38. Cora
CORA
Nik let himself out the same way he'd let himself in, without ceremony, already dialing someone else before the door had fully shut behind him, and for a long moment after the latch clicked I just stood there in the middle of Dmitri's living room in yesterday's clothes, holding a fact I hadn't finished absorbing.
Five days. A name that used to sit in a folder marked security and now had a face attached to it.
I waited for the familiar climb of fear up my spine, and found it simply was not coming, chased out already by something warmer that had been building since the second he pulled that door open and found me waiting for him instead of the other way around.
"You're smiling," Dmitri said, watching me with the particular focus he usually saved for floor plans.
"I'm processing a lot of things at once. Some of them happen to be good."
"Which parts are good?"
"The part where we have five days instead of five hours.
The part where Kirill has a name and a paper trail now instead of just my bad feeling about him.
The part where you're looking at me like that instead of like I'm a liability you need to manage.
" I crossed the room and stopped close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that neither of us needed to raise our voices for any of this.
"Mostly the part where you opened a door tonight instead of closing one. "
"I'm going to keep doing that. For the record."
"I heard the terms. I was there for the terms." I reached for his collar and undid the first button, unhurried, watching his breath catch slightly at the motion in a way that still did something complicated to my chest even now, months into this.
"I just like hearing you say it a second time.
Apparently I have a whole system for that. Confirmations. Documentation."
"You should write it down. In one of your notebooks."
"Don't tempt me. I have a system for everything else in my life.
It would only be fair to have one for this too.
" My hands had reached the third button before I registered I'd been doing it at all, some part of me already ahead of the conversation, already certain in a way I hadn't let myself be certain the first time we did this.
There had been so much careful checking in that first night, so many pauses to ask if the other person was still sure, both of us treating every step forward like it might need to be taken back.
Tonight there was none of that hesitation left in either of us. We already knew.
He caught my wrist before I finished, not to stop me, just to press my palm flat against his chest the way he had the very first time, and I felt his heart going fast and steady underneath my hand, no longer something he needed to hide behind a careful voice.
"I almost lost this," he said, quiet, no polish left in it at all. "Last night I stood in this exact room and told myself losing you would at least keep you safe, and I have never regretted being right about anything the way I regretted being wrong about that."
"You weren't wrong about wanting me safe.
You were wrong about what that had to cost." I pressed closer, my forehead against his jaw, breathing him in.
"I almost lost this too. I want you to know that.
Walking away felt like strength for about four hours, and then it just felt like the same old habit wearing a better argument. "
"We're not doing that again."
"No. We're really not."
He kissed me then, slow at first and then hungrier, one hand sliding into my hair while the other found the small of my back and pulled me flush against him, and whatever I had been about to say next simply stopped existing, same as it always did whenever his mouth found mine instead of just promising to.
We moved toward the bedroom without discussing it, the way people do when a decision has already been made somewhere neither of us needed to speak out loud, shedding jackets and shirts along the way with none of the fumbling uncertainty of the first time, just an easy, laughing kind of hunger that had nowhere left to hide from and no reason to.
"You're very good at this part," I said against his mouth, breathless, working at his belt.
"Which part specifically?"
"The not stopping to ask if I'm sure every four seconds part. I appreciate the growth."
"I know you're sure. I intend to keep behaving like a man who knows that.
" He walked me backward the last few steps to the bed, unhurried despite everything in his voice that said otherwise, and lowered me onto the mattress like the next five days belonged to exactly this. "Tell me if that changes."
"It won't."
"Good."
There was a warmth to it this time that hadn't been there the first night, back when we were still two people learning the shape of each other one careful question at a time.
Tonight neither of us needed the questions.
His hands knew where to go without checking, and mine knew him back the same way, and when his body finally covered mine there was laughter tangled into it as easily as heat, his mouth curving against my throat at some soft, ridiculous thing I said, mine curving right back when he answered it with something worse.
We moved together like two people who had already survived the hardest part of this, the almost losing, and had come out the other side of it wanting nothing except more of exactly this, unhurried and certain and entirely without the fear that used to sit quietly under everything we did.
We were nowhere near finished, his forehead pressed against mine, the two of us breathless and well past anything that could still be called careful, when my phone lit up the nightstand, bright enough that I caught the flash of it without meaning to.
"Ignore it," I said, not stopping.
"I'm not the one who looked."
"I didn't look. I glimpsed. There's a difference."
