17. Seventeen
He slept in the bed with me that night and every night after.
I stopped counting the days somewhere in there.
They ran together the way they do when you've nowhere to be, with a body busy mending itself.
A week passed. Then, more than a week. The light through the blinds got a little longer each morning, the bandage got a little smaller each time Warrick came round to change it, and I stopped going looking for the finger that wasn't there quite so often.
The stump still throbbed in time with my pulse.
It probably always would. But it had quieted from a scream to a grumble, and a man can live alongside a grumble.
Aleksi and Nikolai fought. Christ, did they fight!
Over the dishes, over the thermostat, over whose turn it was to deal with the DoorDash, over things that had happened thirty years ago in two different countries.
Twice it came to fists. Once I came out of the bedroom to the pair of them rolling about on the floor like a couple of weans, Nikolai with a split lip and Aleksi with his shirt torn at the collar, both of them swearing in three languages.
I'd braced for blood, for the day it turned into something a vor couldn't take back.
It never did. Every time, an hour later, there they'd be on the couch with a beer apiece, watching Nikolai's soaps, Aleksi pretending he didn't care how it ended.
So I reckoned that was just how the Laskin brothers loved each other, through the knuckles and out the other side.
And it wasn't only the brothers. Nikolai had made the mistake, once that I saw and likely more that I didn't, of trying to cook in Irina's kitchen.
I came out one morning to the two of them squared off over the stove.
Nikolai had a pan going, a knob of butter in it and some soft French cheese unwrapped on the counter, and Irina stood between him and the hob with her wooden spoon held across her body like a woman barring a door.
He said something in French, bright and reasonable, gesturing at the pan.
She answered in a long, flat run of Russian, not loud, and pointed the spoon at the cheese, then at the bin, in case the spoon hadn't been clear enough on its own.
"It is the same egg, babushka," Nikolai said, switching to English for my benefit, the snake. "I am only showing it some respect."
Irina didn't speak English and didn't need to.
She looked at the butter going brown in his pan, then at his face, and made a sound in her throat that consigned the whole of French cooking to the bin alongside the cheese.
She moved his pan off the heat with the spoon, one firm shove, the way ye'd move something dead.
Then she cracked an egg into her own pan, hard, no butter swimming in it, and stood guard over it with the spoon while it set.
"You see this," Nikolai appealed to me. "In Paris, they would weep."
I didn't understand a word she gave him back. Neither of them gave an inch. I ate every bite of the Russian egg under the Frenchman's wounded eye and didn't take a side, because a man who wants to keep eating in this kitchen learns fast whose kitchen it is.
And somewhere in all that quiet mending, I started to think about the work again.
Not the way I'd thought about it in the dark those first nights, like a thing already buried.
I started to think about it the way you think about a person you've not seen in a while.
I started to want my hands back on a piece of leather.
And under that, lower, stranger, harder to look at straight, I started to think about living again.
Not surviving. Not getting through the day so there'd be another one.
Living. Wanting things on the far side of tomorrow.
That was the morning it caught up with me.
I woke before he did, which never happened.
The room was still dark behind the blinds I'd told him to leave shut.
He was on his back with one arm flung up over his head and the other lying open between us, palm to the ceiling, like even asleep he was offering me something he didn't have words for.
He snored. Not loudly. The snore was a low, working sound, the engine of a big man ticking over.
I lay there in the dark and listened to it, eyes closed, like it was music.
My left hand lay on the blanket where I'd put it.
I made myself look at it. The bandage had shrunk to a neat wrap over the knuckle, gone grey at the edge where it caught on the sheets.
Underneath it, the stump throbbed its low grumble.
Warrick had taken the finger clean at the first joint.
I'd give the bastard that. Clean as anything, while Aleksi begged.
Don't think about that part. Not this morning. I dug for the kit on the nightstand without sitting up, pricked the side of a finger that I still had, and read the number off the meter in the dark. Low side of fine. I dosed and capped the pen. That part of me, at least, still did what it was told.
Aleksi's breathing changed. The snore stopped. The arm over his head came down, and he went still.
"Stop watching me sleep, ye creep," I said to the ceiling.
