27. Raven
Raven
It takes eleven days for the house to become a home.
That's the part nobody tells you about the evolution of something like this.
Bogdan takes the stitches out of Ilya's side on the Tuesday and tells him he is a fortunate and extremely stupid man.
My hip stops being a problem and becomes a thing that aches when it rains, which apparently it will do for the rest of my life.
Sergei goes back to being loud at breakfast.
My furniture is in four rooms, and I have not moved any of it, because it turns out I do not care where the sofa is, and this is information about myself I would rather not have received.
Yeremey arrives on Thursday and hugs me before I can do anything about it.
"You are much shorter than I expected," he says, delighted. "He described you as tall. He is a liar, and I have always said so."
"He talks about me?"
"Ms West," Yeremey says, "since the first week of March that man has said perhaps four hundred words to me about freight."
We are eleven days into it before the two of us are alone in a room with nothing else happening.
That's not an accident, and we both know it. There has been a courthouse, a boy, an aircraft, and a man with stitches, and underneath all of it, running the entire time, is a folder in a drawer that hasn't been mentioned once.
Then, on the Sunday, he puts a box on the kitchen island.
"Everything," Ilya says. "The originals, the copies, the digital, and the card. The photographs, the list, and the pages about Foster."
I look at it.
"There is one item that isn't in there," he says, "because I want to hand it to you rather than let you find it.
The man who took the pictures is called Adam Vasquez; he works out of Silver Spring, and his details are in the envelope on the top.
He has been paid, he doesn't know your name, and he has taken photographs of your mother every Wednesday for weeks. "
I stand in the kitchen and put both hands flat on the counter.
"I'm going to burn it," I say.
"Yes."
"Not because it's finished."
"No."
"I want to be clear about that." I look up. "I'm burning it because I don't want to own it, and because I've realized that if it exists then some version of me is going to keep going back to look at it. It's not absolution. You don't get absolution out of a fire."
"I have never once asked you for absolution," Ilya says. "I asked to be in the room."
We burn it in the fire pit on the terrace at seven on a Sunday evening.
It takes forty minutes because a document that thick doesn't burn well, and we have to keep breaking it up with a poker.
At some point, the sheer inconvenience of it becomes funny, and we both end up laughing about something that isn't remotely funny.
The last thing to go is the photograph of my mother at my father's grave.
I hold it for a while.
"She's going to want to meet you," I say. "She's going to be appalling about it. She's going to ask you what your intentions are, in those words, and then she's going to show you a photograph of me at fourteen with a fringe."
"I would like that a very great deal."
"You say that now."
I put it in the fire.
That night I go and find him in the study, which nobody uses any more because the door doesn't lock, the keypad has been taken off the wall, and there is a hole in the plaster where it was, and he hasn't fixed it.
"I want to ask you for something," I say.
He puts the book down.
"All right."
"And I want to do the asking, because you've done it every single time, and I've been thinking about that for about a month." I stay in the doorway. "That night in the wax. You made me go upstairs and sit on a bed for eleven minutes because you didn't want a yes I'd give in a mood."
"I remember."
"So this one's mine." I fold my arms. "I want both of them. The wax and the feather. Wax first."
He doesn't say anything for a moment, and I watch a great many things happen behind his face.
"You know what that is," he says.
"I've been thinking about it for four weeks."
"Say it, then, so that we are both in the same room."
"After the wax I've got nothing left." My voice is less shaky than I expected.
"Last time, when you put your hands on me at the end, a palm was nearly too much.
So doing the feather afterward, over the top of that — " I stop.
"That's not more of the same thing. That's the opposite thing, and I won't be able to brace for it, because there won't be anything left to brace with. "
"No," Ilya agrees. "There won't."
"I know."
"And you've thought about the pregnancy."
"I've thought about the pregnancy, I've thought about it a great deal, and I asked Bogdan a hypothetical question on Tuesday that he didn't for one second believe was hypothetical.
" I hold his eyes. "Nothing on the abdomen.
Nothing near it. I'm ten weeks along. But, I'm fine, and I'd really like you to stop looking at me like I'm made of glass, because that's the only part of any of this I actually can't stand. "
Something moves in his face.
"All right," he says.
"That's it? No eleven minutes on a bed?"
"You have taken four weeks," Ilya says. "I am not going to insult you with eleven minutes."
He does it properly, which by now I would have been offended by anything else.
The room is warm before I get into it — he has been in here for half an hour, and the heating is up, because cooled wax on a cold body is a different and worse experience, and he knows that and I didn't.
The blindfold goes on first. Same as before. And the moment it does, the room stops being a place I have mapped and becomes a place I have to take on trust, and my whole body has the same argument it had in June and loses it faster.
He ties my hands above me. Good work, again — enough slack that I am not stretched, not enough to reach, and the small professional part of me that noticed the quality of the knots last time notices that he has changed the wrap so there is less on the pulse point.
"Water. To you're right." Something sets down beside my head. "Hear it?"
"Yes."
"Bowl on the floor by my knee. You won't need it."
"Ilya."
"Mm."
"Stop being competent, it's very annoying."
"No," he says.
And then the nothing.
Ten minutes of it, maybe more — the same appalling opening move, a man moving quietly around a room and doing absolutely nothing, and me lying in the dark with every nerve I own trying to triangulate a set of footsteps.
By the time he touches me, I am already gone.
The wax starts high and goes further than June.
