6. Six
The resin was setting cleaner than I'd had any right to expect, given the state of the leather and the state of me.
I'd done two passes since five in the morning, my eye welded to the loupe, my back going by inches.
The consolidant was doing its job. The cracks were drawing closed at the molecular level, the fibers rebinding like the textbook said they would.
My granddad had ruined a Victorian satchel once with too much PVA and kept it as a teaching aid for the rest of his life. I was not going to be a teaching aid.
I sat back and rolled my shoulders. The loupe had pressed a pink ring into my eye socket that was going to look absolutely brilliant for the rest of the week.
I'd been at it since five because I'd given up pretending I was going to sleep through what I'd been listening to.
Now my hands were starting to ask for a break before I made a mistake I couldn't undo on a piece of dying leather.
The piece of dying leather was Aleksi's da's jacket, which was not the only reason I was being careful, but it was high on the list.
I would say this for the man. He'd been quiet the whole time I'd known him, a quiet that came off him like cold off a window.
Last night he'd made noise like he was getting paid by the decibel.
The woman I'd heard once, a single laugh near the start that sounded like she'd been told a joke at the wrong moment.
The rest was him. It had gone on, with breaks, with starts, with the bedframe doing work the bedframe was not designed to do.
I'd lain on my back with the cuff loose around my wrist, my split lip throbbing, listening to a forty-year-old vory enforcer perform straightness through a wall for an audience of one.
I picked the brush up again because thinking about it was less productive than not thinking about it. The work didn't care about my opinion. The work cared whether the resin was even and whether my hands were steady.
I gave it another twenty minutes before the light shifted in the windows and my back filed a formal complaint.
The second pass needed two hours to set before I could go over it again.
I stood, stretched, and discovered I was wearing a shirt stiff with sweat and resin, neither of which was going to improve on further acquaintance.
I went to my room, opened the drawer of clean shirts Gregori had bought me, and looked at them. Plain dark cotton. Identical to what was on my back. Three of them, folded with military precision, which meant Gregori had folded them himself. A detail I was going to have to think about another day.
If I changed into one of those, I hadn't really changed.
Same color, same cotton, same fit. I'd come out of the shower wearing the same shirt I'd gone into the bedroom with, except cleaner, and the man who'd spent six hours of the night fucking a stranger through a wall would walk past me at some point this evening and see exactly what he'd seen at breakfast: a skinny ginger lad in plain dark cotton, eating his food, working his job, behaving.
I was tired of behaving.
I had been behaving since the day the Italians put me in a van.
Six months of being measured and useful and quiet enough to keep alive, and now I was in a Russian's apartment in handcuffs that I'd picked the lock of three nights running, and last night I'd lain on a single bed in the dark and listened to him perform for my benefit, and the only response I had available to me at half past four this afternoon was I'd like a different shirt please.
No. No, I would not.
I closed the drawer and crossed the hall.
His bedroom door was open. He'd left it open at dawn when he went out, the move of a man who didn't expect anyone in his home to wander, who'd never had a wandering prisoner. I was fully aware of the chain of should nots I was leaning on as I walked through it.
The bed was made. He'd done it himself, because a cleaner had no incentive to make a bed look like the previous occupants had been an honor guard.
The room smelled like his cologne and not like hers. She hadn't left a trace. He'd opened the windows after she'd gone.
The closet was a walk-in, and I gave myself the tour.
The suits hung in a row, all dark, all the same wrong cut by the same wrong tailor, who I was going to have words with one day if I ever met him in a dark alley.
A pair of Goodyear-welted derbies sat on the rack at the bottom, English, paid for, badly under-conditioned.
The leather was thirsty, and I'd have told him if we were on speaking terms, which we were not, on account of the noise coming through the wall last night.
The drawers were built into the side. Top drawer, dress shirts.
Second, t-shirts. Third, socks rolled in pairs.
Fourth, boxer briefs folded in thirds, because the man folded his pants.
I took a pale blue cotton shirt off the top of the dress-shirt stack.
I held it up to the light from the window. The cotton was soft from washing, the collar was unfrayed, and the cuffs had been ironed. The cologne had settled into the weave over years of being hung next to its source.