"I'm not awake."
"Yer the worst liar I've ever met, for a man who lies for a living."
He turned onto his side toward me. The mattress dipped, and I rolled half inch into the warm trough of him before I caught it.
Up close his face was soft with sleep, lines gone slack, grey coming in heavy at the temples.
Forty years old, and he looked every bit of it in the morning.
I liked him better for it. The polished version downstairs, the suit and the cologne, that was the wall. This was the man.
He looked at me for a long time. Then his eyes went down to my hand on the blanket, the bandage.
"Dinnae," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Ye said it with yer whole face." I tucked the hand under the blanket, out of his sight and mine. "I cannae stand it. The way ye look at it. Like a man looking at a bill he cannae pay."
"Fin."
"I mean it. Look at me like that and I'll go back to the ceiling." I snapped at him. I hadn't meant to, but it was beginning to wear on me. "Ye've not touched me. No' once since the shop. Ye lie down beside me every night and ye sleep on top of the covers like a Victorian aunt."
"You're still mending."
"I lost a finger, I didnae lose the rest of me." There it was, out in the room where I couldn't take it back. My face went hot. "Forget it."
He was quiet. I stared at the strip of grey light where the blind didn't quite meet the frame, and I waited for him to tell me I needed to rest more, that I needed to heal more.
That I wasn't good enough now that I wasn't a whole man.
He'd never say it directly. Aleksi was a lot of things, but cruel wasn't one of them.
No, he'd do it kind like he'd been doing it, letting me die by degrees.
His hand came under the blanket and found mine. He drew it out into the open and turned it over carefully.
"Don't," I said. "Don't make it a—"
He lifted my hand and placed a gentle kiss on the bandage.
The throb under it answered him. He held my eyes the whole time, so I'd have nowhere to hide from it.
"It's mine," he said against the bandage. "Same as the rest of you. You think a piece of you coming off changes the count? I'll take what's left. I'd take you with no hands at all."
"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me."
"It's the truest." He turned my hand and kissed the heel of the palm, the inside of the wrist, the pulse there, working back toward me. "Now stop telling me how to feel about my own property."
"Property, is it?" But I was breathing differently, and we both knew it.
I put my good hand into his hair and dragged him up to kiss him.
The careful went out of him the second I bit his lip.
He moved overtop of me slowly, mindful of the bad hand, caging it up by my head where it couldn't get caught.
I let him bear me down into the mattress before I stopped being patient and shoved my hand down his pants.
"There ye go," I said into his mouth. "Took ye long enough."
"Shut up, Fin."
"Make me. Ye know how now." I rolled my hips up against him and he made the broken sound, the one from the safehouse, the one I'd have killed to hear again every day of that flat week. "Aye. That. C'mere."
Aleksi kissed down my throat with teeth, the way I'd taught him he was allowed. His hands ran over my skin with more confidence than before, sliding down my chest, my ribs, my stomach. I sat up so he could pull my shirt off, and then he did it right, kissing the places his hands had been.
He paused halfway down and let his chin rest on my sternum before taking my good hand in his, threading our fingers together all soft like. Like we were lovers instead of a few blokes who'd fucked once.
"Ye're going to do the opposite of breaking me, if ye ever stop asking." I dug my heel into the back of his thigh. "I'll tell ye if it's wrong. I'm a mouthy bastard. Have ye met me?"
"God help me, I have."
He went back to kissing his way down my body.
Past the ribs, the soft of my belly, the line of hair below the navel he'd never once let himself follow before he met me.
He paused there with his breath warm on my skin like he was working up to it, and I propped myself on the bad elbow to give him hell about it.
"Shut up," he growled before I could get a word out. Then he grabbed the loose fitting sweats I was wearing and yanked them down.
He took me in his mouth before I got the rest out.
The give-him-hell died in my throat. Christ, the heat of it, the wet, his tongue working the underside like he'd been taking notes every time I'd done it to him.
Clumsy, aye, too much teeth at first, but he learned fast. He pulled off to lick up the length of me, slow, his eyes coming up to find mine.
"Fuck," I breathed. "Look at ye. Mouth like that, on yer knees for me."