The phone buzzed again, insistent, and then a third time, and Dmitri went still above me with the specific stillness of a man calculating whether three consecutive buzzes at two in the morning constituted an emergency he was contractually obligated to address.
"It's probably Beckett," I said. "It's always Beckett."
"At two in the morning?"
"His imagination apparently peaks well past midnight, same as some people's best ideas surface in the shower.
" I reached over without fully sitting up, more curious than alarmed, and read the first line glowing up at both of us in the dark.
"He's texting me that the Hendricks wedding sat the groom's ex-business partner directly across from his current one, and I quote, 'this is a bloodbath waiting to happen and somebody needs to promise me it's fine before I have an aneurysm. '"
Dmitri read it over my shoulder. Something about the absurd, over-caffeinated urgency of it, table assignments treated as a matter of literal life and death, delivered at two in the morning by a man who brought the same operatic panic to every crisis, romantic or logistical, broke something loose in both of us at once.
I started laughing first, helpless and a little unhinged, the kind of laugh that had been building under twenty-four hours of genuine danger and finally found somewhere safe to go.
Dmitri's shoulders shook against mine a second later, quiet at first and then not even close to quiet, his forehead dropping to my collarbone while he laughed in a way I had maybe heard from him twice in the entire time I'd known him.
"Your event coordinator," he said, when he could talk again, "thinks two feuding groomsmen constitute the worst crisis currently unfolding in this city."
"To be fair, he doesn't know about the other one."
"Small mercies."
"I should probably answer him."
"You should probably not." He took the phone gently out of my hand, set it face down on the nightstand with a decisiveness that made me laugh again, and turned back to me, whatever amusement had been on his face a moment earlier already sliding into something far more focused.
"Beckett survives until morning. I have been extremely patient tonight, all things considered. "
"You've been very patient. I noticed. I'm documenting it."
"Document quietly."
I did not, in fact, manage to be quiet about it, and neither did he, and whatever momentum Beckett's crisis had briefly interrupted came back twice as sure of itself, both of us laughing again at some point for no reason we could have named except the sheer, ridiculous relief of being here at all, together, undamaged, with five whole days between us and the thing that had nearly cost us this.
By the time we were finally done there was no held breath left in either of us, no bracing for an exit, just his hand finding mine on the pillow, same as it had the very first time, except now it felt less like discovery and more like habit, the good kind, the kind two people build on purpose because they've decided they intend to keep it.
Afterward we lay tangled in sheets neither of us had bothered to straighten, his fingers moving slowly through my hair, my ear pressed to his chest listening to his heartbeat finally slow all the way down.
"I keep thinking about the door," I said into the quiet.
"Which door?"
"Yours. Tonight. Every version of that moment where I could have stayed frozen in that hallway instead of finally knocking, and every version of it where you could have let the silence sit instead of answering.
" I rested my hand flat against his chest, thinking about how close we'd both come to choosing the easier, lonelier version of tonight.
"We almost didn't get this. Either of us. "
"We got it anyway."
"We got it anyway," I agreed, and let myself believe it all the way through, finally, the night after walking out of his office convinced I would never get the chance to feel this again.
"Five days," I said, testing the shape of it out loud against his skin.
"Five days."
"That's not very long."
"It is long enough. Nik does not need more than that when he already has a name and a paper trail behind it.
" He shifted enough to look at me properly, his hand coming up to brush a strand of hair off my face, unhurried, matching the pace of everything else about him tonight.
"You are not disappearing for those five days either, for the record.
I already told you that once. I meant it the first time. "
"I know you meant it. I intend to hold you to it daily, possibly hourly, until the habit sets in properly."
"I would expect nothing less."
"Good. I have gotten remarkably skilled lately at holding people to things.
" I settled back against him, listening to his heartbeat, thinking that five days sounded almost bearable when I was allowed to spend every one of them exactly like this, informed and included instead of shut out of a single piece of it.
"Ask me again in four days if I still feel this brave. "
"I will. Every single one of them."
He held me a long while after that, in no rush to let go, the city outside doing whatever the city did at this hour, indifferent and endless and none of our business anymore.
I was half asleep, warm and thoroughly undone, more content than I could remember being in a very long time, with a countdown running somewhere underneath all of it, when the screen of my phone lit the nightstand once more.
On the nightstand, my phone read: Five days. I turned off the screen and didn't look at it again until morning.