9. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
The next morning, I wake before she does. That is the first mercy of the day.
For a few seconds, I don’t move. I keep my eyes closed and listen to the room breathe around us.
Snow taps lightly against the windows. The heat hums somewhere in the walls.
Taylor sleeps beside me with her cheek pressed against my shirt and her hand curled in the fabric near my ribs, as if she caught me in the night and forgot to let go.
I remember everything. That is not unusual. I am not a man who drinks enough to forget. Forgetting is a privilege for softer men.
Still, memory comes differently today.
It doesn’t come as a clean report. Not a sequence of choices and outcomes. It comes in fragments, each one more damning than the last.
Taylor beneath me, laughing once before she remembered to be nervous. Taylor saying she had not done this before and looking at me like she expected the knowledge to make me hate her.
Taylor touching herself beside me in the dark, whispering my name because she thought I was asleep. My hand over hers. Her body trembling against mine. The sound she made into my shoulder when pleasure finally took her apart.
I open my eyes. The ceiling above my bed is washed in dark green paint. Quiet luxury. There is nothing in this room I have not approved. Nothing I did not choose.
Except her.
Taylor sighs in her sleep and moves closer.
The top of her head presses beneath my chin.
I go still. There are many dangers in my life.
Men with guns. Men with money. Men with secrets.
Men with old grudges and new ambitions. I understand all of them.
I know where to place them, how to measure them, how to break them if breaking becomes necessary.
This girl asleep against me is a danger I do not understand.
That makes her worse.
She is too young. Too hopeful, though she would fight me for saying so.
Too proud, which is not the same as prepared.
She came to my bed last night dressed in a little black dress and false bravery, and I let myself pretend the bravery meant knowledge.
I let myself believe her sharp tongue was armor.
My hand rests on the blanket by her shoulder. I don’t remember putting it there. I don’t remember allowing myself even that much contact after she fell asleep.
Carefully, I lift it away.
Taylor frowns in her sleep.
My chest tightens.
Ridiculous. I have held dying men without flinching. I have watched men beg. I have given orders that changed the shape of families. But a twenty-year-old girl frowns in my bed because I have taken my hand away, and something in me responds like I have done wrong.
I sit up. Slowly. Her hand slips from my shirt. For one frozen second, I think she will wake and say my name again in that ruined little voice from the night before.
She doesn’t. She rolls onto her stomach, one bare knee escaping from beneath the blanket. My shirt rides high on her thigh.
I look away.
Not because I am noble.
Because I am not.
I stand and cross to the window, adjusting myself with an irritation that is almost anger. My body doesn’t care about consequence. It has never been especially loyal to my better judgment.
Outside, Moscow wakes beneath a thin white veil. Cars move slowly along the street beyond the gate. Men walk with their collars turned up, heads bowed against the cold. A normal morning. An ordinary city pretending it is not full of rot.
I pick up her dress, underwear, and tights from the floor and fold them neatly on the chair next to the bed. Beside me, Taylor makes a soft sound and shifts.
I close my eyes. I should have sent her home.
No. Earlier than that. I should have let her return to her friend at the bar. I should have ignored the way she said lonely like she was naming me in front of witnesses. I should have heard twenty and stood up, paid the bill, and walked away.
Instead, I brought her here. Instead, I know the sound she makes when she’s trying not to ask for more.
There are lines I didn’t cross last night. I can recite them if I need to. I did not take her virginity. I did not use her drunkenness as permission. I stopped when I realized she was not as ready as she wanted to be. I made her say what she wanted. I gave her less than she asked for.
All of that is true. None of it absolves me from what I did do and how I feel about it. How I know she will feel about it. The kind of life I brought her back to, knowing it was not safe.
The mattress creaks. “Mikhail?” Her voice is rough with sleep. My name in it is worse in the morning.
I turn. Taylor pushes herself up on one elbow, her long dirty-blond hair tangled around her face, her bangs pointing in several directions, my shirt sliding off one shoulder.
For a moment, she looks confused. Then the room returns to her.
The bed. The windows. Me standing half-dressed near the curtains.
Her eyes widen. Then her cheeks go red. Not delicately. Completely. “Oh my God.” She looks down at herself, grabs the blanket, and pulls it to her chest. She makes a sound between a groan and a laugh, then drops her face into her hands. “I want to evaporate.”
“That seems dramatic.”
“I learned from your house,” she repeats, and a smile moves at the edge of my mouth before I can stop it.
That is how it happens, I think. Not with the girl in the dress. Not with the mouth and the hands and the feverish stupidity of night.
This. Her in my bed, embarrassed and sharp-tongued in the morning light. This is what will ruin me if I let it.
Her eyes narrow. “You’re enjoying this.”
“No.”
“You are.”
“A little.” I point to the chair. “I folded your clothes.” Taylor’s blush deepens when she notices her underwear on top of the pile. I turn away. “Towels are in the cabinet. You know where the bathroom is. I will have coffee brought up.”
“Coffee?” She sits up too quickly, panic wiping away what remained of her modesty. She clutches the blanket to her chest with one hand while wriggling out of my shirt with the other, then tosses it onto the floor in front of me. “What time is it?”
I glance at my watch. “Eight thirty-seven.”
The color drains from her face. I know before she says it. “No,” she whispers.
“What?”
“No, no, no.” She throws the blanket back, then barely seems to remember that she is naked before snatching it against herself again. “My job. My job. I start today.”
