14. Andrei
ANDREI
Ihave woken to many things in my life. A gun against a door. A phone call that means someone is dead. The particular silence that means a deal has gone wrong in the night. I had never, until that morning, woken to a woman kissing every inch of my face as though she were being paid by the count.
“Wake up.” A kiss to my jaw. “Wake up, wake up, we have to go.” One to my cheekbone, my brow, the corner of my mouth.
“Can we just stay here?” I tightened my arms and hauled her back down into the warmth before she could escape. “The bed is excellent. I have decided it is the whole vacation.”
“We are here to see the beauty of Japan, not the inside of a hotel room.”
“I appreciate only one beauty, and right now she is trying very hard to escape me.”
“That is sweet.” She pried herself out of my grip, laughing, hair everywhere. “But you cannot use lines like that to talk your way out of sightseeing. Up. Now.”
“Five more minutes,” I tried.
“You have said that four times.”
“And I meant it all four.”
“Up, Kuznetsov. The city is not going to see itself.” She hauled at my arm with her whole body weight, which moved me approximately nothing.
I got up. I lose these arguments on purpose now, because the face she makes when she wins is worth more to me than the sleep.
She got out of bed and threw the curtains open on a gray, glittering, rain-washed city, and stood there in the window in one of my shirts, vibrating with the particular joy of a person finally let off the leash she built for herself.
I have negotiated with the heads of cartels less determined than Zoe Williams with a sightseeing itinerary.
What followed was the strangest day of my adult life, and I have had days that ended in other countries under other names.
I do not take vacations. A man in my position who leaves the board unattended comes home to find the pieces moved, or missing, or sharpened against him.
I had not been more than a phone call from the business in over a decade.
Yet there I was, in a borrowed sweater in a city where no one knew my name, trailing a woman who had no idea she was leading the most wanted man in three countries toward a stall that sold fried octopus.
She walked me through half the city. Shrines with red gates stacked one behind the next like a corridor into somewhere holier than I have any right to stand.
Narrow streets strung with paper lanterns.
A market where the air was thick with smoke and frying batter and a hundred smells I could not name and she could, because she had read about every one of them on the flight while I pretended to sleep.
She had a list, of course she had a list. She runs her whole life off them, and she had built one for a city she had never set foot in, ranked by some private logic of joy I did not try to follow.
“Open,” she ordered at a food stall, holding something hot and round and skewered up to my mouth.
“I do not know what that is.”
“That is the fun. Open.”
I opened. It was extraordinary. I did not tell her that, but she read it off my face anyway and made a small triumphant sound that I am not proud of how much I wanted to hear again.
“What is in it?” I asked, still chewing.
“Octopus.”
“You fed me octopus.”
“And you loved it. Do not lie, your face confessed before your mouth could.” She popped one into her own mouth, beaming. “Stick with me, oldie. I will ruin you for room service.”
She ate her way through the city with the focus she usually saves for a deadline, and she fed me half of it, and she photographed all of it, the food and the lanterns and the gates and, when she thought I was not looking, me.
She bought a crepe folded around fruit and cream and ate it with the unselfconscious greed she only allows herself when no camera that matters is pointed at her.
She got cream on her nose. I wiped it off with my thumb, and she caught my wrist and kissed it, right there in the street, and a part of me that has been fisted shut since I was a boy eased open another fraction.
“Smile,” she said, lifting her phone with the two of us crowded into the frame and a vendor’s cart behind us.
“I do not smile for cameras.”
“You will for this one.” She tipped her head against my arm and beamed at the screen. The shutter clicked. She looked at the result and pressed the phone to her chest like it was treasure. “There. My cute oldie baby.”
“Do not call me that.”
“I told you to leave the grumpy man at home, did I not?” She held the photo up for me to see, and the man in it, standing in a foreign street with a woman tucked under his arm, did not look like anyone I recognized. He looked happy. It was unsettling.
I gave up. I pulled her in against my side and pressed my mouth to the top of her head. “Whatever you say, my goddess.”
She made a sound like a kettle. “Oh, I love that. Say it again.”
“No.”
“Once more. For the road.”
“You are pushing your luck, goddess.”
She laughed so hard a passing grandmother smiled at us, and I understood, dimly, that I was the kind of man strangers smiled at now, and I did not entirely hate it.
She made me sit in a photo booth that framed the two of us in cartoon hearts and animal ears I had not consented to.
She made me wear a paper crown from a festival stall and would not let me take it off.
By midday I had lost count of the ways I was behaving like a man I would not have recognized a year ago.
At a shrine she made me write a wish on a slip of paper and tie it to a rack already heavy with a thousand others.
“What did you wish for?” she asked.
“If I tell you, it will not come true.”
“That is not the rule here. I read the sign.”
“Then it is a state secret. I happen to keep several.”
“Of course you do.” She tied hers beside mine, close enough that the two papers touched. “Mine is not a secret. I wished for more days like this one.”