I pulled my own shirt off, dropped it on the floor of his closet because I was a small, petty man and proud of it, and put his on.
The shoulders were too big. The collar gaped.
The cuffs hung past my fingertips, which wasn’t useful for working, since you could push them back and they'd fall again the moment you stopped.
I looked like a kid who'd put on his da's good shirt without permission.
Thin in the shoulders and short in the arms, swimming in cotton that smelled like a man who was not mine.
The collar was gaping wide enough to show the hollow at the base of my throat.
Aleksi had looked at that hollow too long at breakfast yesterday.
The cologne was warming on my skin from the inside of the cotton, and I was an inconvenient amount harder in my jeans than I'd been thirty seconds ago.
So that was where we were.
I rolled the cuffs once, then thought better of it and unrolled them. The hanging cuffs were the better look. Theatrical.
On the way out, I picked my own shirt off the floor and dropped it in his hamper, because I was raised right. I walked back to the dining table with my hands in his sleeves and a head full of a perfectly reasonable plan that was about to detonate on contact.
The cuff was on the table next to the loupe. He'd unlocked me at dawn before he'd left, because the work needed me unrestrained, and he hadn't asked me to put it back on while he was out. I wasn't going to put it on now either. Not making a point. Just couldn't be arsed.
I sat down, put the loupe back in, picked the brush up, and bent over the jacket.
The light was nearly gone when the elevator pinged.
I hadn't been listening for it. The doors opened. Footsteps in the hall. The key in the lock. The key didn't go in cleanly.
He had to try twice.
I bumped against the console table on the way past, hard enough that the wood knocked. The keys hit the floor and didn't get picked up. When he stopped at the edge of the dining room, he was breathing heavily.
I kept the loupe in. The brush moved.
"Is that my shirt?"
His voice was thicker than it had been at breakfast. The vowels were softening at the edges, and I knew that voice, my da's voice every Hogmanay by half eleven, the voice of a man who'd been at it since long before anyone in his life would have signed off on it.
"Aye."
A pause.
"Take it off."
"I'm working."
"Take it off, Fin."
It was the first time he'd used my name, and it landed at the back of my neck and stayed there.
I kept my hands moving on the leather because if I stopped, I was going to have to look at him, and if I looked at him, I was going to have to make a decision about what came next. I wasn't yet ready for either.
"In a minute. Resin's setting."
"Now."
I set the brush down. I took the loupe out and set it next to the brush, and I looked up.
He was three steps from the table, swaying on his feet. His coat was still on, the buttons done up wrong, tie loose, eyes red-rimmed. He'd been drinking since lunch at the latest. I frowned. This wasn't the version of him I'd put the shirt on for.
I should have stood up and gone to change.
Instead, I said: "Make me."
He moved fast for a man that drunk.
He came across the table and fisted my shirt, the other hand on the back of my neck.
I was half out of the chair with my thighs against the table edge before I'd fully registered that he'd moved at all.
His face was inches from mine. Vodka and stale cologne and cigarettes were on his breath.
His pupils were blown and his lips were parted.
"I told you," he said, "what would happen."
He'd told me nothing of the sort, but I wasn't about to argue with a drunk man holding my collar.
He gripped the placket in both fists and tore.
The first button popped clean and pinged off the table somewhere behind us.
The second went with the buttonhole, the cotton splitting before the thread did.
The shirt ripped down my sternum, soft worn cotton coming apart under his hands with a sound like paper, and then his knuckles were dragging down my bare chest as the shirt opened to my navel.
The cool air of the apartment hit my skin a second after his hands did.
His palms stopped flat against my ribs, fingers spread wide enough to span them, and he held me there.
He was looking at his own hands on me.
His thumbs were resting in the dip below my pectorals, exactly where they'd land if he'd been going to push me down onto the table. His lips had parted, and a flush had come up his throat the way it had at the safehouse when I'd touched his palm.
We were both breathing hard.
This was the moment, then. I'd planned for it. Just not for this version of him.
He leaned in slowly.