He is more confident this time, and I can hear it — the pause, the small sound of him testing it on his own forearm, the drop. Collarbone. The flat under it. The outside of one breast and then, eventually, both, and by the fourth of those I have stopped making words.
He works down my sides. Never across, never anywhere near the middle of me, and after about the eleventh drop I notice that he has built the whole geography of this around a place he isn't going, and that noticing it does something to my chest that has nothing to do with heat.
And it does what it did in June: it takes everything.
Every drop takes the whole apparatus — the courthouse, the corridor, four sworn statements, sixty hours in a basement, a bathroom floor on Florida Avenue — and puts all of it into one square centimeter of skin for a second and a half.
There isn't anything else, and I didn't know how badly I needed there to be nothing else until the fourth one.
Somewhere in the middle, I start to shake; it’s not cold, and it isn't fear.
"Raven."
"Don't stop."
"That was not the question."
"Green. Fine. Perfect. Don't stop."
"Say it in your own words."
"I'm — " I have to find them, which is hard, and that's the point. "I'm all right, I want more, and if you stop now I will personally—"
"That will do," Ilya says, and I hear something in his voice that isn't composed at all.
It goes on a long time.
Long enough that the wax on my collarbone has gone hard and cool while there is still fresh landing on my hip, and the difference between the two — the cold plates and the live heat, on the same body, at the same time — is a thing I have no equipment for.
And then he stops.
He sets something down. He moves. I hear him settle beside me, and I am lying there entirely overloaded, breathing like I have run up a hill, waiting for the pressure of a hand — because that is what happened last time, that is what the ending is: he puts his hands on me, and I go off like something being switched.
He doesn't.
There is a noise I recognize and cannot immediately place.
And then the feather touches the inside of my wrist.
I come off the bed.
Completely — my whole back arches and I make a noise I have genuinely never made in my life, because after forty minutes of heat, a single fine line of almost-nothing isn't less.
It isn't gentler. It is the same information arriving through a door that has been kicked off its hinges, and there is no part of me left that can absorb it.
"Ilya—"
"Don't move," he says, and he is enjoying himself enormously, and I can hear it.
"I can't — that isn't — you cannot—"
"You asked me for this."
"I've changed my mind—"
The feather stops instantly.
Everything stops. The mattress shifts and his hand comes near my face, not touching, and his voice is completely different.
"Say it properly."
And I am laughing, wrecked, half sobbing, blindfolded and tied to a bedframe covered in cooled wax.
"No — no, I haven't, I meant it as a — keep going, keep going, I'm sorry, that was an expression of speech—"
"That," Ilya says, "was very poorly chosen phrasing."
"I'm aware."
"Do not do it again."
"I won't."
"Raven."
"I won't. Please keep going. Please."
And he does.
He takes it over the wax first — the cool, hardened plates, where I cannot feel it at all, so there isn't anything but the knowledge of where it is — and then over the bare skin between them, which is raw and overloaded and has had forty minutes of heat on it.
The contrast between those two things about eleven inches apart remains genuinely unbearable.
I lose track of everything.
I don't know how long. I know that I beg, twice, in words I won't be repeating; I know that at some point the blindfold is soaked through at the outside corner and that neither of us mentions it; I know that when he finally, finally puts his hands and then his mouth on me I go somewhere for a while that isn't a place.
And I know that the last thing before that happens is his voice, very close to my ear, saying something in Russian I still do not understand.
Afterward he does the whole thing.
He unties my hands and rubs both wrists between his palms for two solid minutes, which they do not need.
He peels every single piece of wax off me himself, slowly, one at a time, into the bowl, doesn’t permit me to help, and doesn’t rush it.
Warm cloth over all of it. Water, which he holds, because my hands are shaking too much to be trusted with a glass.
The blindfold comes off last, and the light in the room is already down to nothing, because he thought about that half an hour before I did.
Then he gets in beside me and pulls a blanket over both of us and puts a hand flat and low on my stomach, where nothing has touched all night, and holds it there.
I am non-verbal for a while. He doesn't fill it.
"Say the Russian," I manage, eventually.
"No."
"Ilya."
"You will have it eventually. Not tonight." His hand moves once. "Tonight you get English."
"That's not—"
"Raven."
I open my eyes.
He is looking at me, in a dark room, with his hair a disgrace and forty-one hours of a very long fortnight in his face, and he isn't composed at all.
"In June," he says, "in this house, after the first time, you said something out loud and then you pretended to be asleep."
Everything in me goes very still.
"You knew."
"I knew before you'd finished the sentence.
" A pause. "I let you pretend, because you were not in a state to have meant it and I was not going to hold you to something you said with your hands still shaking.
And then you left eleven days later, and I have thought about those four seconds every single day since, and I would like to be finished thinking about them. "
I lie there with my heart going.
"I love you," I say.
Awake. Looking at him. Nothing between us and nowhere to go.
And Ilya Yaroslav — who has run a criminal organization across four cities for eleven years, who killed his own uncle in a study when he was twenty-five, who isn't, by any measure, a good man and has never once claimed to be —
— closes his eyes for a second, like a man setting something down that he has been carrying up a hill.
"I love you," he says. "I have loved you since a corridor in Kansas, and I have been extremely badly behaved about it ever since, and I intend to be badly behaved about it for the rest of my life."
"That's not really a—"
"It is the best I have," he says. "You will have to take it."
I take it.