We found a garden in the middle of all the noise, a pocket of green and still water and stone, and she went quiet in it the way she only does when something is too beautiful to perform over.
I watched her instead of the garden. I have stood in some of the most guarded rooms in the world and never felt the thing I felt watching an ordinary woman go silent in front of a pond.
I did not answer right away. Some moments you do not interrupt.
“This is the best day I have had in years,” she said, not turning around. “I do not say that to many people. I am saying it to you.”
“I know.” I came to stand behind her, my hands on her shoulders. “I was there for the other years.”
“Do you ever wish you had a normal life?” she asked the water. “A boring one. A desk, a dog, a quiet week that means nothing at all.”
“No.” I weighed it honestly. “Until recently I would have answered that without thinking twice. Now I am less certain what I want, which is entirely your fault.”
“Good.” She leaned back into me. “I like being your fault.”
I caught myself more than once reaching for my phone out of habit and putting it back unchecked. The empire would survive two weeks without me. I was beginning to suspect that I would not survive without this, the small ordinary holiness of a day with nothing in it but her.
It was going perfectly, which should have been my warning, because perfect is a thing the world charges interest on.
It happened at a little stall selling folded paper, of all the harmless places. A man stepped into her path, well dressed, wearing the easy smile of a person who has never once been refused.
“Forgive me.” His English was careful and rehearsed. “You are the most beautiful woman I have seen in this country. Let me buy you a coffee.”
I have ended men for less than that sentence, and I am not speaking entirely in metaphor.
“That is kind of you,” Zoe said, in the gentle voice she uses to turn people away without drawing blood. “But I am here with…”
“With me.” I stepped in, set my arm around her waist, and drew her into my side. I did not raise my voice. I have never once had to. I only held the man’s eyes until he understood every word I was not saying.
He found an appointment somewhere on the other side of the country. He was gone inside ten seconds, and he did not look back, which was the single wisest thing he managed all day.
What unmade me was not the man. Men like him are weather, they pass.
It was the half second before I moved, when I watched her open her mouth to be gracious, and understood that the whole world would go on reaching for her for the rest of her life, and that I had signed up, somewhere I could not point to, to stand in the way of all of it.
After that I did not leave her side.
I held her hand through streets that did not require holding.
I stood at her shoulder while she haggled, in a language neither of us spoke, over a silk scarf the color of the inside of a shell.
I put my body between her and every man whose eyes lingered a half second too long, which in a city that size is a full-time occupation.
I am not a jealous man by temperament. I am a careful one, and from the outside the two are identical and from the inside they share nothing.
I know the difference between guarding a thing because it is valuable and guarding it because the thought of losing it stops your breath.
I had crossed from the first to the second somewhere on this trip, and I had not told her, and I was not ready to.
She noticed, of course. She notices everything.
She let me do it, the hovering, the hand at her back, the looming.
She did not tell me I was being absurd, though I was.
She only laced her fingers through mine and let me believe I was protecting her from something, which is its own quiet kind of generosity, letting a man guard you from nothing so that he can feel useful.
“What has gotten into you?” She bumped her hip against mine, grinning up at me. “You have been welded to my side for an hour. Where did my brave, independent, goddess-worshipping boyfriend go?”
I had no defense, because she was right, and we both knew it, and the knowing sat between us warm as a held hand.
“Stop teasing me.”
“You are jealous.” She said it the way a child unwraps a present. “The great and terrible Andrei Kuznetsov. Jealous. Of a man who sells folded paper.”
“Admit it,” she pressed, walking backward in front of me so I was forced to watch her instead of the crowd. “Say the whole sentence out loud. I dare you.”
“I will say nothing of the kind.”
“You just did. Your silence is a signed confession.”
“My silence has not confessed to anything in forty years.”
“There is a first time for everything, baby.”
“I said stop.”
“Make me, oldie.” She went up on her toes, delighted with herself, entirely unafraid. “You cannot. That is the best part. You are soft now, and only for me, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
She was right, which is the most dangerous thing a person can be with me.
I did not let go of her hand. I have spent my whole life making sure no one could find the thing I could not stand to lose.
I had just spent a day walking it through a foreign city in full daylight, holding its hand, answering to goddess, and I could not bring myself to regret a second of it.
There is a word she has not said, the one she keeps circling, the one that lives underneath all the oldie babies and goddess jokes. I have not said it either. We are two people holding the same word hostage, each waiting for the other to pay the ransom first.
She squeezed my hand once, hard, the way a person grips something they are afraid might not be real.
“Buy your scarf,” I said. “Before I change my mind about the paper salesman.”
On the walk back I carried every bag and held her free hand, and she narrated every shop we passed as though I had asked her to. I had not asked. I listened to all of it anyway, the way I have started listening to her, like there might be a test later and the prize is her.
She bought the scarf. She also bought a small ceramic cat with one paw raised, which she informed me was for luck, and which she tucked into my coat pocket without asking, because she has decided my pockets are hers now, the way she has decided most things about me lately and turned out, infuriatingly, to be right.