Nick
She falls asleep on my chest.
It happens in degrees. Her breathing slows first, then her fingers loosen where they were curled against my ribs, and then her weight settles into me the way water settles into a glass.
I don't move. My arm is going to be dead inside ten minutes and I don't care.
I've had her in my arms for less than an hour and I'm already learning that I don’t want to let her go.
I look at the ceiling above us.
It's water-stained in one corner. The paint is peeling near the light fixture. The light fixture itself is a bare bulb. The walls are bare, but at least look like they’ve had a fresh coat of paint in the last decade or so.
I shouldn’t be here.
I think it clearly, because it's true. My father is fading away sixteen miles east of this apartment, and my uncle is at his bedside smiling, and I don't know which morning I will wake up to the call that changes everything.
When it comes, Viktor will move. I don't know how. I only know that he has been waiting a long time and that waiting men always have a first step ready. My father, in the last clear voice he had, told me Viktor would come for the thing I love. I didn’t entirely believe, when he said it, that I had a thing that I love.
But I know now because she is asleep on my chest.
I reach for the blanket with my free hand and pull it up over her shoulders, because the window has no curtain and the fire escape is leaking cold air through the glass.
She makes a small sound against my chest.
It's not a word. It's a sleeping sound, the kind a person makes when they're warm and safe and their body has decided to trust the surface it's on.
I feel it in the flat of my sternum. I feel something else there too.
The thing that began to unfurl the day I woke to her dressing the wound on my arm.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep. I'm not going to sleep in her bed the first night she has let me into it, not unless she asks me to.
I rest my hand on the back of her head and stroke her hair with my fingers.
I listen to her breathing change into the long slow pattern of real sleep, and I let myself have this.
An hour. Maybe two. Whatever I'm given before something in the world remembers where I am and comes to collect me.
Time passes.
I don't know how much. The lamp on the floor is the only light in the room, and it doesn't change.
My arm goes numb and I shift her, carefully, so that her head is on my shoulder instead of my chest and my arm has some blood flow again.
She doesn't wake up. Her mouth is a little open. Her lips still swollen from our kisses.
She stirs.
Her eyes open slowly. She looks at me for a moment as if she's checking that I'm still the same man she fell asleep on, and then her mouth softens and she lays her palm flat against my chest.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"How long was I out?" she asks, stretching her body in a way that wakes up ever nerve ending in mine.
"Not long."
She props herself up on one elbow and looks down at me. Her hair is a mess. The blanket slides off one shoulder and she doesn't grab for it.
"You stayed," she says.
"I stayed," I repeat, stroking my thumb over her bottom lip.
"You could have left,” she offers, the blush in her cheeks telling me she’s glad I didn’t.
"I didn't want to."
She lowers her head and presses her mouth to the side of my throat. It's such a small thing. It's such a careful, thought-out, deliberate thing, and I feel it all the way down my spine. My hand comes up to the back of her neck without any decision on my part.
She lifts her head. Her eyes are clear now. Whatever sleep took out of her, it put back something else, and she's looking at me with a steadiness I’ve only seen on her in the sedan and on the sidewalk, both times when she was making a decision and meant it.
"I want more," she says, stroking her fingertips over my chest while I try to control my pulse rate and the way my cock reacts to seeing her like this. Still naked, flushed, and wanting.
"You're sure?" I want to give her the world, I realize. And I’m not sure I can give it to her piece by piece in a way that she would feel comfortable accepting. I want to snatch it all up and lay it at her feet.
"Yes." She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and a groan vibrates from my throat.
I roll her so she is on top of me.
She makes a small surprised sound and then she laughs, a real laugh, the first one I have ever heard out of her, and it's a sound I am going to hear in my head for the rest of my life. She looks at me like she's the one doing the memorizing this time.
"Your turn," she says.
I frown, my question clear.
"To let me look."
She traces the line of my jaw with one finger.
She follows it down to my throat, to my collarbone, to the scar over my ribs that's older than she is.
Her finger stops there. She looks up at me with a question in her eyes and I shake my head once, because tonight isn't the night for the story of that scar.
She nods once back, because she understands every language I speak without needing any of them explained.
She keeps tracing.
The ink on my left pec. The ink over my ribs. The line of hair down the center of my stomach. Her finger is cool and steady and she's not rushing, and I understand that Sadie Jenkins is a woman who needs to put her hands on a thing to know it's real.
That’s when the biggest realization of them all hits me. I want her to know me. Every real part of me.
My phone rings.
The ringtone is the one I've assigned to Dmitri, and Dmitri doesn’t ring unless something is on fire. She feels me freeze and she goes still too, her eyes on my face.
"Nick."
"I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to answer this."
"I know."
I kiss her forehead and she lifts herself from me.
The ring stops as I reach into my back pocket for the phone, then immediately starts again.
Dmitri calling twice in thirty seconds. I thumb the phone open and put it to my ear as I say his name.
He speaks three sentences in Russian in the voice he uses when there is no other voice left, and every part of me that was warm thirty seconds ago goes cold.
I listen.
I ask two questions. I get two answers. I tell him I'm twenty minutes out and hang up.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my back to her and put both my hands over my face for one breath, because she deserves to not see what my face is doing right now, and then I drop my hands and I turn to look at her.
She's sitting up. She's pulled the blanket to her chest. Her face is carefully neutral.
"I have to go," I say.
"Okay." She smiles with it, and it looks genuine. But I hate that I’m leaving her now.
"Sadie—” I try to think of what to say, how to explain, while I’m grabbing my sweater and pulling it over my head.
"It’s okay, Nick. You have to go."
"It isn't what you think it is. It’s my father, he is sick."
"I'm not thinking anything. Go to him." Her voice is very even.
Her hair is falling over one shoulder and there's a pink mark on her collarbone where my mouth was ten minutes ago, and she's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I lean on the edge of the bed and I take her face in both hands.
"This is something I have to go deal with right now, and if I could stay I would, but I can't. Do you understand me?"
"Yes,” she says it emphatically, as though I’m the one not understanding, then she covers my hands with hers.
“Honestly Nick, I know there’s more to you than you’ve told me tonight, I’m not offended or upset that you have to leave, especially if it’s for family.
Please just go and do what you’ve got to do. ”
I kiss her hard, once, because I don't trust myself to kiss her soft right now, and I feel her hand slide to my wrist and hold it there for one second before she lets me go.
I stand and walk to where I left my shoes earlier. I turn back to look at her one more time, and she's exactly where I left her, on the bed with the blanket to her chest, and she lifts the corner of her mouth in a small smile.