first time she says my name, not whispered, said. Nico. Like she is certain of it.
She pulls me up by the shoulders.
“Come here,” she says. “I want you here.”
I move up her body and take her and she arches up to meet me and makes a sound that goes straight through me and says “yes, there, like that” against my jaw and I am not going to survive this woman, I am absolutely not going to survive her, and I do not care.
I come inside her with her name in my mouth.
“Milochka.”
I say it quietly.
She turns her face into my neck. Her arms come around me and hold.
We lie there. I curl around her from behind. My hand low on her stomach. My mouth at the back of her neck. The smell of her hair. Sweat and soap and us. The chain at her throat under my chin.
The painting space door is open across the room.
Yelena is on the canvas in the lamplight.
I have not turned her to the wall in days.
The canvas stays out. I look at her face in the paint and the grief of her is there and it is bearable now and I let it be.
She is going to be in this room with us for the rest of my life. That is right. The way it should be.
“I’m going to love you for the rest of my life.” A breath. “You know that, right?”
She is quiet for a moment. Long enough that I think she has gone under. Then:
“I love you.”
Her voice steady and low and certain the way it goes when she has decided something.
My chest does the thing it does when something costs me and I was not braced for the cost. My arms pull her closer before I have told them to. My face goes into the back of her neck and I stay there for a long breath and I do not speak because I do not trust my voice right now.
She lets me stay there. Her hand finds my arm where it crosses her stomach and holds.
“Okay?” she asks quietly.
“Khorosho.”
She tightens her hand on my arm. I feel her smile against the pillow.
A beat of quiet. The lamp on the desk still on at low. The canvas of Yelena across the room. The chain at her throat warm under my chin.
“Khorosho,” she says back. Soft. Testing the word in her mouth.
She sleeps.
I watch her face for a long time. The chain at her throat. The mark above her eyebrow. The small sound she makes when she breathes.
Keep being a man she chose.
I close my eyes.
I sleep. For the first time in years, the dark behind my eyes stays quiet.