26. Raven #2
"You are not leaving me again." It comes out of him with nothing arranged in front of it at all.
"That isn't a threat, and I have no leverage, and there is a woman on that plaza who could have me arrested this afternoon.
It is simply true, and I would rather say it badly than have you find out I felt it and didn't."
The car goes about a block.
And I sit in the back of it and think: there it is. There's the whole man. He asks about the thing that matters, then moves your entire apartment across a continent without asking about anything at all, and both of those are the same person, and neither of them is going to change.
"I love you," I say.
He goes completely still.
"That's not — I'm not finished." I put a hand up. "You don't get that as a conclusion, you get it as a starting position, because I've got a condition and I need you to hear the whole of it before you answer."
"Say it."
"All of it stops." I turn in the seat to face him.
"Every division. The eleven containers, the brokers, the men who sign without reading, the entire thing.
You keep the freight company — I don't care about the freight company; the freight company employs 1,100 people and pays its taxes. Everything else goes."
He looks at me.
"Yes," he says.
I blink.
"You didn't think about it."
"I have thought about it since Kansas," Ilya says. "You have simply asked me on a Thursday."
"Ilya, I'm not — I need you to understand what I'm asking, this isn't a—"
"It will take two years," he says. "Possibly three.
Eleven arrangements cannot simply be stopped; they must be handed to somebody, and four of them will require conversations that I would rather you were not in the country for.
It will cost me a very great deal of money, and it will make three families in this country extremely unhappy with me, and there is a version where somebody tries something about it.
" He shrugs slightly, which pulls at his side.
"And it is going to happen anyway. Stefano Severese has been telling me to do it for two years, and I have been telling him he is soft, and I am going to have to telephone him and be gracious about it, which is the part I am actually dreading. "
I sit there.
"You're serious."
"Raven." He turns properly. "I have a son who is eleven in February and a woman who has just been told she can have New York. What exactly do you imagine I am holding on to?"
And that's the moment I do it.
"There's something I need to tell you," I say.
"All right."
"I'm pregnant."
And I watch Ilya Yaroslav receive information he has been carrying for several days as though it has just been handed to him.
He does it perfectly. That's the thing. His face does exactly what a man's face does — the calmness, then the disbelief, then something breaking open behind the eyes — and it is completely genuine, because none of it is about the fact and all of it is about me telling him.
"Say it again."
"I'm pregnant. About nine weeks. It's — "my voice goes to a near whisper "— Ilya, they told me I couldn't. Two doctors told me I couldn't, and I've been walking around with that since I was twenty-three, and I sat on the floor of that gas restroom on Florida Avenue and—"
He kisses me.
He gets both hands into my hair and pulls me across the seat and kisses me like a man coming up out of water, and I make a noise into his mouth that has three months in it.
"Careful — your side—"
"My side can go to hell."
"You've got a hole in you—"
"Raven," he says, against my mouth, "I have been standing in car parks for days."
And that's the end of the conversation.
He gets me across his lap, which isn't sensible for either of us, and his hands are under the courthouse skirt and up the backs of my thighs, and there isn't anything patient about him at all — no feather, no counting, no unbearable stillness.
This is a man who has been holding something in both hands for days and has just been given permission to put it down.
"The divider," I get out.
"Is up."
"Grigor—"
"Has been told."
I get his belt open, and he says something in Russian into my throat. I stop caring about Grigor, the courthouse eleven blocks behind us, and the fact that I have been legally a person again for approximately forty minutes.
He does it with his mouth first, with my back against the door and one of my heels somewhere near the ceiling, and I have my hand over my own face because the divider isn't soundproof and I am not going to be able to look Grigor in the eye for a year.
Ilya takes his time despite the fact that neither of us has much patience right now. His mouth moves over the soft skin between my thighs, slowly. Hooking one hand around my hip to keep me exactly where he wants me while the other braces my leg high against the seat.
Every deliberate pass of his tongue pulls another moan from me, and I bite down agains the heel of my hand to try to keep quiet. Uselessly, I might add. By the time my fingers find his hair I am shaking hard enough that he tightens his grip in response.
He hold me there until I come apart against his mouth, the satisfied chuckle he gives in response is almost insufferable.
Then I get him down onto the seat and take my turn, and the sound he makes is one I intend to remember for the rest of my life, and about four minutes in his hand comes into my hair and holds — not pushing, just holding — and he says my name once, wrecked, like a man losing an argument.
Afterward we are an absolute disgrace.
I am sideways across the back seat with my head on his thigh and my hair destroyed and one shoe somewhere near the divider, and he has a hand flat on my stomach, low, and has had it there for about eleven minutes without saying a word about it.
"He'll be pleased," I say.
"He will be insufferable."
"He's going to want to name it."
"He is going to want to name it after a boat," Ilya says, with genuine alarm, "he has been reading about the Cutty Sark for a fortnight—"
And I laugh so hard my hip hurts.
We land in Los Angeles at nine that night, and Sergei is on the steps before the car has stopped, because Bogdan flew him back from Suffolk two days ago and he has been at that window since four in the afternoon.
He hits me at about waist height and knocks the breath out of me.
"You came back—"
"I came back."
"You said in the letter you'd tell me and not the bed and then you didn't—"
"I know. I broke it. I told you I broke it on purpose, and I'm not going to apologize for that, because it was the right thing, but you get to be angry about it for as long as you want."
He thinks about this, with his arms still round me.
"Two days," he decides.
"That's very generous."
"Okay, three."
We tell him in the kitchen, at half past nine at night, with all four of us standing up.
He bursts into tears immediately, which nobody expects, and then apologizes for crying, which absolutely wrecks his father.
And then he wipes his face with the back of his hand and looks at me and says, in a voice of enormous seriousness:
"Am I allowed to help choose the name?"