The word lands unpleasantly. Job. Reality returns with it. Not the soft morning reality of coffee and borrowed shirts. The real one. Schedules. Names. Places. The world outside my locked bedroom.
“What time?”
“Nine.” She looks around frantically, as if the answer might change if she finds the right corner of the room. “Nine. I have to be there at nine. I’m going to be late. I’m going to be late on my first day. Oh my God, my parents are going to kill me. No, I’m going to kill me first.”
She unlocks her phone with shaking fingers. Her hair falls in her face. She is panic and bare legs and youth and consequences. I should not find any of this charming. I do.
The feeling is so unwelcome I almost leave the room. Instead, I take my phone from the dresser and call downstairs. “Have Pavel bring the car around.” I end the call. “My driver will take you home.”
Taylor looks up sharply. “What?”
“My driver will take you.”
“No. No, that’s okay. I can get a cab.”
“You are late. You need to change. You do not know the city well enough. And—” I let my eyes flick up and down the state of her. “You do not know where you are. Pavel will take you home, wait while you change, and take you wherever you need to go.”
Her mouth closes. Then her expression shifts into something uncertain. “That’s…nice.”
I dislike the word. Nice. A useless little word for harmless men. “It is practical.”
“Right.” She nods too quickly. “Practical. Of course.”
“Yes. Get dressed,” I tell her, lifting my chin toward the bathroom door.
She gathers her clothes in a bundle against her chest and hurries toward the bathroom.
At the door, she pauses. “Mikhail?” I look at her.
The morning catches her face differently than the bar did.
It makes her freckles visible. It makes her look even younger.
It makes me feel every one of my forty-three years.
“Thank you,” she says. Not teasing. Not defensive. Just grateful.
I nod once because I do not trust my voice.
She disappears into the bathroom. The door closes.
I stand alone in my bedroom, surrounded by evidence of her.
The dent in the pillow. The empty water glass.
The faint trace of her perfume beneath the clean scent of the soap she used to wash her face.
My bed looks occupied even without her in it.
I hate that. I hate how easily the room has accepted her.
I dress while she rushes behind the bathroom door. I button a clean shirt. Fasten my watch. Put myself back together piece by piece until I resemble the man I am supposed to be.
Son. Governor. Pakhan. Threat.
Not a man who spent the night beside a girl because she asked him not to leave, the scent of her still on his fingers. Not a man who woke with her hand curled in his shirt and did not want to move.
By the time Taylor emerges, I’m fully dressed, and I have folded the shirt she slept in. Her hair looks raked through with fingers, her bangs still uneven, and she has attempted to wash off the rest of her makeup, leaving slight traces around her eyes.
“The car is waiting.”
Taylor follows me down the hall. She moves quickly, then slows when we reach the staircase, suddenly aware again of where she is. The chandelier. The marble. The silence. The men she has not noticed but who have certainly noticed her.
At the bottom, I hold her coat out to her while she slips into it, and for one second, the movement is so domestic it feels indecent. I step back. Her mouth opens, then closes. Good.
Let neither of us say anything we might remember too clearly. At the door, Pavel waits beside the car. He keeps his eyes forward, as he values his life.
Taylor looks from him to me. “You really don’t have to do this.”
“I am not. Pavel is.”
She huffs a laugh. “Okay.” She shifts her weight. “Then…thanks.”
I nod. “You should keep this,” I say, pushing the shirt she wore to bed into her chest.
Sentimentality is the only explanation, which makes me dislike the impulse immediately. It is not like me. None of this is like me except the part where I am putting her in a car and getting her away from me.
Her eyes widen. “What? No. I’m not stealing your shirt.”
“I have others.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is—” She stops, looking down at the folded white fabric. Her fingers tighten in it. “I don’t know what the point is.”
Neither do I. I should take it back. Instead, I open the car door for her.
She gets in and looks up at me. The snow has stopped. Morning light catches in her hair. She looks tired. Young. Brave in the exact foolish way that made me want her in the first place.
“Am I going to see you again?” she asks.
There it is. The question I deserve. The question I cannot answer honestly without proving what I am.
No, I think. No, you will not. You will go to your new job.
You will be late, but charming enough to survive it.
You will call your worried friend. You will decide last night was a strange thing that happened in a foreign country with a man too old and too dark for you.
You will keep my shirt in a drawer until it stops smelling like me.
You will be safer because I let this end here.
“No,” I say. The word comes out colder than I intend.
Her face stills. “Oh.” It is one syllable.
I force myself not to soften it. “I think that is best,” I say.
Her pride returns instantly. I watch it slide into place. Chin up. Mouth firm. Eyes bright and a smile so brittle I can almost hear it crack. “Right,” she says. “Of course.”
I say nothing. If I speak, I may ruin the only useful cruelty I have managed all morning.
Pavel closes the door. Through the tinted window, I see only the faint outline of her face turned away from me. Good. The car pulls down the drive and through the gate. I stand there until it disappears into the gray morning and then go back inside to finish getting ready for work.
The house is quiet again. Properly quiet. The way it was before her. Mercifully, my mother is still asleep. I do not know that I could face her right now.
I should feel relief. Instead, I go upstairs, enter my bedroom, and find the room unbearable.
Her scent is still in the sheets. The water glass remains beside the bed. On the pillow, one strand of her golden hair catches the light.